It’s time to walk away, Roy: you have nothing to prove to anyone
THE four greatest Irish footballers were John Giles, Liam Brady, Paul McGrath, and Roy Keane. You might rank them in order, but most of us would agree that these are the four really worldclass players we’ve had.
We would also note with a certain unease that there was a continuity until the time of Keane, that at any point between the early 1960s and the retirement of Keane in 2005, we always had at least one great player — and these days you don’t really need much more than one of them, to do well in international football.
But that gap which has formed is wider still, when you consider that Giles himself has stated that if he was in a battle to win a match to save his life, and he had to choose one player to be by his side, he would want Roy Keane there.
So you’d miss Roy Keane on the park, and maybe in his strange career at various levels of management, Keane is just missing himself. Certainly unlike Giles or Brady, his achievements as a player do not seem to have brought him the kind of satisfaction they should have done — the peace that comes from the knowledge that they made the most of the gifts that they had, that they “left nothing out there”.
Paul McGrath too has found that peace elusive for reasons outside of football, and Keane still exudes this sense of profound discontent, still having “altercations” after all these years.
Clearly he has failed at whatever he was doing for the last five years with the Republic, but that shouldn’t matter much. When you have John Giles saying that in a match to save his life he would want you by his side, you have already succeeded in life beyond the wildest dreams of the overwhelming majority of the human race.
So when Matt Doherty told RTE Sport that he and other players couldn’t quite figure out what Roy was doing there (nor could they figure out at times what Martin was doing there) there could be a simple explanation: in football, Roy’s work is already done.
And it was tremendous work, and it would be even more tremendous if he was able to look back on it with the pleasure that other men might derive from such a singular career.
It’s time to walk away Roy — you know you can do it.
‘Keane still exudes this sense of profound discontent’