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Falling Down – Roy Keane, Ireland and the end of the affair

Published 20:31 23 Nov 2018 GMT

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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?’

Or it could start a few years later at Old Trafford cricket ground or it could begin on the pitch at Lansdowne Road at the end of one of Irish football’s greatest days.

Maybe it would take us to a Sunday morning in a Dublin hotel with one player returning to Manchester to nurse an aching body, certain the hard work had been done, while his international team-mates get ready to fly to Tehran.

Or maybe it would start in an airport terminal where Ireland’s greatest ever player is setting his face for a month on the road with team-mates who wonder if they know him at all.

It could start a long time before then. It could take us back to the beginning of one of the most extraordinary stories in the history of Irish sport. A story about the rise of a boy fromMayfield, who made it to the top of the world and never forgot where he came from.

But never forgetting was not just a cliche, but the organising principle for his life. Never forgetting was the Alpha and Omega, the way he propelled himself forward, the way he ensured the standards he believed in became an ideology rather than simply a way of not forgetting.

This boy was fuelled by the rejections and remembered every slight. He held on to every dismissal and remembered those days when it looked as if there was no escape and that the life he wanted had been denied to him while others less talented, but more understood, flourished. Once he was on the outside and he always remembered what that felt like. He remained an outsider and he refused to forget as if forgetting was kryptonite that would rob him of his powers

Maybe the answer could begin when that boy was at the height of his powers and found himself at a BBQ on a Pacific Island. Or maybe it would start in a Hyatt Hotel bedroom where Ireland’s captain considered getting off the island before deciding that he’ll stay.

We could begin the answer in that same room when he gets a few things off his chest in a couple of interviews. Or it should start in the ballroom of the same hotel when his manager - his international manager - questions these views, before producing a fax of an interview and then being stunned when this player - his player or so he thought - replies to comments about injuries with an explosion of rage, an invective of not forgetting that altered the course of Irish football.

Maybe it would start with the return to the Ireland team two years later, an act of rebellion against his mentor which could point to trouble ahead. Or it could commence with the reconciliation between the former captain and the man he called Mother Teresa which started a management career that once looked to have great potential.

But it never came to that. That potential perished on the hardness of this ideology, the unforgiving relentlessness that made it so difficult to sustain the relationships, unnecessary as a player, but central as a manager.

The hardness informed everything and made sense of everything while he was a captain and a footballer, but became more difficult in management when nuance and empathy might matter more than he realised during the hard years of never forgetting,

And it is that which seems to remain now. A manager defined by his career as a player, a man who represented the future, now appearing to be a relic of the past.

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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?”

Or it could start a few years later at Old Trafford cricket ground or it could begin on the pitch at Lansdowne Road at the end of one of Irish football’s greatest days.

Or maybe it would start in an airport terminal where Ireland’s greatest ever player is setting his face for a month on the road with team-mates who wonder if they know him at all.

And it is that which seems to remain now. A manager defined by his career as a player, a man who represented the future, now appearing to be a relic of the past.

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.

Keane was a drinker who stopped drinking at the height of his powers. It may be that those two lives - “the life we learn with and the life we live with after that” as Bernard Malamud put it - are at the heart of everything. Keane has had to live with everything in a different way and while he has said his decision to stop drinking was because he wanted to get more from his playing career, it is hard not to speculate it could have been more fundamental than that, that it was fundamental to everything, to the experience of Saipan and all that followed from it.

But that was turned into a debate about standards – another element that could be mined for contradictions. It's possible Saipan was never about pitches or balls or training kit, but it was easier to deal with that than to see it as a story of one man trying to adapt in a world that was alien to him.

The worlds had collided on the way to Saipan and they would keep on colliding. At Dublin Airport, a man dressed as a leprechaun as part of a promotion for a tabloid told him not to be so miserable.

“I've got two bloody leprechauns telling me to 'Cheer up Keano’. I thought 'I'll fucking knock you out, you stupid cunt’.” He didn’t and if he put this down as a moment of great restraint, it wouldn’t count for much in the end.

In this moment, the two traditions met and if things had changed when he returned as part of the management team, the promise of the first three years stalled in recent times.

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.

His contribution for the past five years might be summed up by Matt Doherty's reply when asked what Keane did in the set-up. “I guess he was Martin’s assistant.”

And this is the strange position Keane finds himself in. He is the same age as Pep Guardiola but acts like he comes from another era. His acts of not forgetting have seemed to curdle into a self-defeating sentimentality where the past was a different, maybe better, country. A man who was once the most vital, electrifying force in Irish football leaves reduced by the role, with people scratching their heads, pausing as they try to explain what exactly he did. There was a time when everyone knew what Roy Keane did.

Keane, who once was seen as representing everything about Ireland’s future, an Ireland which didn’t trade on its reputation, which aspired to greatness and which could meet those aspirations, can now be seen to be part of the past. Those ideas were always overblown, but nobody would even be overblowing them now.

So as Mick McCarthy gets ready for a possible return to deal with his 'unfinished business', Keane leaves with his business seemingly finished. And, as we wonder how we got to this point, only the most unimaginative would begin with a row in a training camp in 2018 between Ireland’s assistant manager and a couple of players. When it comes to Roy Keane and Ireland, this is not where you would start when you ask how we got to this point. But it might be where you’d end.

Falling Down – Roy Keane, Ireland and the end of the affair

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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?”

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?”

Home football