“It went in off my belly,” said Jason Kennedy, by way of explaining his first Carlisle United goal at Northampton Town in March 2015. And this, we would go on to discover, was the purest Kennedy – the most Jason Kennedy way of scoring a Jason Kennedy goal, the Kennedy branding all over it, the ball not so much placed into the net as blocked, deflected, shunted or stabbed over the line.
And if you’re going to have a belly as a professional footballer, well, why not use it to your advantage? Indeed, why not use whatever parts of your anatomy happen to be closest to the ball at the time if it gets you the desired result?
This was the sweet Kennedy logic, and there’s another goal that fits this rugged template perfectly: at home to Cheltenham Town in August 2016. The ball is launched forward, an aerial challenge goes up, Kennedy continues his run and, as he falls over, the ball strikes some part of him – no idea which – and bounces into the net.
POMO, the former Football Association director of coaching Charles Hughes called it; position of maximum opportunity, the places where goals were most often scored. In the autumn of 2016, Carlisle’s POMO was wherever Kennedy happened to be running, which was normally somewhere close to, or ideally inside, the six-yard box.
His retirement, announced last weekend, leads us back to that remarkable time: that Kennedy purple patch when Carlisle unlocked a close-range goalscoring genius in their number seven with the thinning strawberry-blond pate.
It may be tempting, when waving off his career, to think first of his best goal in a United shirt – the overhead kick at Morecambe which garnished a 3-0 victory. That, though, was the outlier, the point off the scatter graph, the farmhand putting down his shovel to perform an aria.
Enjoy it, by all means – but the real meat of Kennedy’s 2016/17 was less spectacular and more repeatable. Quite the best tribute to his exploits is the fact that most of his other goals were so similar, in proximity certainly, and in many cases style too.
The midfielder scored 11 for United that campaign. A quick run through them on YouTube confirms that, if you take the Morecambe acrobatics out of it, Kennedy’s other ten came from an aggregate distance of about 40 yards. Four yards each, in other words, and with this number in mind you can picture those goals all the more clearly.
The ricochet against Cheltenham, the two-yard scramble against Colchester United, the rebound volley at Stevenage, the stretch and prod against Crawley Town, the near-post header at St Albans City, the stand-still header against Mansfield Town, the two-yard pounce at Luton Town, the six-yard header at Notts County, the no-yard stab at Exeter City…
Some were among the most unsightly goals you would ever see. And if football awarded points for artistic flourish, Carlisle and Kennedy would have been nowhere. The game, though, is above all about transferring ball to net in whatever way works best for you, and Kennedy at that time, was supreme.
It was of course not just about the finishes, far from it. It was about the runs, the instinct, the willingness to put head amongst limbs, the awareness to be where something might fall, the timing honed by years of honest lower-league labour, the honesty – an overused word in the game, at times – to bring all this to the pitch, week after week, and not make any part of it conditional.
And that approach was more than anything the real Kennedy identity. This was a man of substance, a player of consistency, one who genuinely transformed how Carlisle United were in the middle of the last decade. Whatever United had in the 2014/15 campaign, they did not have many sure things. From March, they certainly had one in Kennedy, whose contribution to a successful survival battle was, in tone and impact, rather akin to that of Omari Patrick in 2021/22.
When he then signed permanently from Bradford City it contributed convincingly to the idea of Carlisle being less flaky again. “They’re men,” said the former assistant manager, Lee Dykes, as the likes of Jabo Ibehre, Kennedy and Michael Raynes were giving the Blues a tougher, maturing edge in 2015/16.
That was not a great scoring season for Kennedy, not by any means. There was his League Cup winner at QPR, a deft post-flood slalom against York City, a lovely clipped winner against Bristol Rovers, and that was it: no portent of the deluge that was to come…
…or maybe there was, because the bottom line of Kennedy, in terms of work and running and industry and 100 per cent application, was always there. What happened the following campaign was the very meaning of someone making their own luck – which, in the end, is not really luck at all.
Among the many Sliding Doors episodes of Carlisle United, one is the alternative universe where Kennedy (plus Mike Jones, plus Danny Grainger) does not suffer mid-season injury in 2016/17. He did return to score at Exeter in that doomed play-off second leg, but the hip problem that stalked him in 2017 would soon render the rest of his Carlisle career a matter of pain, and a different kind of character. The injury was so serious that it left him in a wheelchair for a while. His comeback in itself, in 2019, was a real victory.
And off he eventually went, to lower levels, sustaining his career into his mid and late-thirties; Football League life now over but still, in places such as Hartlepool United, Spennymoor Town, Marske United and Redcar Athletic, environments where Kennedy’s professionalism, principles and, from time to time, that old goal knack could still express themselves, until such point that he could call time on his terms.
That came a week ago, and as much as it’s easy to say United could do with someone of his traits now, that doesn’t make it untrue. The reality is that many sides at this level would benefit from a slice of the prime Kennedy we knew: belly, legs, knees, head, brain; every glorious part of the Ginger Lampard, in fact. Go well in retirement, JK.
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