Cut Roy Keane some slack

Seeing the deposed world darts champion’s faded signature in Auntie’s Bar in the Cork village of Tower kind of paled next to the sight of Dunne’s Stores flogging Manchester United baseball caps containing the initials of David Beckham on the front. Picking up this ludicrous item in an enormous display full of the same, I could only conclude that we are more of a British colony now than we ever were before.
That little cameo came to mind more than once when considering what looks like being the final chapter in Roy Keane’s international career. Notwithstanding the fact that Manchester United have been an enjoyable satellite of Irish sporting life since Belfast winger Jack Piden first togged off for Newton Heath more than a century ago, this relationship has grown grotesquely out of all proportion. What else is there to think when we are buying merchandise specifically celebrating the English captain and filling the coffers of a club whose manager has been quite open about his desire for our best player to never again wear the Irish jersey? Just because we can see manager Alex Ferguson’s point of view regarding Keane’s long-term fitness shouldn’t mean we have to accept it.
And so, Keane’s turbulent affair with Ireland ends, pretty much as it begun, with one rejecting the other. Sixteen years ago, he attended a trial game in Dublin designed to identify the 18 best Under-15 players in the country. Immediately afterward, the manager of the team told him that he wouldn’t be making the cut because he was too small. The disappointment enveloped him as he slumped into the backseat and was driven the 160 miles home to Cork. Other boys with no prospects in their lives but soccer would have had their spirit broken by this sort of incident; Keane only became inspired by it. An overwhelming desire to prove people wrong is at least part of the reason he became so good and any amateur psychologist would venture that he always carried some lingering resentment of the international set-up with him from his youth.
“I live over here in England now,” Keane said in an interview in The Sunday Times last weekend. He also admitted he will need a replacement hip by the age of 45. “And people may wonder why I don’t probably intend to go back,” he said. “Well, it is the way things are over there. They are quite happy to knock people. Being honest, I feel really let down by what has happened in Ireland. I was angry for two days. I’ve cooled off a bit, but there’s a lot of negative things over there. People need to remember the bloody good things [that happened] when I played for Ireland. The last few days have been a pretty sad state of affairs.”
After one Irish tabloid printed the headline “Betrayed” over a story about Keane at a time when the world is on the brink of war, we know that, as has been the case for nearly a decade, everything to do with the finest Irish footballer of his generation is being exaggerated. Nobody has been betrayed here. Keane was our best player in almost every competitive international he played — Paul McGrath’s performance against the Italians at Giants Stadium in the 1994 World Cup is the only day we remember him being eclipsed by a teammate. He was our best performer at that tournament and the sole reason we even qualified for last summer’s World Cup. These are not opinions, just facts.
Unfortunately, there were a couple of years in the mid-1990s when he missed crucial Ireland games because, even then, his all-action style was causing him to suffer recurring injuries. On more than one occasion, he sat out a Wednesday international but was subsequently deemed fit to tog out for Manchester United 72 hours later. A few moronic journalists started to question his commitment to the cause around that point, these idiots choosing to ignore one obvious facet of the story. Keane missed internationals because United decided he was unable to play. They pay his wages, they decide on his fitness. Nothing personal. Just business.
Being the most important player at the biggest club in the world comes with a huge mental and physical price, the sort that militates against somebody enjoying a 20-year professional career. The Corkman has put his body through the mill and continues to wrestle with personal demons like alcohol. It isn’t hard to imagine him walking away from the game entirely sometime in the next couple of years, no longer able to cope with the intensity his own approach to every battle demands.
The saddest element of Keane’s departure now though is that Saipan cost him his last chance of playing in a World Cup at somewhere close to his peak. He was right about the laxity of Ireland’s approach but wrong to deprive himself of his own day on the biggest stage. Again, recent revelations about the extent of his hip problem then have lent some credence to a conspiracy theory that maybe his unhappiness had its root in his own fear of failure. When a man has spent his entire career living up to the incredibly lofty standards he set himself, there is a chance he knew that this time round his body would not hold up as he would have wanted.
“Keane is a great soccer player,” said the legendary Juventus and Holland midfielder Edgar Davids in an interview last weekend. “He is one of the best midfielders in the world. Keane is what a great player really is. I don’t look up to him, because I don’t look up to anybody, but he’s fantastic.”
After all is said and done, that is what his peers in the game think of him. For services rendered to Ireland, we should think nothing less.