Considering he first went between the sticks by chance and almost saw his fledgling career wiped out when hit by a motorcycle as a teenager, Everton’s goalkeeper coach Alan Kelly has done well to reach a thousand games in football.
Luck of the Irish? Possibly, but the son of the Preston North End legend whose image adorns the seats in the Town End of Deepdale has reached the milestone of matches as a player and now a coach (in Everton’s 1-0 win over Brentford earlier this month) through hard work, determination and resilience.
Although, like that aforementioned stand which houses PNE’s most-vociferous supporters, he is named after his goalkeeping father from Bray who was capped 47 times by the Emerald Isle and turned out a record 513 times for the Lancashire club – including in the 1964 FA Cup final alongside future Everton legend Howard Kendall who became the youngest player in the fixture since Clapham Rovers’ James Prinsep in 1879 – Kelly junior didn’t don the gloves until relatively late and wasn’t supposed to be a footballer full stop. He told the ECHO: “I was a defender, I played in defence for the town team and a couple of times for the Preston youth team at Under-14s and Under-15s level.
