Remembering Mick Kennedy: a vital part of the best Pompey team I have watched
Friday, 22nd Feb 2019 18:25 by Steve Bone

I was 14 when we signed Mick Kennedy and 18 when we sold him. Those are an important four years of anyone's life and it helps explain why I was so sad to learn last week that Kennedy had died.

Quite simply, he was part of the best Portsmouth FC team I've seen. But not just a part. As Mick Quinn put so perfectly days after the Irish legend's death, he was the glue that held a great team together.

I was trying to describe to my son, who's only 16, why Kennedy was so important to Alan Ball's mid-80s Gremlins and, in fact, so important the club's history as a whole. And I'll admit I found it difficult.

My son knows all about Jimmy Dickinson, Peter Harris, Alan Knight, Robert Prosinecki and Paul Merson, but he'd never heard of Mick Kennedy. He has now, by the way.

As I was telling him about the man we've now lost, I concluded that perhaps he was not one of the big names or easily-identifiable stars that many neutrals would name if asked to come up with PFC's greatest players. (Though I will point out there that I when I asked readers of my programme who their favourite Pompey player of all time was, he was second only to Prosinecki). And that theory about him being something of an unsung hero was hardened when I watched the 'Decade of Pompey 1982-92' film made by TVS that you can find, in five parts, on Youtube.

Kennedy was a pivotal player — an absolute rock - in the centre of the Blues midfield from the start of the 1984-85 until January of the 87-88 campaign when, as those who lived through it know all too well, he — along with our realistic chances of survival in the top division — was sold. But he hardly features in that video.

In a way that surprised me, but in a way it didn't. He wasn't a player who scored many goals (though I do remember a stunning long-range one that secured victory on a rainy September 1986 Fratton afternoon against Blackburn). He was not, at least as far as I recall, even one who came up with many assists, nor fancy tricks that the cameras loved to pick out then repeat.

But that should not in any way diminish the effect he had on that team, on the club and on those of us who were fortunate enough to be Fratton regulars in those years — perhaps particularly those who, like me, were an impressionable age at the time.

Kennedy was there, large as life and hard as nails, and was probably the most important single element of a team who suffered promotion heartbreak two years running yet had the sheer guts to come back for a third try at promotion to division one and make it happen.

He was the toughest of tacklers, the most frightening of opponents for anyone who thought they could mess Pompey around. But he could play too.

I was going to write a piece the other week about how Ben Thompson's influence on the Blues class of 2018-19 reminded me of Kennedy's bearing on Bally's mid-80s Gremlins. He was a similar type of player to the Millwall man. That perhaps is as good a way as any to try to explain his presence to today's younger fans.

And if you want just one example of his contribution, look up part two of the aforementioned Decade of Pompey video, go two minutes in and watch him, in the Fratton Park mud and murk against Oxford, deliver the perfect cross for Alan Biley to head in one of the club's most famous goals of the past 50 years.

It's a goal that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up every time I see it. And now that its provider has passed away, it somehow seems to have taken on an even greater significance. RIP Scully.

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