Duff view of Keane’s bad-cop influence carries warning for

ANY tendency to believe that Damien Duff ’s attack on the style and domineering personality of Roy Keane carries a touch of envy – or at least the regrets of a former star now operating in the shadows – should be resisted, at least for the moment.

The most compelling reason is that Duff, whatever his motives, is expressing what some meeker spirits might consider the unsayable.

It is that Keane may indeed be the wrong man in the wrong place at this delicate stage of the making of a new Irish team.

There is a theory that in any highly competitive business, and not least professional team sport, the combination of good cop/bad cop makes for effective leadership.

But does the partnership of Martin O’Neill, who can be as sharply acerbic as any man in football when his blood is up, and Roy Keane really make sense at a time when young players are battling to find their nerve at the highest level.

What Duff is saying, with a mass of rather more than circumstantial evidence, is that Keane is misplaced around young men who will probably never exude the levels of self-belief – some might say arrogance – which seems to have filled his veins since his days as an unproven stripling in Cork.

This, as Duff (right, above) readily concedes, helped to make Keane one of the world’s best players – he rated him the number one midfielder at the time of his explosive departure from the Irish squad in Saipan.

But then he is candid about the bullying force Keane (right, below) exerted on the younger players in that 2002 World Cup.

Most intriguing was Duff’s response to the possibility that Keane’s presence in the Far East might have powered Ireland to the final rather than the defeat in round of 16 by Spain. Maybe, maybe not.

It was certainly true that Keane, while carrying an injury, was a magnificent force on the field when Ireland upset Holland in the World Cup qualifier.

But then with the authority came the imbalance, and it is idle not to consider the evidence of a distinguished player who believed in himself quite enough to challenge some of the pet theories of Jose Mourinho when the Special One was at the peak of his powers at Chelsea. Duff says, persuasively, that while Keane gave of himself enormously on the field – Bobby Charlton, no less, claims to have in been awe of his commitment – but that he also took from others.

He had one view of events on the field, undeflected, unchallenged in his own mind.

There are such stories told around Manchester United, where Alex Ferguson sadly decided that his most consistently effective player, the man who almost single-handedly carried the great manager to his first