ROY KEANE LOOKS highly unlikely to be the next Ireland manager, a decision which would mark another great contribution to the game from the FAI.
How could Irish football take Keane away from his weekly appearances on Stick to Football?
The podcast is Gary Neville’s latest mega-success, consistently hanging around the top of the charts while never dipping below a million YouTube views per episode. Neville, Jamie Carragher, Jill Scott, and Ian Wright all deliver the comedy and insight you’d want, but the star is Keane.
He’s hilarious, of course: Keane is a ringer for Tommy Tiernan but his comic timing is arguably better. His perspective in management has proved highly valuable, grounding the discussions of managers and recruitment strategies in realism. Guardiola, as Keane points out, is alone in being able to work in his ideal environment: everyone else is scrabbling around and making do with whatever they can get in a berserk world.
The format also always Keane escape from the strictures of TV punditry, where he has largely played a role as an exquisitely unimpressed enforcer who alternates between death-stares and eye-rolls.
He still indulges in some self-parody, and it was difficult to know the point at which Keane ended and Larry David began when he claimed the three most overrated things in life are “parties, smiling and fireworks.”
And he hasn’t abandoned all of his old hang-ups either. When he was peppering Jaap Stam as to whether he felt wronged by Alex Ferguson in his endgame at United, it felt like there was a bit of projection going on.
But beyond all of this, there is something very enjoyable to see Keane…enjoying himself so much.
Think of all of Keane’s greatest moments as a player. They were always framed as standing in defiance of something; exhibitions of raw single-mindedness in the face of adversity of some kind. (We praised these qualities so much we forgot to celebrate Keane’s technical quality.)
Plus, Irish fans won’t need to be reminded that Keane the player seemed to be perpetually chafing at his environments, be it at cheese sandwiches or the surface of the training pitch.
But now, in the third act of his career, Keane is in a fundamentally warm environment. The soft lighting, the pastries, Ian Wright: how could anyone bridle against spending a couple of hours a week here?
Previously, the notion that Keane might be seen to actually enjoy his playing career was a forbidden thing, it was all a straight-faced and strait-laced exercise in – to quote the man himself – doing his job.
This wasn’t restricted to Keane, as it was indicative of Irish and British attitudes to professionalism in the 1990s and 2000s. Ronan O’Gara and Paul O’Connell have spoken about this before: you weren’t deemed to be doing it right if your pre-game disposition was anything but the stuff of queasy, furrowed-brow anxiety. If you hated every minute of it – you were a good pro.
The unflinching, occasionally cruel person Keane came across as a player and manager never felt like a true reflection of him, as it was entirely at odds with the many stories of private benevolence that leaked into the public domain despite his best efforts.
That stony exterior always felt like an assumed character, as if Keane calculated that the best way to respond to a cold and brutal sport was to take on precisely those characteristics.
This part of Keane has always reminded me of Dickens’ description of Scrooge as someone who “feared the world too much”, to the point that all his hopes “merged into the hope of being beyond its sordid reproach.”
But the truth is the Keane who lunged on Alfie Haaland and made crass jokes about Clive Clarke is not the whole of Keane. We have reduced him to an object of our fanaticism and fascination, but in fact he’s just as varied and inconsistent as the rest of us. He is capable of flashes of anger and self-interest but he is also a man of great warmth and decency. It was there in his solicitous advice to Gary Neville to slow down for the sake of his health, in his singing of Jaap Stam’s song, in his positivity to Wayne Rooney on his managerial ambitions.
Keane’s books have been criticised for their superficiality, for failing to reveal some true version of Keane that lurks beneath the brooding surface. Maybe there’s truth to that, maybe there’s not.
But Stick to Football is giving us a more rounded insight into Keane than we have ever had before. Long may it last.