IT’S BONKERS
McCarthy says Keane hogging Irish limelight
MICK McCARTHY has launched a stunning critique of the current Republic of Ireland management team and declared the ‘bonkers’ set-up as ‘Roy Keane’s Ireland’. The former Ireland boss (below) believes the amount of attention Keane receives is astonishing and he reckons manager Martin O’Neill shouldn’t have to clean up the mess caused by his No2. Keane has come under the spotlight once again in recent weeks following Harry Arter’s decision to make himself unavailable for selection after a row with the Cork man. ‘Me and Roy have had our issues, of course, but I’m not in there with him, I don’t see what’s going on. It’s like Roy Keane’s Ireland. It’s bonkers, in my view. He should be
assistant to Martin O’Neill. It shouldn’t be Martin having to mop up anything else that’s going on. ‘Roy is the only assistant manager in the whole world who gets this much publicity, nobody else,’ McCarthy told Paddy Power News. And the 59-year-old reopened the Saipan debate, as he revealed during the pre-2002 World Cup trip there was always intended as ‘a p***-up’ prior to the real training camp. McCarthy also confirmed that he held talks with then Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson after sending Keane (right) back home, and feels the team would not have got out of the group had the captain remained with the squad. ‘There was some suggestion, that Roy made, that I couldn’t manage the team or players. I’d managed him for five years. I f ****** spun his plate, I kept him going. “Roy, don’t come in on Monday. We played Saturday, you come in Tuesday”, so he’d come in on the Tuesday and then just go home. I don’t think he particularly liked being in. ‘I’m not going to put blame on people, everybody has made their mind up, rightly or wrongly, I think it fluctuates. Having sent him home, I offered the olive branch and asked him to come back, and he refused,’ McCarthy continued. ‘Having had him in the frame of mind that Roy appeared to be at the World Cup, we wouldn’t have got out of the group, no chance. I had this discussion with Alex, I called him up because I always had a good relationship with him, and I wanted to maintain that, because I thought at the time the way the Manchester United machine moved, along with a lot of other people, would be to try to seriously discredit me because of what I’d done and my part in it. ‘Alex said to me: “You would’ve got to the semi-final if Roy had been there”. I said; “We wouldn’t have got out of the group, we’d have been coming out after three games”. That is what I believe, we’d have been coming home and I would’ve been on my holidays a lot sooner.’