Kelly casts eye over The FA

Despite a stroke, diabetes and epilepsy he has qualified as a referee and is active in youth leagues, has gained his coaching badge and helps run the kids' team on his doorstep, watches football whenever it has a spare 90 minutes.

In the North-East he remains member No. 55 of the Northern League Club, proud president of the Durham and District Sunday League and at 58 still nurses the hope of returning to the colours of Durham Buffs, they of Ushaw Moor cow field.

"It's the same dilemma at the start of every season, do I go out and buy a new pair of football boots, " he muses.

"I was most affronted a couple of years ago when I went into a shop and the assistant asked me who they were for." However fiendishly they villify him at the FA, Kelly was at least the devil they knew; however cadaverously his critics sought to portray him, he was instantly animated by the glorious sight of a football; however greatly high office stretched him on the rack, his heart remained in the right place always.

Graham Kelly didn't fit inside the glossy new wrapping, didn't often smile for the canera, didn't spin in the same direction as the columnists and the calumnists.

None would ever admit it within the wailing walls of Soho Square, but probably they miss him like hell.

LET it at once be declared, therefore, that we have been friendly for more than a decade, from the time that in FA Vase matches he would stand alone behind the goal, hoping the ball might come his way so that gleefully he could hoof it back the goalie.

There was the match at Tow Law where he stood on the spot where the week previously someone had fallen through the roof - "It's about time something exciting happened to me" - the cup final at Billingham Town where he appeared to be smiling and thus caused consternation among the crowd.

"He's mebbe got a bit wind, " someone said. "Aa'll gan yam and get the gripe watter." There was the Northern League dinner at which he spoke without charge and arrived with his boots in the boot. "It's just nice to talk to a live audience, " he announced, "I'm not used to it at the FA." There was his Durham Buffs' debut the following day when, first on parade at Ushaw Moor, the FA chief executive not only hauled out the nets and erected them single handedly but insisted on buying a huge round thereafter.

Now he looks back, if not in anger then with scarcely concealed derision at what has happened since for the sake of some Welsh dressing his ten year office abruptly ended and he was obliged to leave the asylum to the lunatics.

"I never lost my love of football, I just got a little bit disenchanted ? more than a little bit disenchanted ? with some of the people who were running it, " he says.

"I was still enjoying life at the FA. I don't suppose Mark Pailos wanted to go either, unless it was for the sake of his children." So was the FA, as one of this week's tabloids supposed, being consumed in the blaze of "vicious" politics?

"I think probably it was even worse in my time. There was some very weak leadership, people were allowed to get away with things that they should never have done. There were some very mischievous goings on, and they should have been stopped.

"There was an enormous amount of intrigue, an awful lot of time wasted on petty politics.

"We have seen successive leaders talk about cleaning up the game, about getting rid of agents and that sort of thing.

Nothing seems to have changed, the abuses go on regardless." Above all, he says, the new chief will need tenacity.

"Ideally he should be a business figure, 50-ish, mature family, someone who; s seen it and done it and is still in love with the game." A job reference for Sir Trevor?

"I think he'd do a very good job. He's certainly Mr Clean so far as football is concerned. It's probably what you need right now."

WE'D last met in November 1999, after he'd rashly suggested that Juninho of Middlesbrough was the sort of player you'd walk a long way to watch and someone took him up on it.

With his then partner, Romayne, he hoofed the 184 miles from Peterborough to Middlesbroughm raising £25,000 for medical charities. R G Kelly, the column suggested at the time, was the most traduced Englishman since Professor Plum was wrongly accused of doing it with the lead piping in the conservatory.

He married Romayne the following Valentine's Day but soon afterwards resumed a relationship with a girl friend from his youth ? younger and prettier, he concedes, than he is.

His own love life has attracted tumultuous tabloid interest. He doesn't for a moment seek to condemn Palios or Eriksson for theirs.

"The issues here seem to be about misjudgement. If Palios knew about that proposoed deal, then his position was untenable.

"Sadly, I think Sven will survive because there is no obvious replacement. He had a wonderful opportunity, inherited a great nucleus of players like Beckham, Owen, Campbell, Gerard and Gary Neville, but flattered to deceive.

"If he couldn't make a good team with that nucleus, it's a pretty poor show. The people who allowed him a £1m pay rise after he'd gone courting with Chelsea must be thinking pretty hard now."

WE meet again in Lytham, near to his Lancashire home, and the former headquarters of the Football League of which he was secretary until joining the FA in 1988.

It's the sort of seaside place where the tide went out a long time ago and resolved on no account to return, the sort of day which makes the English Tourist Board want to emigrate.

His Mercedes (M1 RGK) waits at the Victorian railway station, passes Hardaker Court ? named after his Football League predecessor and appropriately (says Kelly) a retirement home - is parked behind the Clifton Arms where the menu includes beluga caviar.

Just like old times? "I can honestly say that we never had caviar on the menu in all my time at the FA, " he says, placing hand on heart like a schoolboy crossing and hoping to die.

He eats melon ("without the ham please") and roast turkey, thus contradicting the impression that he was vegetarian. Nor, by way of further amendment, is he strictly teetotal.

"After we'd both been ill, my friend Gerard Houllier told me that a little red wine was good for the circulation. Better than that, I enjoy it." The stroke seemed to have left no physical legacy. Three years ago, however, he suffered an epileptic attack while staying at the Ramside Hall Hotel in Durham.

"Jeanette woke up and thought I was dead, it was because the stroke had left a scar on the brain. At least they found that I had one." He has turned to golf, playing off 21, and to writing.

His ghosted autobiography ? called Sweet FA but more accurately Bitter-Sweet FA ? sold well and he is 100,000 words into a solo second. His weekly column in The Independent ended on Monday with his thoughts on the latest scandal.

Though full of phrases like "humiliating mistakes", "regular debacles" and "unholy mess", it was anodyne compared to the vitriol on the next page.

"The deal was so squalid and crude, " wrote James Lawton, "it might have been conjured by the lower orders of the Mafia." Other than the manner of his going ? "I was fired with enthusiasm, " he liked to tell his audiences - his principal regret from ten years at the top is probably that the Premiership grew too big for its football boots.

"I'd set it up differently now, with more checks and balances, but there was a wonderful impetus and I'd want to keep that.

"We had a legal fight to get it off the ground and winning it gave me a lot of satisfaction, but there was one point very early on when the FA chairman (Bert Millichip) told them that they could have as many clubs as they liked, that it was entirely up to them and that the FA didn't care.

"The FA should have resisted that, not least for the good of the England team. From that moment we were on the back foot and the Premier League were in the driving seat.

"The FA's goose was cooked; they knew we were weak, we had a soft underbelly." More than any other chief executive, he also spent time nurturing the game's grass roots, chasing the ball when it went out of play, though he denies favouritism.

"I don't mean to imply that I was disenchanted with the professional game, that wasn't the case. I loved football in its totality."

HE spent three years on the board at Luton Town, enjoyed it immensely, has now accepted an invitation to serve on the national council of the Football Supporters' Federation, in which kid glove capacity he nay find himself on the opposite side of the table from some of his former FA colleagues.

Though he does question and answer sessions, he no longer accepts after dinner speaking engagements. "I don't do my act; I'm not a comedian, as it were."

He tries not to scowl as he says it.

So he referees, or coaches the kids ? the original Under 10s, now under 12s, fast growing evidence of time's march.

"You're strictly recommended on your coaching qualification not to play with the kids; these days it's much easier to adhere to.

"When they were nine of ten I could go past them at will. Now they won't even pass the ball to granddad." For the former top man at Lancaster Gate, however, the greater problem is with their parents. "A very small minority gives me grief, the vast majority no longer recognise me. They know about footballers, not old fogies who used to run the game." Within five minutes of one match beginning a father loudly suggested that he couldn't run a mini-soccer match, much less the FA. Kelly reckons he flew over. "We had no more bother after that.

"I get a lot of fulfilment out of refereeing. I don't know if enjoyment is the word, it can be quite testing with some of the parents." For now, slimmed down and satisfied, he still worries about never playing again, and about the Buffs with the smooth. We promise to pass on details of his anxious availability.

"Tell them I'm not quite as quick as I used to be, " smiles Graham Kelly, "but I'm still absolutely passionate about my football."

YOU wouldn't believe the trouble getting home from Lytham, or how greatly First North Western makes the train companies over this side seem like transports of delight by comparison.

Half way and thunder struck, we landed in the Pride of Accrington, a no-smoking pub not 100 yards from the railway station but soaked before ever arriving. It was also a nocustomer pub, only Lancashire fire brigade out and about on such an evening, pumping prodigiously.

The pride of Accrington seems not to be born again Stanley but 1960s marathon runner Ron Hill, Commonwealth gold medallist and three times Olympian who marked his recent 65th birthday with a 5k race.

Hill, who every day hoofed seven miles to and from work, reckons to have run every day of his adult life and, still superfit, to have little truck with modern methods.

Tough of the track, he only once had a massage and - there's the rub - never bothered again.

And finally...

The first goalkeeper to win top division championship medals with two different clubs (BackTrack, August 2)was John Lukic - Arsenal in 1989, Leeds United three years later.

John Briggs in Darlington today invites readers to name the six North-East football grounds on which England have played full internationals.

Queen and country, the column returns on Tuesday.

Published: 06/08/2004