Considering he first went between the sticks by chance and almost saw his fledgling career wiped out when hit by a motorcycle as a teenager, Everton’s goalkeeper coach Alan Kelly has done well to reach a thousand games in football.
Luck of the Irish? Possibly, but the son of the Preston North End legend whose image adorns the seats in the Town End of Deepdale has reached the milestone of matches as a player and now a coach (in Everton’s 1-0 win over Brentford earlier this month) through hard work, determination and resilience.
Although, like that aforementioned stand which houses PNE’s most-vociferous supporters, he is named after his goalkeeping father from Bray who was capped 47 times by the Emerald Isle and turned out a record 513 times for the Lancashire club – including in the 1964 FA Cup final alongside future Everton legend Howard Kendall who became the youngest player in the fixture since Clapham Rovers’ James Prinsep in 1879 – Kelly junior didn’t don the gloves until relatively late and wasn’t supposed to be a footballer full stop. He told the ECHO: “I was a defender, I played in defence for the town team and a couple of times for the Preston youth team at Under-14s and Under-15s level.
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“My old man was hilarious because when he was at Everton as goalkeeping coach around that time between 1985-87, he thought I wasn’t interested in football. I loved football but because I’d transitioned really late into goalkeeping, only going in goal because Preston’s youth team keeper Glen Campbell broke his finger, he probably thought I had no chance, even though I used to come to Bellefield and help him out.
“When I signed pro forms in September 1985 after being an apprentice electrician at British Leyland, I remember going home and saying: ‘Dad, I’ve made my mind up, I’m going to play football, I’m going to be a footballer.’ He said: ‘No you’re not, you’re going to get your trade.’
“He’d learnt a trade, he was a plasterer and a hairdresser (there’s a photograph of him posing as Kendall’s barber when he had a full head of hair). He told me: ‘You’re two minutes in the game, over my dead body.’
“I let him know that he better die quick then because – still wearing my overalls – I then presented him with my contract and he acknowledged you’ve got to make your own way in life.”
Speaking in the café area of Everton’s Finch Farm training base, Kelly has kindly collated a couple of A4 sheets for me that he’s printed out to document his career. As well as impressive lists from his time as a coach, chronicling the 45 goalkeepers he has worked with (38 senior keepers, six Under-23s and one son, Bertie), he points out that he has worked under 37 managers in 36 years.
We both laugh when it’s observed that he’s averaging more than one every 12 months – hopefully Sean Dyche the fourth Blues boss since 2021 can last a bit longer – but it’s impossible not to notice an intriguing photograph on them of Kelly playing in goal for Everton next to another snap of his dad alongside Neville Southall and Bobby Mimms when he worked in what is now his son’s role back in the 1980s. Just why is Kelly junior pictured in a green Everton keeper’s jersey with NEC on the front while a young John Ebbrell guards the goal post behind him?
He explains it was taken in a youth tournament in the city of Viterbo situated in the Lazio region of Italy, some 50 miles north of Rome. Kelly said: “Everton were strapped for a goalkeeper and my Dad said: ‘You did alright in that game, do you fancy playing for them?’ So I replied: ‘Ah yeah, I’ll give it a go.’
“It was my holidays before I started in September and I played three games. I think it was AC Milan, Sampdoria and then a local side.”
Returning to Preston, Kelly broke into the first team and was part of the side that finished runners-up in the Fourth Division in 1986/87, winning promotion just a year after they’d come second bottom of the Football League and had to apply for re-election. Although he was still a teenager, he had a couple of well-known veterans alongside him in the team and one of them at least was glad of his keeper’s outfield skills.
Kelly said: “Sam Allardyce was the centre-half while Frank Worthington was the centre-forward. On Fridays we didn’t do team work, we just played a five-a-side.
“Sam always said to me: ‘You’re our best centre-half, you play next to me. I’ll head it, you kick it, you’re a better passer!’
“Imagine that now when you’ve got all your tactical preparation, punctual preparation, drills and sports science, it’s a complete transformation.”
Another example of how the game has become more sophisticated is the story behind Kelly’s nightmare injury the following year that amazingly he is now able to make light of. Again it features on his picture board as a photo shows him sat up in bed with his leg in plaster and a huge plaster on his forehead while nurses hand him a cup of tea.
He said: “It sounds like a joke, did you hear about the goalkeeper who went to cross the road and didn’t make it to the other side? I was going to buy a pair of gloves as Preston were playing Burnley in the Sherpa Van Trophy semi-final at Deepdale and my mum was a florist and I used to pick her up from work.
“It was a sliding doors moment, I told her I’d go and get my gloves first and I never arrived. A motorbike came around the corner, swerved a car, crashed into me and I was out of the game for a year.
“I was 19 at the time and have no memory of it at all. I smashed my leg up and as well as it being broken, I required 50 stitches.
“Then in my first game back, I broke the same leg again. We talk about the sports science now with strength and conditioning but after 18 months in the fracture clinic I was discharged on the Wednesday and the manager told me I was playing on the Saturday away at Leyton Orient.”
Although Kelly crossed the Pennines to make a big move to Sheffield United at the start of football’s brand new era, he acknowledges that life in those early years of the Premier League were closer to what had gone before than the game today, although there was one significant change for those in his position.
He said: “Then in 1992 it’s the Premier League and I’m at Sheffield United and ‘bang’ they bring the back pass rule in. Because I’d been an outfield player, I was one of the goalkeepers who could cope better with the change but the year before when you’d caught the ball it was like netball, you had to stand still. You had six steps and they’d go after you and penalise you if you went over that.
“If I caught the ball by the edge of the 18-yard box out by the byline, I still only had six steps to kick it and you would kick it, there would be no bowling it out, it was a big hoof upfield and a case of trying to put some snow on it. It was completely different and a lot of keepers suffered from that change.
“During my first seven years as a pro, I didn’t have a goalkeeping coach. Among the group of goalkeepers you had at the club, you warmed up the number one before the games.
“I remember going away with Ireland during the 1992/93 season when I got my first call-up, I was warming Packie Bonner up in front of 50,000 people at Lansdowne Road. Even in the World Cup in the USA in 1994, there was just the two of us.
“Fast forward to today and the latest trend is to have multiple goalkeeping coaches and most of the top clubs have two if not three. People are looking to get different angles on it and provide a better service.”
*Look out for part two tomorrow as Kelly explains his move into coaching and how he works with Jordan Pickford and Everton’s current stable of goalkeepers.
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