“Last season, it was Keane blasts this and Keane blasts that. I don’t blast anything.” – Roy Keane, Saipan, May 2002.
“You’re the reason I’m driving up and down the f*****g country to find another player, you’re not f*****g good enough. Your attitude is shit. You’re not good enough. Next week we’ve got our last home game against Arsenal. You know at the end of the season when you walk around the pitch and thank the fans for their support? I’m ringing Umbro and getting you some hooded jumpers, because you’re a f*****g embarrassment, it’s a joke and this is not going to stay this way.” – Roy Keane addresses his players at Sunderland manager, 2008.
After every Irish international at the Aviva Stadium, a member of the management team or squad travels up from the dressing room to the lavish suite where the Ireland team’s main sponsor, Three, entertains its guests.
The “Three dugout” is full of those connected to Irish football and those who would like to be. It is essentially the players’ lounge, packed with relations of the teams and guests of the sponsors. One of the perks of access is that you hear the views of someone from the squad immediately following a match.
It is a large room with no obvious focal point so often when a player or a member of staff answers questions, it isn’t long before the room is full of the low-level hum which tells you the guests have resumed their own conversations, that the speaker has lost the room.
There is, however, one exception. There is one man who ensures the room stays silent when he speaks. The room stays silent in anticipation of what he might say next as much as out of respect for who he is and the wisdom he imparts. That man is not the manager, although people listen when Martin O’Neill speaks. That man is the assistant manager of the Republic of Ireland, Roy Keane.
“No one man is bigger than the team,” Mick McCarthy said once, but for most of the 21st century it has rarely felt true about Roy Keane and the Ireland team.
When he is exiled, he is the story. When he is absent, he becomes part of the story as he did after Thierry Henry’s handball in 2009; as he did in 2012 when he criticised the attitude of the supporters, but not, he insisted, the players.
When he became part of the Ireland management team in 2013, he drew attention as no other assistant manager ever has or, arguably, should. Last week, O’Neill and Keane agreed contract extensions until 2018 and the manager said Keane was well-placed to succeed him.
BREAKING: Martin O'Neill extends his contract with Ireland https://t.co/4kriyHtCFm
— SportsJOE (@SportsJOEdotie) June 7, 2016
Keane seems to hover above the team. He is the most recognisable figure in Irish football which is an indication of his stature, but also an indictment of those who have followed him. Irish football has one superstar: the assistant manager, Roy Keane.
When he speaks, he is seen as speaking with that authority of his office, not the office of Martin O’Neill’s number two, but the true position he is deemed by many to occupy in Irish life: He is the setter of standards, the man who won’t accept mediocrity, the sportsman who made a nation understand how to demand the best.
Yet all of those imagined roles are subordinate to his main job: being Roy Keane. In Cork 10 days ago, he spoke out and criticised a number of the Ireland players. He may have been fulfilling the requirements of his role in Irish life, but he spoke out too because it was the thing Roy Keane needed to do. Sometimes it is hard to discern any more coherent strategy than that.
On Saturday, he said there had been an over-reaction to those comments, “particularly by the media”, but it is the media Keane despises who get the most from Keane these days. This is just another paradox to absorb.
When he stands alongside Martin O’Neill at the Stade de France on Monday evening, it will be tempting to see it as the final step in a journey home that began when he walked out of the ballroom of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Saipan in 2002. But that would involve a belief that things travel in straight lines, or that there is a journey home. It would also ignore the mass of contradictions that remain in the most compelling sportsman of his generation.
“No one man is bigger than the team,” Mick McCarthy said in 2002 as he left a press conference at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Saipan, which had been arranged to announce that Roy Keane was no longer part of the Ireland squad. McCarthy added that there would be no more talk of Roy Keane once they left the island. These were defiant statements from McCarthy which, at the time, nobody even pretended to believe were possible or true.
The Great Escape
“I had to arrange my own flights coming back. I waited in the room for two or three hours, nobody approached the room from the FAI so that’s why I rang United and asked them to book a flight to come back. I remember all the things.” – Roy Keane, 2002.
He too could smile at Herzog and despise him. But there still remained the fact. I am Herzog. I have to be that man. There is no one else to do it. After smiling, he must return to his own Self and see the thing through – Herzog, Saul Bellow.
Nobody said goodbye. Roy Keane sat in his hotel room and heard them walk outside that morning. He had promoted the idea that football was ruthless, brutal and selfish so why was it a shock when his team-mates didn’t knock on his door or come into his room and offer some consoling words before they left Saipan?
He had promoted the idea that consoling words changed nothing, if anything it was a sign of weakness if you needed them. Not for the first time, not for the last time, there were his standards and his beliefs, and then there was his reality as it existed at this moment. There were his feelings and then there was how he believed things should be.
“I heard them all leaving…I’ve been involved in Ireland since I was 15…and I heard them all leaving. Mick Byrne knocked on the door and said we’re away. I shook his hand and said, ‘Good luck, Mick’. I felt I deserved better than that. I’ve known people in that squad a long time.”
Reality sometimes took him by surprise because he had no idea how things would feel until he felt them.
“Early this morning, we left the hotel quietly,” Niall Quinn wrote in his autobiography about Ireland’s trip from Saipan to Japan in 2002. “I’m not sure that any of us apart from Mick Byrne even knocked and said goodbye this morning. We’re too pissed off with him. It’s too raw.”
The reality at this moment was that he was being left behind as Ireland went to the World Cup. All he wanted was some understanding of his position. All he wanted was some understanding of his plight. He had given up on the idea that they would ever understand him.
He remembered everything, he remembered the details of that day like he seemed to remember the details of every day. He was right on the details, right on so much but never had it seemed so futile, never had being right seemed like such an obstacle to contentment.
Roy Keane sat in his room at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Saipan and set his face to meet the world. The view he would give in the next seven days – no regrets, a man must have his principles – would, with only minor glimpses into a more complex interior (“You can laugh, that was the World Cup”) be his view for all time.
“I have to stand up for what I believe in, I live and die by my actions,” he told Tommie Gorman in 2002 when the nation watched and hoped that a way could be found for Keane to return to the Ireland squad. Keane instead stood up for what he believed in. Whatever it was.
This would, at least, be his public view. There has never been any indication of a more regretful, more considered reflection on events. This was a story about bibs and balls. A story about bumpy pitches, about false accusations and Roy Keane’s principles. He would see the thing through. And he would have to see it through alone.
The Ireland squad walked by Roy Keane’s door in Saipan without saying goodbye, but then he had left when it suited him too. On a Sunday morning in Dublin six months earlier, he had headed back to Manchester after the first leg of a play-off that would decide if Ireland went to the World Cup and he never said goodbye.
Ireland had beaten Iran in Dublin. Keane was nursing an injury and hadn’t played for Manchester United for three weeks. “I’ll talk to the gaffer about it,” Keane told reporters in the mixed zone after the 2-0 win at Lansdowne Road and nobody could be really sure if he was talking about Mick McCarthy.
The following morning he talked to McCarthy and he called his manager, Alex Ferguson and the decision was made. Keane would return to Manchester. When the players got up, he was gone. He hadn’t said goodbye.
By then, Keane had separated himself from the squad, not by choice but it often appeared by necessity.
You & Me & the Bottle Makes 3 Tonight
“When you talk about regrets, maybe I could have been more professional when I was younger. Some of that is nothing to do with being a professional footballer, that’s just being young. What are you going to do? Go home and watch Downton Abbey? You’re going to go out.” – Roy Keane, 2014.
In an interview with the Irish Times in 2010, Keane explained his own drinking. “When I was having my own escapades I hope I was being young and raw and stupid. I went too far sometimes, but my social life in that way had a short life-span. Burned out. The penny dropped a few years ago for a number of reasons. Thank God.”
In his most recent autobiography with Roddy Doyle, he described how a friend called him a “time-bomb” when he was drinking and angry. Then he took away the drink, but the anger often remained.
By then, Keane was describing his decision to give up alcohol as a lifestyle choice, a lifestyle he observed in the foreign players at Manchester United and decided he would like that way of life as well.
“I just gave it up, I’d had enough of it,” he said in 2014. “Particularly when I’d done my cruciate and I wanted to play a little bit longer but ironically the hip held me back anyway. I want to give a lot of credit to the foreign players. They got me thinking, ‘Tell you what, they’ve got it pretty switched on, looking after their bodies’.”
By the time the qualifying campaign came round for the 2002 World Cup, Keane was attempting to change, a change which would become more pronounced over the coming years. He had, he wrote in his first book, decided to bury “Roy the Playboy”.
After Ireland drew with Portugal in 2001, Keane went out with the players. Some recent arrivals in the squad had never seen Keane out. On that night, the Ireland team ended up in Lillie’s Bordello, Keane sang ‘Positively 4th Street’ and Niall Quinn recounts in his autobiography that Peter Reid, who was also among the party, turned to Quinn and said, “Isn’t Roy Keane a great guy?”
Those who had never had a night out with Keane, but knew him as an international team-mate considered him a great guy, some of the time. Keane could talk to you at breakfast and ignore you at lunch. What had happened in the past was no indication of what would happen in the future. Except he remembered all the things.
The nights out became rarer and then didn’t happened at all, a revolutionary change for Keane, as it would be for many people. Keane would describe it only in terms of his lifestyle, as if he had simply decided to eat more broccoli and steamed fish. Yet some would wonder if there was more to it than, say, switching from chips to brown rice, given that he said that drinking was his hobby and Alex Ferguson once threatened to fine any Manchester United player seen drinking with Keane on the night of their Christmas party. Keane had been banned from the function after arguing with a barman at the reserves’ party. Again this would appear to be a central facet of Keane’s existence which he decided to change, not just a lifestyle choice.
In 2002, many of the rest of the Ireland squad had a different lifestyle which heightened their sense of separateness from Keane.
As a result, he was detached from one of the key bonding devices of Ireland players, a device that would be utilised in Saipan. “Roy hasn’t been drinking for some time so we keep it low key about what we have planned for the rest of the evening,” Quinn wrote in his autobiography of the night on the island which had started with a barbecue and ended in the Beefeater bar.
While Keane went to his room, most of the players pushed on until the dawn. Keane had no problem with them doing this, but it may have increased his sense of isolation.
If Keane’s lifestyle no longer included drink, it still contained anger.
It had been an angry trip from the moment the squad departed Dublin Airport and Keane encountered two leprechauns from the Sun.
“We’re getting ready for a World Cup,” he would tell Paul Kimmage. “We’re going to be travelling for over 20 hours. And I’ve got two bloody leprechauns telling me to ‘Cheer up Keano.’ I thought, ‘I’ll f***king knock you out, you stupid c***’.”
He didn’t cheer up. There was so much to be upset about, so much that could cause righteous anger, but Keane was also on the other side of the world, away from family and friends as he prepared for the World Cup while his team-mates first engaged in some traditional bonding routines.
Keane has never sounded like a censorious former drinker – in fact as a manager he sometimes admonished his players for failing to go out – but there have been times when he has expanded on the subject of Ireland and drink in a more interesting way.
“I notice that just about every incident we have had to deal with that is drink-related it is Irish lads,” he said in 2010. “It’s an issue with Irish players. Always.”
It wasn’t an issue in 2002 for those who were enjoying themselves at the right time, who felt that this was what Saipan was for, while Keane thought it was for something else.
The unravelling of that week is now familiar. Having arrived at the weekend to the news that balls, bibs and rehydration drinks were missing, Keane rowed with players at the training ground on the Tuesday. That evening he told McCarthy he was going home, but changed his mind overnight. On the Wednesday he sat down for interviews with Kimmage and Tom Humphries. On Thursday evening, McCarthy decided to deal with things.
“It’s going to go off tonight.” As McCarthy walked into the ballroom of the Hyatt Hotel, Keane muttered these words to the players next to him. The hotel’s entertainer Mario and his band had just finished playing ‘Stand by Me’. McCarthy told Mario and the band to leave the room.
McCarthy was carrying a copy of Keane’s interview in the Irish Times and soon it would go off.
What happened next would be disputed and the legend was printed ahead of the facts, but soon Keane had left the room, left the squad and was out of the World Cup.
This is not an Exit
Despite attempts to get him back, despite the pleas of Tommie Gorman who would cite the peace process to Keane as an example of how people were able to put aside ancient enmities and work together, Keane didn’t go back. The World Cup went on without him, but in the autumn after a defeat in Moscow and at home to Switzerland, Mick McCarthy left the job.
Keane had other problems. In August, he was sent off after he elbowed Jason McAteer during a game between Sunderland and Manchester United at the Stadium of Light. Before the match, Sunderland held a ceremony on the pitch to honour their players who had played in the World Cup. Most of them – Jason McAteer, Niall Quinn, Kevin Kilbane – had been in the ballroom at the Hyatt Hotel. The game was an early reminder that Saipan could not go away and the talk of Roy Keane would continue long after they had left the island.
Keane had a hip operation in September, which diminished his effectiveness. Every season he played after it, he would say later, “I regarded as a bonus.”
He wasn’t the same player, but the FAI wanted him back. When they interviewed people for the job as McCarthy’s successor, one of the questions would be how would they get him back.
When Brian Kerr became manager, Keane returned to Ireland eventually, after his initial plans to return changed following an intervention by Alex Ferguson.
Keane was a changed player and it was possible to believe he was a different man, but if he was more restrained, he was no less certain of his position on the events in Saipan. On Newstalk last week, Kerr recalled how he had suggested to Keane that he may need “to eat a bit of humble pie” with some of the players who had been on the island. Keane replied, “humble pie, me bollocks”.
Keane’s remaining time in an Ireland shirt was uneventful, except for a sign that he was loosening himself from Alex Ferguson’s influence when he travelled to Dublin ahead of a game against Switzerland despite United insisting he was injured.
He missed the final games in that campaign with injury and when Ireland didn’t qualify for the World Cup, he announced his retirement from the international game. The following summer, he retired as a player but there would soon be a reunion of sorts.
SundIreland
When Keane became manager of Sunderland, he gathered his players together and told them that his door would always be open if they wanted to talk. “Nobody went near him,” claims one former player.
If few took him up on this offer, he was quickly demonstrating familiar traits. One day, he would react well to something. Another day, the same set of circumstances could lead to an explosion.
This is a human failing, but makes it harder for a manager who has to inspire players who are never sure what he wants.
Keane’s appointment after Sunderland had been taken over by Drumaville, a consortium of Irish businessmen with Niall Quinn heading the initiative.
“He was one of the most inspiring people you could meet,” Louis Fitzgerald, a Drumaville member said in 2012. “I couldn’t say anything bad about him, he would be as intelligent and perceptive when talking about my business as about football.”
Others found him less inspiring. “Sometimes his manner and certain other things on the training ground would leave you scratching your head and wondering how he got things done,” one player said.
Quinn and Keane had got things done, an early sign that he would make peace when peace was offered.
Keane could also be persuasive when trying to sign a player, and his ability to say the right thing to those who had suffered serious injury ensured that those players never forgot the healing words from those conversations.
But those players who had been persuaded to join would have to reconcile Keane’s words with the reports from other players who spoke of his unpredictability, especially as his career progressed and word went round the small community in football.
“He’s going around booting chairs and throwing things,” the Sunderland defender Clive Clarke told Richie Sadlier in an interview which provided an early insight into Keane’s methods. “He’s never going to give you confidence, he doesn’t talk to lads.”
Keane’s door was open, but once again people were reluctant to knock on that door, but initially there were signs of improvement.
Another player recalled how training improved immediately – “everybody’s work-rate quadrupled”.
If the players believed there would be certain standards and they tried to meet them, the unpredictability became the defining feature with players less cowed by Keane’s anger and more inclined to find it amusing.
In his autobiography, Danny Higginbotham recalled a team-talk before a game against Aston Villa in Keane’s first year in the Premier League.
“Listen lads,” Keane told them. “Basically, you’re shit. Try and enjoy the game. You’re probably going to get beat. But just enjoy being shit.” Sunderland drew the match so the brutal truth may have worked.
During Keane’s first two years in management, it seemed as if anything was possible. Sunderland lost one game in the final five months of his first season. When Keane arrived they had been bottom of the Championship and by May, they were top.
Many believed then that Keane was a less volatile figure, a more rounded personality who was adapting effortlessly to management.
A Man Apart
As Keane became an admired manager, he opened up a new front in his battle with the FAI. In 2007, he talked about encounters with “What’s-his-name, Delaney”, when he had returned to play under Kerr. “There was no acknowledgment from him, I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to him. Can’t remember having a conversation. Nothing had changed. They all deserve each other.”
He was exiled then as Ireland tried to make progress under another former friend, Steve Staunton. If Staunton’s time was comical, Keane’s ended at Sunderland with talk of his dark moods and anger.
When Giovanni Trapattoni was appointed Ireland manager, Keane approved of the methods of the manager in general. When Thierry Henry handled the ball in Paris in 2009, Keane’s frustration with the endless outrage again told of a man refusing to share the fury of a nation.
Ireland should get over it, he said, while referring back to incidents on a Pacific island seven years before. “People forget the last time we were in the World Cup,” he said. Keane hadn’t, of course, as he talked about John Delaney’s failure to contact him back then. “Try my hotel room,” he said, remembering that morning again when nobody had said goodbye, when nobody except Mick Byrne had tried his hotel room. He remembered all the things
The reaction to Henry was the “Usual Irish and FAI reaction.” This was Keane the man who was exiled not just from his national team, but also from the mood of his country.
By then, Keane was at Ipswich where his methods were less effective than they had been at Sunderland.
At Ipswich, the players encountered some of the strange methods that had marked its time at Sunderland. At the Stadium of Light, Keane had once exploded when he heard laughter coming from the treatment room. These were injured players and they should be taking their rehabilitation seriously.
When he moved to Portman Road, he fell out with the captain Jon Walters. “Jon Walters will not play for this club again as long as I am here. He is finished with me,” Keane said.
If Keane had told players his door was always open, it wasn’t helping results. Perhaps it was his countenance which kept them away. At times, as Paul Howard once observed, his face says “Do not Disturb”. And they are the good days. Sometimes it says, “I’m going to knock you out, you c***.”
Keane has joked about this. “My kids always say to me, ‘Are you happy, Dad?’ And I say ‘yeah’ and they say ‘Well, tell your face’.”
In a professional environment, it may be more unwelcoming and not as easy to suggest that Keane tell his face.
In January, 2011 he left the club. There followed a time in the wilderness. Keane was linked with the Iceland job, and there were reports he was going to take over the Turkish side Kasimpasa.
Instead he stayed on the outside, developing his role as a TV pundit, when he could be most cutting when Manchester United were discussed or, as in 2012, Ireland and the failure of its people to strive for the best.
Coming in from the Cold
“In management, you’re depending on some people carrying out, not only your tactics for the day, but your whole plan for the year. And you’re depending on other people. Roy has to depend on people, which has not always been in his nature.” – Martin O’Neill, 2010.
When Martin O’Neill decided that the man he wanted by his side when he took the Ireland job was Keane, it seemed as if there could be insurmountable obstacles. “That man,” was how Keane referred to John Delaney, but the need for an impressive appointment and both men’s ability to move on ensured the past was forgotten.
“We’ve all said things in the past that we probably regret,” Delaney said. “I’ve said things about Roy and he’s said things about me as well. The good news is that we’re ringing each other now.”
Keane was now at peace with the FAI, but there were always battles to be fought. After an incident in the team hotel with a man who wanted Keane to sign a book, he confronted journalists at a subsequent press conference who had wondered if he was becoming a “distraction”.
“Who in the hell do you think you are? I’ve got to answer to you? I answer to the FAI and Martin. And if we don’t get the right results, I’ll be gone and you won’t lose a minute’s sleep, so don’t worry about distractions. The things you write about are distractions.”
A reporter then mentioned the man Frank Gillespie, who had the altercation with him in the hotel, and Keane responded.
“Frank? You know him?”
“Yes.”
“Of course you do. You know him well. You know Mick McCarthy well, don’t you? You know Frank well, don’t you?”
Nobody had mentioned Mick McCarthy, but it seemed everything came back to those times, to the island in the Pacific and all that followed.
O’Neill has praised Keane’s role, especially in the time after the draw last summer against Scotland, but it is O’Neill who has the track record and the proven ability to motivate players. At half-time during the play-off against Bosnia in Zenica, O’Neill is said to have virtually whispered his half-time talk to the players, forcing them to come closer, creating a sense of unity in a hostile environment which is one of his great gifts.
Keane’s gifts as a manager are harder to discern. Harry Arter spoke last week of an inspiring conversation with Keane when he was ruled out of the squad.
On Saturday in Versailles, Keane faced the media again. He joked about his role making tea under O’Neill and turned the question back on journalists who asked if he had a release clause in his new contract which would allow him to leave if a club approached him.
"What's your deal with them? Do they pay you good money?" 😰 https://t.co/rcT30mSdhw
— SportsJOE (@SportsJOEdotie) June 11, 2016
“How long have you got?” he said when he was asked if there were many differences between Ireland’s base in Saipan and their facilities in France.
Sometimes it feels as if nothing has changed. When the players read his interview with the Irish Times in 2002, it brought home a reality to them. They had wondered what Keane thought of him as he kept his distance. Then they saw the truth on the page. “He thinks we’re shit,” Jason McAteer said.
Perhaps the players who read his comments in Cork had the same reaction, the same unwelcome confrontation with Keane’s opinions and the truth as he sees it.
Keane may well have been right, as he may have been right about bibs and balls, rehydration drinks and accusations of injury in Saipan but it doesn’t mean he should say it and it doesn’t mean it helps.
Maybe he feel he has no other option. In that sense too, perhaps nothing has changed. He must return always to himself and his instincts. Despite his place as part of Ireland’s management team, he will always be a man alone, a man apart and a man who feels he has no choice but to see the thing through.
Brought to you by Three. #MakeHistory
