Michael John Kelly, born 18 October 1942, Northampton, England.
PART ONE
Mike Kelly joined Chelsea as a junior and spent two seasons on their books, 1959/60 and 1960/61, learning his trade in the shadow of Stamford Bridge; but the club decided he was not for them, and released him at the end of that second campaign. It would have been easy, at nineteen, for a rejected young goalkeeper to drift out of the game altogether, and plenty did in that era, when non-league football offered little in the way of a safety net or a second chance. Kelly, however, did nothing of the sort, and instead found his way to Wimbledon, then plying their trade as amateurs in the Isthmian League, a decision that would shape the next eight years of his life.
At Wimbledon, Kelly discovered something close to a golden age, though nobody at the time would have described non-league amateur football in such grand terms. The club he joined in 1958 was building toward genuine distinction within its own sphere, and Kelly was there, between the posts, as it happened. In 1963 Wimbledon beat Sutton United in the final of the FA Amateur Cup at Wembley Stadium, a competition that mattered enormously to clubs of that standing and carried a prestige which modern followers of the professional game might struggle fully to appreciate; and Kelly, guarding the goal that day, played his part in one of the defining triumphs of the club’s amateur era.
Nor was that success an isolated flourish, because Wimbledon went on to win the championship of the Isthmian League in two consecutive seasons, and also finished as runners-up in the Southern League First Division, evidence that this was a side built for sustained achievement rather than a single lucky afternoon. Along with all of that, Kelly’s form for Wimbledon earned him recognition at international level, albeit of the amateur variety, and he won three caps for the England national amateur football team during these years, a modest but meaningful acknowledgement that his talent had been noticed well beyond the boundaries of south-west London.
Eight seasons is a long time to remain amateur when your performances are catching the eye of Football League scouts, but Kelly stayed with Wimbledon through 1966, by which point he was twenty-three and evidently ready for the step up that so many good non-league goalkeepers of that period never got the chance to take. Queens Park Rangers offered him that chance, signing him as a professional in 1966 and giving him his first taste of life in the Football League proper.
Kelly would spend four seasons at Loftus Road, a period in which Rangers themselves were beginning to establish a reputation as one of the more ambitious lower-division clubs in the country, climbing through the divisions under Alec Stock and assembling a side that would eventually win promotion to the top flight. Kelly’s own appearances for the club, together with those he later made for Birmingham City, added up to 116 in the Football League, a solid and respectable body of work for a goalkeeper who had come into the professional game relatively late by the standards of the time.
After four years with Queens Park Rangers, Kelly moved on to Birmingham City in 1970, and it was at St Andrew’s that he enjoyed the longest single spell of his playing days, remaining with the club for six years until 1976. Birmingham during this period were a Second Division club with First Division pretensions, forever pushing for the promotion that would finally arrive in the 1971-72 campaign, and Kelly’s presence in and around the goalkeeping department through those years places him firmly among the supporting cast of a club trying to find its way back to the top of English football. His overall figures at Wimbledon, Queens Park Rangers and Birmingham City combined read impressively enough on paper — 139 appearances for the Dons, 54 for the Hoops, and 62 for the Brummies, a grand total of 256 matches across those three clubs — and they tell the story of a thoroughly dependable professional rather than a fleeting sensation, which in the unglamorous business of goalkeeping is very often the higher compliment.
PART TWO
By 1976, with his thirty-fourth birthday approaching, Mike Kelly might reasonably have been expected to wind down quietly in the lower reaches of the English game, as so many goalkeepers of his generation did once their legs and their reflexes started to slow. Instead, he took his talents across the Atlantic, joining forces with the Minnesota Kicks of the North American Soccer League as a player-coach for a single season. The NASL in the mid-1970s was a curious, colourful experiment, stuffed with ageing European stars chasing one last payday under the Californian or Minnesotan sun, and Kelly’s solitary appearance for the Kicks suggests that his role there had already tilted decisively toward coaching rather than playing. On top of that, it was a neat symbolic bridge: the last kick of his playing days spent not principally protecting a goal but teaching others how to do it, which is precisely the shape his life would take from that point onward.
Kelly returned to England once his time in Minnesota had run its course, and the reserve team manager’s job at Plymouth Argyle awaited him, a role that suited a man now moving deliberately from the pitch into the technical area. It did not take long, however, for circumstances to thrust him into a far more exposed position, because when Plymouth’s manager Tony Waiters resigned, Kelly was promoted to take his place at the helm of the first team. This was 1977, and the job would last only nine months before Kelly himself resigned, with the team seemingly heading toward relegation and the pressures of top-level management evidently not to his taste, or at least not on that particular occasion. Nevertheless, the experience at Home Park was not wasted, because it appears to have confirmed something important about where Kelly’s real gifts lay — not necessarily in the unforgiving, results-driven world of first-team management, but in the more specialised, more patient discipline of coaching, and above all in coaching goalkeepers.
From Plymouth, Mike Kelly moved into a series of assistant manager roles that read like a tour of English football’s middle and upper reaches: Fulham, Crystal Palace, and West Bromwich Albion all called upon him in this capacity during the years that followed, each appointment adding another layer to a reputation being built quietly and steadily away from the back pages. Then, in 1984, came the appointment that would define the middle portion of his working life and place him at the very centre of the English game: Kelly was named goalkeeping coach of the England national team, a post he would hold until 1990.
During those six years he worked with the England set-up across two World Cups, a period that took in Bobby Robson’s reign as manager and the tournaments in Mexico in 1986 and Italy in 1990, the latter of which ended in the agony of a penalty shoot-out defeat to West Germany in Turin, a match still spoken of with a mixture of pride and heartbreak by English supporters of a certain age. Whatever the outcome of those tournaments on the field, Kelly’s presence in the background, refining the technique and the temperament of England’s goalkeepers, represented as significant a contribution as anyone could make without ever pulling on the shirt himself.
His departure from the England set-up in 1990 did not signal any diminishing of his standing within the profession, because Switzerland promptly recruited him to perform a similar role with their national side, and Kelly remained in that post through to the 1994 World Cup in the United States, working with a Swiss team that qualified for the tournament for the first time in twenty-eight years under Roy Hodgson, the manager with whom Kelly would go on to forge one of the most enduring professional relationships of his life.
Once his work with Switzerland concluded, Kelly returned to the England fold, and he was goalkeeping coach once again during Euro 96, the tournament staged on home soil that summer and remembered above all for Paul Gascoigne’s celebrated goal against Scotland, a strike that owed everything to Gascoigne’s own instinct and very little to any goalkeeper’s error, though it is a fair bet that Kelly, watching from the technical area, appreciated the finer points of the goalkeeping on display that tournament as keenly as anyone in the stadium. The years that followed saw Kelly continue to work at club level with a variety of teams in England and abroad, moving between posts with the quiet consistency of a man who had long since stopped needing to prove himself and had instead settled into the role of trusted specialist, the sort of figure that managers seek out precisely because his expertise is proven rather than promised.
Then, in December 2007, came a reunion that must have felt almost inevitable given the history between the two men: Kelly joined Fulham as goalkeeping coach and assistant manager under Roy Hodgson, resuming a working partnership that stretched back to their time together with Switzerland more than a decade earlier. Fulham at that point were fighting to preserve their Premier League status, and Hodgson’s calm, methodical approach to the task — with Kelly once again at his side — helped steer the club to survival, a achievement that would later be regarded as one of the finest of Hodgson’s time in English football.
Where Hodgson went, Kelly tended to follow, and so it proved again in 2010, when Hodgson left Craven Cottage to take charge of Liverpool and brought Kelly with him to Anfield Road as part of his backroom staff. It was, by any measure, a remarkable posting for a man who had first pulled on goalkeeping gloves for Wimbledon amateurs more than half a century earlier, and it placed him at one of the most storied clubs in world football during a challenging period in its recent history. Hodgson’s time at Liverpool proved short and difficult, however, and when the manager departed the club before the end of his first season, Kelly’s own involvement came to an end as well, the two men’s paths having run together, almost without exception, since their days working with the Swiss national team.