RK Watch: Paul Hayward…
Mail: Life was a whole lot simpler when Roy Keane was the smouldering anti-hero who engaged his enemies only around the knees or by the throat.
Back then, Keano was the game’s dark star: brooding, volcanic, unpleasable. When we looked to the Premiership’s first big wave for a future defender of the faith, a guardian for the game’s splintered integrity, Keane’s kennel was the last place we expected to find an attack-dog for the cars-and-girls age.
Our mistake. Roy’s reincarnation from public enemy to statesman is this summer’s most compelling costume change.
Like many, I thought Sunderland’s charismatic manager would become the J D Salinger of the British game: a recluse glimpsed only through rainy dog-walking snaps.
An introvert who seemed badly hardwired for the politics and personal space incursions of man-management, Cork’s fiercest instead sent Sunderland shooting up the second-tier and on to the stage he sodominated in Manchester United red, where four points from six and two last-gasp goals attest to his talent for transplanting his own obdurate nature to his team.
Shame is a running theme of his autobiography, which features a brilliantly righteous passage straight from the mouth of Travis Bickle, the vigilante cabbie in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.
Here is Roy in injury rehab: “Seen from a windowless gym on a winter afternoon, the game looked like a bad movie, full of spivs, bluffers, bulls******s, hangers-on, media whores and bad actors. If you played your hand correctly you could be a big man without achieving anything.”
What’s to disagree with? But around that time, Keane was ensnared in his own tussles with guilt, which invariably ended with him feeling he had let down his wife Theresa.
As, for example, when he threw a punch at Alan Shearer, found himself in a police cell four days before an FA Cup Final, brawled with Dubliners who had disparaged Cork or bailed out on a World Cup.
I mention this because Keane knows what it’s like to answer to that half of the marriage sometimes referred to as “Her Indoors” — but more commonly known in Premier League football these days as Her Indoors at Selfridges or Her Outdoors at the Burj Al Arab.
Again and again Keane confesses to biting shame at what Theresa might have felt when he fell below the standards he exhorted his team-mates to attain with his notorious outburst against slackers in the Old Trafford dressing-room.
So he at least understands the mechanism of discomfort when a player has to say to his wife, for example: “Darling, I want you to sit down. I have a confession. I can’t keep this to myself any longer. We’re moving to Sunderland.”
As the phones on Wearside are apparently three-digit, crackling Bakelite jobs, who is to say that the players who were so reluctant to relocate to the Stadium of Light didn’t actually say: “Sorry, Roy, but my missus is a consultant paediatrician at a top London hospital and she’s just starting an important research project. She feels she can’t uproot to Sunderland at this important point in her career.”
Keane’s interpretation of these discussions is rather starker. This week he erupted: “If a player doesn’t want to come to Sunderland then all well and good. But if he decides he doesn’t want to come because his wife wants to go shopping in London, then it’s a sad state of affairs. It’s not a football move, it’s a lifestyle move. It tells me the player is weak and his wife runs his life.”
Tin-hat time again for the WAGs, who must be wondering which popular caricature fits them best: fragrant shopaholics tottering along behind their superstar beaus or ball-breaking autocrats who decide who goes where and when.
A personal suspicion is that some of the Sunderland no-shows merely recoiled at the survival prospects of Keane’s squad or cringed at the thought of working for a manager with such a rampant work ethic.
In other words, maybe it was not the paucity of shopping opportunities that scared them off so much as Mean Keane himself.
Right message, wrong target is the best take on his priceless fulmination.
And admiration swells by the hour, because modern football is peppered with people who are scared of the sound of their own voices.
However often he misses the target, he bears some of the region-transforming talents of Brian Clough who, aptly for our purposes, scored 54 times for Sunderland in the early Sixties.
The frequent indiscipline in Keane’s superb playing career acts as a useful needle to pop the balloon of his intermittent piety.
What keeps us transfixed, though, is that the WAGs’ least likely shopping companion has, like Clough and Sir Alex Ferguson, that elusive human virtue of ‘character’, which, let’s face it, you need in football’s ‘bad movie’ of institutionalised self-interest.
Sometimes that quality stagnates in later life. With Keane it’s quite obviously deepening as he escapes the self-absorption of his playing days. Keep talking. Never stop. And not just because it sells newspapers.
