On Morning Ireland last September, the presenter addressed the latest controversy surrounding Roy Keane and asked what may have seemed like a straightforward question: “How did we get to this point?”
Keane was in the news because of the WhatsApp voice memo made by Stephen Ward detailing Keane’s row with Harry Arter and Jon Walters, but the answer to the question, ‘How did we get to this point?’ wouldn’t really start with an explanation of that argument.
It could conceivably start, say, in 1992 when Roy Keane was late boarding the team coach which led the captain of the side Mick McCarthy to question his professionalism with the line, ‘Call yourself a footballer?’ Keane, according to legend, owned the encounter by replying, ‘Call what you have a first touch?’
On Wednesday morning, Roy Keane left his role as assistant manager of the Ireland team.
Keane was the unforgiving exile telling the players, supporters and anyone else “to get over it”. Eejitry resolved to enjoy every moment, even if they weren’t that enjoyable.
Under O’Neill and Keane, there were many moments that were worth enjoying. Keane danced onto the pitch in Gelsenkirchen after John O’Shea’s late equaliser and it seemed the man who was always relentlessly looking forward because of his awareness was now able to enjoy the moment.
I’m very excited. I know I don’t look it,” Keane said when he was appointed and it was those first two years when the partnership offered the most. There was a long year before Ireland played a competitive game and Keane had an opportunity to become Celtic’s manager in that first summer and, perhaps, that is an opportunity he will regret not taking.
But Celtic didn’t want him enough,he said, and this was one of his many paradoxes. Keane has a sensitive side, but often it is highly attuned to his own feelings and may not be as sensitive to anybody else’s. He had, we accepted, been his own worst critic, so maybe this is why he was expected to be everyone else’s worst critic too.
There were times when this seemed necessary as O’Neill and Keane played the bad cop, bad bad cop roles well but by the end, it had been wearing. Keane had power without authority. He was a highly paid assistant, but one whose role remained baffling to many.
Keane arrived in the Ireland job with a point to prove. He had his difficulties at Sunderland with Ellis Short and if he had some problems managing upwards, some would have said he had some difficulty managing downwards too. And maybe even sidewards.
It was said that being an assistant suited his temperament, but maybe that view no longer holds either. Keane wanted to be a manager again one day and when O’Neill and Keane signed new contracts before the European Championships, O’Neill said Keane was in a good position to succeed him. Two years later and his future is full of uncertainty.
When the stories emerged about Arter and Walters, it would have been easy to point to what looked like double standards. Keane had wondered why they were getting treatment and it seemed ironic that a man who had reacted so badly to the idea of feigning injury in Saipan could now be policing the Irish squad in search off shirkers and dilettantes. But he was never one of those. As a player, he found a way to endure but his way wasn’t the way for others and that was the problem.
But his life has been full of great divides and he has been so reluctant to reveal them that it’s understandable -if wrong – that the simplistic charge of hypocrisy is put towards him.
RELATED ARTICLES
Donegal manager Jim McGuinness reveals ‘classy’ gesture Roy Keane made after devastating injury
By Ryan Price