To treat everybody equally, treat them differently.
People are different. Roy Keane is different.
In any walk of life, the key to good management is getting the best out of your best assets, however you have to do that. With any group, you’re going to get some pains in the hole and you’re going to get more selfish, more difficult personalities but, if you want your team to be the best it can be, you have to manage them – put up with them sometimes.
Roy Keane was given more leeway in his career because he was Roy Keane. He had outbursts, he crossed lines, he got personal, he didn’t chain himself to the same strict rules he expected everyone else to follow but the pay-off was that you had one of the best midfielders to ever play the game lining out for you and one of the most effective leaders dragging everyone else along with him.
Perhaps he got away with it as a manager too because it was a massive personality, a winner now at the helm. So he was irrational, he made jokes that cut through the bone and he was inconsistent but he was Roy Keane.
Now, it’s beginning to turn.
His most recent comments about Jon Walters now smack of hypocrisy. Keane is often criticising those who are hyper-sensitive, soft, unmanly even, yet he has no problem have a good old whinge himself about his own problems, whenever they occurred.
On The Football Spin, Dion Fanning had enough.
“Roy Keane is the most self-obsessed, most relentlessly narcissistic bore that Ireland has produced in a long time.
“Roy Keane was sustainable when he was right about things or when you felt he was right about things.”
The biggest problem now is that Keane is often wrong and it comes out as plain angry.
“It’s very funny. He has the nerve to talk about Jon Walters going on television talking about deeply personal, very serious, tragic, traumatic stuff and Roy Keane is still banging on about Manchester United getting the years of his service at the club wrong. 14 years ago,” Fanning said.
“He’s still talking about Carlos Queiroz playing him up front in a practice match. He thinks that’s important because it happened to Roy Keane.
“Have your opinion on Jon Walters but stop talking about the press statement 14 years ago. As if… as if it had said 12 and a half years instead of 11 and a half years that Roy Keane would be happy now. Are we meant to believe that if Alex Ferguson and David Gill had gotten those years right, Roy Keane would be sitting here saying, ‘I’ve got nothing to complain about’?”
Despite a fruitful relationship with Alex Ferguson, Keane says he hasn’t spoken to him since 2005 and he says Brian Clough was the best man to ever manage him – despite Clough being well past his prime in the 90s.
“If he wasn’t always talking about that, I would say okay, your opinion on Jon Walters is harsh and brutal and unfair but I suppose it’s fair enough because you never complain about anything that’s ever happened to you. But instead, you’re still here 14 years later talking about the wording of a press statement.
“Don’t come to us an say Jon Walters should lie low for a while. Roy Keane telling people to lie low!
“It’s tragic, his lack of self-awareness.”
Listen to Dion’s full rant here from 12:30.
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