Mark Kennedy had a grip of Danny Mandroiu and was dragging him with purpose from the centre circle. Don’t worry, this was not some spiky training ground confrontation, this was the magnet version of Mandroiu and he was being moved across the white tactics board in Kennedy’s tidy office at Lincoln City.
Not for the first time on Thursday afternoon, Kennedy was animated. He was on his feet illustrating a phrase from a Turkish coach on his pro licence course: “I’m comfortable being uncomfortable.”
The phrase struck Kennedy then, it has stuck and it is a way of explaining why Kennedy, this man who has declined interview requests for a decade and more (including, initially, this one), who refuses to use social media, who plays golf on his own (off 4), who wants to live his life under the radar, is talking for two hours about where he is, who he is, what has been and what is to come.
“When I look at my career and my life, I’d like to think I’m balanced,” he says. “I’d like to think for all that I’ve done wrong, I have emotional intelligence.
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“I embrace challenge. Hearing ‘I’m comfortable being uncomfortable’, I loved that. He was saying to get better you have to go from here to being out here. And I think that’s what I’m good at.”
The ease and articulation suggest Kennedy has been doing this kind of speech for years. But, no, he is 46 and we might not have heard from him since he was 26.
The nature of the reporting of those caused him to recoil from the uncertain celebrity of football
He was beyond his starlet years then — “the most expensive teenager in British football” — had been in and out of Liverpool and had had his “escapades” while on international duty with Ireland.
The nature of the reporting of those caused him to recoil from the uncertain celebrity of football. Kennedy went into the shadows, played at Manchester City, Wolves, Crystal Palace, Cardiff City and finished at Ipswich Town. There he was signed by Roy Keane, encouraged to coach and appointed by Paul Jewell, and maintained on the staff by Mick McCarthy. All the while, or most of it, Kennedy was happy and professionally fulfilled. We just didn’t hear him say so.
But it is different now. Managing Lincoln City in League One may not strike some as high-profile, but it is around here. Kennedy has been in the job only 5½ months — 12 league games — but there has been enough done in that short time to make us wonder afresh about him.
Last Saturday Lincoln became the first team this season to win at promotion favourites Ipswich; Lincoln did it via a third consecutive clean sheet; today it is Sheffield Wednesday at Sincil Bank. Win again, or perform admirably, and there will be more ripples in the game and, locally, more autograph and selfie requests.
Kennedy noticed the number ticking up. So far, he is okay with it. But it is not a status he is chasing, we will not suddenly see Mark Kennedy as a guest pundit on our screens.
Yet over tea in his office, Kennedy reveals he can talk and that he has opinions. Some are strong, some are measured. He is an experienced professional; he is also a father of three. He is ambitious but he knows where he has come from, where he is and how fickle football management can be.
That last fact is why Kennedy considers Lincoln a good fit. The two immediate predecessors — Danny Cowley and Michael Appleton — both stayed three years. Kennedy has signed on for four.
“We spoke for 8½ hours over several meetings,” he says. “I remember saying to them: ‘If I don’t get the job, I can’t thank you enough for the opportunity to have these conversations.’ I also said how impressed I was with them and their procedures. I might be new to management but I’ve been in a first-team environment for 30 years and they really are a high-end group of people. And there’s no egos.”
Kennedy had been Lee Bowyer’s assistant at Birmingham City when Lincoln came up. Previously he had been loans manager at Wolves, head coach at disintegrating Macclesfield Town (12 matches), coach at Manchester City’s academy and then there were the Ipswich years, six in total as player and coach.
It made last Saturday, if not sweeter, then a small personal landmark. Ipswich had 33 shots and 77 per cent possession but Lincoln won and Kennedy’s phone had texts from his father-in-law and McCarthy among others as to how Lincoln had left with three points.
Kennedy is laughing when he says: “Mick texted me after the game: ‘Sparky, how did you win? You never had the ball!’”
So how did Lincoln do it?
“I’m not massive on systems,” Kennedy says. “This season we’ve played 4-3-3, 4-2-3-1, 3-4-3 and my preferred system is probably 5-3-2.
“The system we play at the moment is slightly more defensive. Against Ipswich the game plan was that we were not going to outplay them in terms of possession, we would drop off, have a mid-block, counterpress and counterattack. Although Ipswich had 33 shots, Carl [Rushworth] our goalkeeper, had a relatively quiet game.
“It worked on the day. Look, we could have got beat 3-0, we could have won 2-0.
“People get emotionally attached to the result — three games ago we lost 2-0 to Bolton and from a defensive point of view I thought we were excellent. We lost 2-0, so nobody wants to talk about that. But the outcome at Ipswich was absolutely a product of the work we’d done previously.”
Guardiola, Glenn Hoddle and Pep Lijnders, as well as Jewell and McCarthy, are names Kennedy mentions
The work, and the understanding of the work, is what matters. Kennedy has learned that. He is a devotee of Pep Guardiola but stresses defence, not attack: “In Pep Guardiola’s 10 league titles, I think he’s probably conceded the fewest goals nine times [correct]. But people don’t talk about that.
“We were too expansive, to win games you have to be hard to beat. We tightened up. I didn’t want us to be a team with 700 passes and the two centre halves have 400 between them. I think I’ve brought a realism — we play in League One and sometimes a game will look League One. But the philosophy has to be around playing football and possession-based. We’re not going to whack the ball from back to front. But you don’t need 83 per cent possession.”
Guardiola, Glenn Hoddle and Pep Lijnders, as well as Jewell and McCarthy, are names Kennedy mentions.
It was Hoddle, when manager of Wolves, who first stimulated a sense of coaching within Kennedy, albeit indirectly.
“Phenomenal coach,” Kennedy says. “We played Derby away and in his team talk he said something to me. I just thought that’s amazing for me what he’s just said. That’s the first time I thought about coaching. He was just doing a team talk, but the way I received the information in my head said he thought I saw the game and understood it.
“Paul Jewell looked after me massively. I had my B licence, Paul kept on at me. I did my A and then I applied for my pro immediately. I did it in Wales, I can’t compliment them enough. Pep Lijnders was on it and he’s the reason I’m sat here today. He doesn’t know that. I don’t know him very well.
“Basically I asked him … how he’d become Liverpool assistant manager. When he told me I realised I didn’t know anything about coaching. Clueless. I made my debut at 16 and I had talent, but I did not know the game.”
McCarthy, of course, was the manager of the 16-year-old at Millwall three decades ago and he remains a constant in Kennedy’s life.
“I speak to Mick all the time. A great guy, brilliant manager, 1,000-game manager; and a father figure to me. I used to babysit for him when I was at Millwall. I’m sure that was his way of looking after me.
“I’d like to think we’ve since gone through a multitude of phases in our relationship. We’re close friends now. I’m not a kid anymore.”
What a kid he was. We are here primarily to discuss coaching, but Kennedy’s playing career cannot be erased. It is not something that occupies him daily, though by co-incidence this week he received a photograph by text from an old Millwall team-mate, Mark Beard. It was from Highbury in 1995 when Millwall had beaten Arsenal 2-0 in the FA Cup and Kennedy, then aged 18, was forcing himself on to English and Irish football’s imagination. Soon he would be joining Liverpool for a record £1.5 million.
“I’m very proud of it, but it’s not something I think of,” Kennedy says of his playing career. “I’m not sure my kids even know I played football.
“It’s just gone — I’m not downplaying it. I love football, all I ever wanted to do was play football. But that area of my career has been and gone. I don’t look back, I don’t watch old games.
Liverpool? I get quite embarrassed when people say I played for Liverpool
— Mark Kennedy
“I’m married with three kids and that’s all I care about. We didn’t have kids until I was 35, I just had my career then. It’s different now. I love the school run.
“But really weirdly ‘Beardy’ texted me this picture on Tuesday. I replied to it. But you move on.
“Liverpool? I get quite embarrassed when people say I played for Liverpool. It was a big thing and I remember the magnitude of it, but I played 20 games. I tend to make a joke about it — that I was there, not that I played. I’m as proud I played for Millwall.”
Equally, Kennedy’s 34-game senior Irish career is not something he wants to retrace in detail today. He is, he says, proud of it, too, and he knows where his shirts and caps are. The one match he does refer to briefly is his first. “I was only 15 but I can remember it like it was yesterday. Tolka Park, under-16s against Wales. That’s a big moment.”
That was the beginning, but the memory of it and how it felt returned when he first lined up on the touchline at Sincil Bank as manager in July. Exeter City were the opposition: “I felt the same anxiety as a man of 46 as a boy of 15 at Tolka Park. The same emotion, the same pressure.
“Trust me, I was the most nervous man in the ground.
“Scoring at Highbury was in my skill set. Standing on the touchline for the first time … and I need this to go well because if it doesn’t …”
He rattles off a statistic about sacked first-time managers and a second chance.
But that can wait. Kennedy has moved from his comfort zone, his centre circle. This is new.
“It’s only 12 games. But that’s okay. We’re finding out who we are.”
