Pampered, spoiled footballer he's not

In Manchester on Thursday morning the world had almost stopped turning. Regardless of your faith, the end was nigh. So nigh that you could smell its breath and hear its heartbeat. At Old Trafford, the mainstream faithful awoke to the news that they would be seeing new faces at their place of worship next year. Roy Keane had said that it would be so. And Roy Keane is infallible. Elsewhere, for the hardy cult who worship under a blue moon, these are weeks of closure and farewell. The shining city of the Premiership is disappearing out of the rear-view mirror. Manchester City are slipping quietly back into the mire. Blessed are the humble. They hope so, anyway. The heavy sense of fatalism about the place is such that not even the prospect of this morning's derby gets the pulse running. United are champions. City are relegation fodder. In another time in this place football fans would be making whoopee. The run-in to this week's derby is like a communal act of mourning: the stinging sense of not being good enough is all that links the two teams.

There's one happy soul though. For Mark Kennedy, it's springtime and he's ready for renewal. Purged of his venialities he's back in the Irish squad, and healed of his wounds he's playing for City again after three months in the repair shop. He's the last off the training ground this morning, and if you have questions for him, what the hell. Life is short and then you retire. He sits in the little canteen above the Manchester City training ground and considers his station in life.

"You're still just 24," you say. "Going on 50," he says.

And he's right. When he finishes this season and has his 25th birthday party, it will be nine years since he made his debut as a prodigious, gifted 16-year-old dancing through the hard man's world that was Millwall's old ground in Cold Blow Lane. He's been around forever, and this new chapter is the latest in a long series of beginnings for him. You bring baggage to interviews and you expect you are not going to like Mark Kennedy. Too much of bloody everything. Too many tabloid headlines. Too many miles of unfulfilled promise. Too smirky by half. Too much petulance. Too many exits from the pitch looking sulky and bored. Too many second chances. Too much time feeling sorry for himself.

Looking in from the outside, he seems the embodiment of the spoiled modern footballer, but there is life as a person lives it and life as others know it. Mark Kennedy is not what you expect him to be. Never has been.

He was the saviour once, of course. The future of Irish football by the time he'd begun shaving. Forty-nine goals in a season in Millwall's youth team. That debut! The move out to the wing till he muscled up. Still, he scored four times in his first 13 games. You couldn't stop him scoring. He did it for fun!

Then there was that night at Highbury six years ago when he whipped in an astonishing goal and we agreed he had the set of a man clearing his throat before a great opera of a career. Instead, it's been a light musical. Liverpool took him away from Millwall and made him the "most expensive teenager" in Britain. Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first describe as promising. Tabloids swooned at news of his £3,000-aweek wage. He was misused, and the leaving of Liverpool, when finally it happened, was painful. He spent a year rotting at Wimbledon, and then last season bloomed at Manchester City.

Then this year it went wrong again. Throw in a rollercoaster international career and a few skirmishes with the tabloids and Kennedy's lifestory makes better reading than his CV. But hey! The past is prologue. This week he's starting again. If nine seasons have left him bitter, well, there's no trace. No more Mr Sulky Guy. There's still enough time to have a wonderful career, and, anyway, life's good. He whistles while he works.

"I'm injury free now, that's the first thing I'm happy about. It's a pity there's only a few games left in the season. I've missed three months, but I just have to smile and get on with it. It's nice to be in the Ireland team too. My career has been a bit of a rollercoaster, but the ups have been good and the downs have made me a better and a wiser person." MILLIONAIRE superflop bad boys aren't supposed to say such things. He's not having a moan, but it's been another turbulent year at a time when he needed stability. In his first year at Manchester, Kennedy had a splendid season as City made their way upstream. But in the Premiership he found that Joe Royle had chosen to play a different way. Kennedy was seeing less of the ball and seeing it in tighter spaces. All that and Premiership defenders too. Confidence ebbed.

"That's affected me a little, yeah, but I feel that when I've played I've done okay, and when I've come on as a sub I've done well, which is nice because when I was at Liverpool and at Wimbledon I never felt I was coming on and doing well. Maybe that's because I had a good year last year and I'm coming off that. There's nothing I can do about the system I play in, or the way management chooses to go."

Maybe that's the most unusual thing about Kennedy. Most swaddled and pampered footballers have a bonnetful of bees by the time they get to his age. They are forever "slamming" managers and becoming "wantaway wingers". Kennedy serenely sees the silver lining in every brooding cloud. Life unfolds, and always for the better. So regardless of what horrors come City's way this morning and for the next few weeks, he'll be sticking with them unless asked to leave. He's that sort.

"Liverpool was great," he says of an experience that palpably was anything but. "I wouldn't change it, but I'm happier here at City though than I have been anywhere else. Obviously last year was so successful and a great bond and really friendly club. So many new players came in this year, it takes longer to gel and mix in, but everyone gets on. It's always been a good feeling being here."

At times you would have been forgiven for suspecting Kennedy was bad news if you were to pick a certain number of the headlines he has generated. A run of little incidents involving drink seemed to have climaxed with his litigation against an English tabloid which maligned him badly. Then came the Starsky and Hutch incident.

Looking back, it was hardly crime of the century, and the lather which was worked up in the media seems comically excessive even just six months later. Kennedy and Phil Babb performed some giddy play-acting on the bonnet of a car one night last August. Unfortunately the car was owned by a garda. They were in a cell when morning broke. It was raining headlines. Most of them had the words "drunken oafs" in them. If being silly and unpopular had been a crime there'd have been calls to bring back the death penalty.

"That's when the severity of it hit us. Before you say it, it wasn't drink which stopped us seeing the severity, but it was just, you know, you're out having a laugh and then the police are there and you are being detained and you realise you have to go to court. It hits you, like, that this is going to be big.

"I couldn't believe the media attention," he says ruefully. "I'm a footballer and I know it gets out of proportion, but the judge hit the nail on the head for me (when giving him and Babb the Probation Act). It all happened in full media glare. He indicated it was a waste of time. They were all in the court room waiting for the huge big story, and it never came. "I was thinking about it today. Somebody reversed into my car the other day and smashed up the whole side of it, but I didn't ring the police or try to have them jailed. Ours was a small prank. We apologised. We were sorry. It was a small situation which got blown up. We were prepared to put things right.

"Worse things happen in life, there's wars and famines goin' on, and we're front page, back page and two, three, four and five inside. We took it on the chin. I don't feel hard done by. Nothing too severe happened us, or nothing we didn't deserve, so we accept it and get on with it."

He's happy to talk about it all and he knows that when he gets to Dublin he'll be asked to talk about very little else. He's curiously at peace with the media though.

"You have to write your stories. I try to be media friendly and I'm not bitter about any of it. I might have a different version, but I'm not bitter. It wasn't Riverdance on the top of the car or anything, and there was lots about the story and the way it was written that Babbsy and me would disagree with. But I'll talk about it."

Talking about it next week will be the final act of closure, a process which began when he and Babb spoke privately to McCarthy on the morning after the night before. For Kennedy it was especially tough. McCarthy has been a father figure to him since mid teenage days. Sparky, as he was known in the McCarthy house, used to babysit and lodge occasionally. "Mick was always so good to me. He'd even throw me clothes and gear when I was young and coming over first. He looked after me. If I was ever down about not being in the squad, I'd think of those days. He's put up with a lot, but I think he knows how much I appreciate all he's done for me."

ON THE other side of getting the Starsky and Hutch biz put to bed this week is the possibility of returning to international football. So far Kennedy's international career has been the same pot pourri as his club life.

He made a wonderful first impression against Austria under Jack Charlton, and was good bordering on exciting early in McCarthy's reign. But the bad days seem to get remembered more. He was taken off one day in Lansdowne against the Belgians, two minutes after they'd scored and with only half an hour on the clock. You forget how well he played in Brussels in the return. He was sent off for dissent in Iceland earlier in that campaign, with McCarthy memorably roaring from the sideline: "Sparky, why do I fookin' bother?"

"Yeah, I could hear Mick. I just kept my eyes on the tunnel. I didn't want to look over. It was terrible. The Princess Diana business was on that morning, her funeral, and I didn't know till late on that I'd been dropped and Kevin Kilbane was in. Then, at the game, I came on for Kev at half-time and I was wound up. I think I made two goals and scored one. Then I got sent off. I was thrilled that I'd played well and it took me a while to realise that what everyone remembered was me being sent off. First I knew about it was Mick coming into the dressing-room and getting into my ear."

Since that campaign finished he's produced the usual mix of brilliance and anonymity. He knows he needs to focus more, and feels that at times he needs more confidence. If it's going to happen for him, he reckons, well, it'll just happen.

Same with the derby today. Last derby he was taken off at half-time. He's not even sure he'll start today's. The gaffer hasn't said. Mark hasn't asked. He's feeling good and ready to give it a lash though.

All that potential still there waiting to be exploited? "I don't know how to answer that. The only really good stuff I have done is in Division One. To fulfil your potential you have to do it in the Premier league. At Liverpool it was such a big squad and I had setbacks and I couldn't fight my way up the pile; at Wimbledon, well, that was lost time, and this year in the Premiership we are playing different. I don't know."

Not that wisdom hasn't come. You ask him about drink. His considerable brow furrows. Poor friend, the drink. Bad to be seen in company with.

"I'm not a lunatic, but I get it all the time. After having a big move to Liverpool, everyone was watching me there. With us doing so well in Manchester everyone knows who you are. If I have lunch with my girlfriend in bar on Friday it'll be around that I was out getting pissed before a game. I have to be more careful and sensible."

He's getting ready to go. He has lifts to give in his black sports car, the sun is shining outside and in Manchester that's a rare thing. When you're feeling renewed you want to be out in it.

"It's a great life," he says, "I wouldn't change it for anything in the world. People would give their right arm to be here. When I was a kid I used to love dreaming of this. Now I play football and I've got money, which takes the sting out of stuff. Sure, I look forward to my days off but, well, it's not like work."

And he shakes hands and heads for the road. A happy young man. Not the person you thought he was at all.