Fading leaves bring Sparky memories

Locker Room: There are unsuspected pleasures that come with being untidy and disorganised. It's true that quite often you lose important things under the great chaotic mountains of the junk you accumulate for no good reason, but just as often when you go looking for what you need you get sidetracked by the discovery of interesting things you'd forgotten you had.

I have a rainforest's worth of notebooks stacked up all around me. Most of them are only half-used as I tend to leave home without one whenever I actually need one.

Then there's the problem I have with my pretentiousness. Usually it's not enough for me to buy a simple spiral-pad notebook with pages that flip over the top. Nope. I might decide that going to a minor game in Parnell Park requires the immediate purchase of a moleskin-covered collection of parchments assembled by Tibetan monks using wood pulp and the saliva of bald eagles. This I intend to use for scores and scorers, before beginning the great Irish novel after tea. Pretentious to a fault, that's moi.

Then the notebook gets tragically buried in a landslide of junk and only sees the light again when a small, furry rodent creeps out from underneath the paper alp having reconstituted its DNA from the moleskin.

This happened just the other day. There was a life-threatening avalanche of junk, and while poring through the debris I found a notebook which I'd bought in Riga, Latvia, in 1994. Nothing written in it but a few rain-blurred pages of reporting on an under-21 game between Ireland and Latvia. No memory of the game at all, but I can remember getting the notebook.

Funny thing was, there were adjectives hung like doodles down the margin as to how I would describe Mark Kennedy. As such the notebook was like a double find. I'd forgotten I owned the notebook. I'd forgotten about Mark Kennedy.

And who hasn't forgotten about him? As Ireland stretch their legs and find their strength in the new era, Kennedy isn't mentioned in any of the blueprints. Too much squandered promise. Too many "incidents". Too erratic. Too petulant.

Too yesterday.

Ten tears ago! Phew. Back then Mark Kennedy seemed like something that you could take to the bank. He'd had that season before he was shaving properly when he scored 49 goals for the Millwall youth side. He'd got into the full team at 16, scored four crackers in his first 13 games. He would be on his way to Liverpool the following summer. The most expensive teenager ever! Wonder stuff.

On that under-21 team which played in Riga he was the blue-chip prospect. Others who played that day have had mixed fortunes. Willie Boland, Alan Moore, Tony Sheridan, Phil Hardy, Shay Given, Gary Breen, Brian Launders, Dave Greene and Graham Kavanagh have had their various triumphs and failures, but, oddly, it is Kavanagh, then with Boro and Ireland's best player that day, who should give Kennedy most cause for hope. It's never too late.

It's been a long road, some of it spent unwisely perched upon a car bonnet in Harcourt Street, more of it spent in Wilmslow police station declining to submit to a breathalyser test. Those odd moments of madness have overshadowed what was once a monumental talent.

You could look at Kennedy's career in two ways. You could argue he was lucky. Mick McCarthy became manager at Millwall and took to the youngster straight away. He lived for a while in the apartment attached to the back of McCarthy's house in Bromley and used to baby-sit the manager's kids.

That fondness of McCarthy's for the kid they called Sparky transmuted itself into loyalty, and Kennedy got into Irish teams when Mick had a rule requiring his players to be playing first-team football at the time. He got forgiven more often than most, quicker than Phil Babb after the Harcourt Street incident, quicker than most after he was sent off in a qualifier in Iceland and McCarthy was heard to bellow, "Sparky, why do I fucking bother?"

And often he rewarded McCarthy's faith. At the end of the World Cup qualifying campaign which was Mick's first task in charge we had a two-legged play-off with Belgium. In the first leg at Lansdowne Road Kennedy stank the place out. He was impressively awful and he was taken off after 33 minutes.

The next weekend in Brussels, McCarthy risked derision by picking him again. We lost, but Kennedy was superb.

He enjoyed that patronage and benefited from it. It looked like becoming a pattern. Roy Evans watched him score a remarkable cup goal for Millwall against Arsenal and reached for his chequebook.

Kennedy was the costliest teenager ever and Liverpool were his childhood sweethearts. The avuncular Evans would nurture him and let him grow. Good move, we all said. He was earning £3,000 a week, the tabloids said. Wow! we all said.

He made his full international debut back in the Charlton days in an away game against Austria. He was wonderful. Things could only get better with talent like that coming through.

He made his Red debut one day at Anfield against Leeds (ah), and when he came on Leeds were a goal up (ah, again). Kennedy arrived and drove a 30-yard screamer against the underside of the Leeds crossbar. It bounced down onto the line and somehow stayed out. Those centimetres were the difference in becoming an instant folk hero or a passenger.

Looking back, he had more bad luck than good. Liverpool never knew what they wanted from him. He started five games, none of which Liverpool lost, but he never fitted in and was finally left to moulder in the reserves.

He had a brief spell at QPR on loan but they couldn't afford him. He went to Wimbledon, having been charmed by Joe Kinnear, and made just 11 starts as he found himself in a queue behind Michael Hughes.

He escaped to Manchester City and was the player of the year in their promotion drive of 2000, getting picked on to the PFA's First Division team of the year. He scored four goals in his first six games there and was credited with 17 assists for the season.

Then, for the Premiership season the next year, Joe Royle decided the team would play differently. Kennedy was shelved. Royle left eventually amid rumours of there being a drinking club within the club.

Kennedy was never fancied by Kevin Keegan, who didn't see himself using wingers. He was sold to Wolves, where he continued his pattern of looking a much better player in Division One than he does in the Premiership.

He's been cursed with injuries too. Twice on the first day of the season at Anfield he got Achilles' heel injuries. Injury kept him out of the 2002 World Cup, for which he was picked despite only having managed two qualifiers. And he had played just two league games for Wolves this season before incurring ligament damage.

For somebody called Sparky he never seemed to make the brightest decisions. He visited tabloidland more often than was wise, and my clearest memory of him on a trip was seeing him emerge triumphantly from the duty-free shop at Keflavik airport in Iceland brandishing some brand-new Callaway golf clubs.

The team were moving on to Lithuania for a midweek game. Kennedy had been sent off just hours previously and should have been in disgrace. Instead, he arrived out beaming with the golf clubs in his hand only to be met with derision and rolling eyes. Man comes to the most expensive country on earth to buy his golf clubs!

It seems unlikely we'll ever see him again in an Irish jersey.

We are blessed with left-sided players, and although when he played up front Kennedy was the sort of striker we could use right now, it's been a long, long time since he was asked to perform there. The goals which provided spectacular punctuation to his game have dried up a little. He's scored 20 in his 211 league appearances since leaving Millwall in March of 1995.

So there you are. Mark Kennedy. Coming back from injury this weekend. His birthday falls at the end of each season and he was 28 last May. Maybe four years left of a long, long career. Anything salvageable? Call Graham Kavanagh and ask.