February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
“He [Keane] won’t come back,” McCarthy said in an interview last weekend. “Not while I’m manager. He knows it’s not possible and so do I.” McCarthy sent Keane home from Ireland’s pre-World Cup training camp in Saipan following a blazing row between player and manager. McCarthy confirmed that Keane called him a “crap player, a crap manager and a crap coach,” although the word ‘crap’ can certainly be replaced with something a little stronger.
“I still can’t believe it happened,” McCarthy added. “It wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted everything to be right. But I do say this: There was only one person who deprived Ireland of Roy Keane’s services and that person was Roy Keane. . . . Ask me if I’d handle things the same way again and I’d have to say yes. Exactly the same. I’ve got no regrets on that score, none at all.”
McCarthy shed some more light on the Keane saga in an interview to coincide with the publication of the first extract from his “World Cup Diary.” Keane says in his own book that he was furious when McCarthy accused him of feigning injury in order to miss the second leg of Ireland’s vital playoff against Iran in Tehran. Keane has insisted that McCarthy had come to an agreement about his non-participation with Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson, for who McCarthy plays professionally.
However, McCarthy has put a different complexion on the story by insisting that Keane had told him he intended to travel to Tehran but then returned to Manchester before the squad departed without informing McCarthy.
“I ask him why he missed the biggest game of all our international careers to date,” writes McCarthy in his diary, “why he pulled out of the trip to Iran on the Sunday morning, just hours after telling me he was going. That is the final straw. He shouts at me about ‘your deal with the gaffer’ [Alex Ferguson]. I ask him did he tell me on Saturday night that he was going to Iran. He ignores the question and goes on about the deal with the gaffer again.
“He rants on for about eight minutes. I am every expletive imaginable. . . . He has no respect for me at all, as a manager or as a player. He only has respect for Alex Ferguson. He bizarrely claims I don’t want him in the squad.”
McCarthy’s diary will be on sale in shops in Ireland after next week’s European Championship qualifying game against Switzerland in Dublin.