Saipan II? No, this is a different Roy Keane
But he still demands the highest standards from all Keane’s reflections on defeat to Belarus were both clear and unarguable
SAIPAN is the shameful secret threatening to burst and poison another Irish summer. That view is not the product of rational analysis, but the prophecy screamed by those who believe Roy Keane is a threat to national prosperity.
Fourteen years after the most famous story in the history of Irish sport, Keane’s critics wonder, not at all silently, if his return to a squad environment will set old, explosive impulses burning once again.
It is a trite suggestion, but Keane is a figure of whom the most improbable predictions can be made. Throughout his professional playing life, he was caricatured in much of the English media as a foaming lunatic, a modern type of the wild Irishman that has recurred in depictions of this country over there.
His first autobiography, while flawed, was a more intelligent effort at a soccer life story than most of the risible product pulped out for the market. But it became a sensation because of his account of a hideous tackle on Alf-Inge Haaland.
His second life story was often funny and a credible attempt at analysing the end of his playing career and the start of his management one, but his fury at Alex Ferguson blazed across the headlines.
Given the particular potency of Keane’s rage, that is no surprise; when he attacks a target, the victim is usually reduced to a cindered ruin. Ask Aiden McGeady.
But as with this week’s comments, and many of his previous interjections, the method of delivery too often obscures the truth of the messages themselves. Keane speaks plenty of sense, and his reflections on Ireland’s sorry-looking defeat to Belarus were clear and unarguable.
They also signalled the importance of Keane to Ireland over the next month: he has now registered the standards expected of the players in France. There is no ambiguity about what will be demanded of the team − as McGeady could testify.
Keane appears a very different man to the figure that was consumed by anger in Saipan. Re-reading the interview with The Irish Times that triggered the team meeting that begot the final, flaming row between himself and Mick McCarthy, the restless fury of the player becomes immediately apparent.
He did not want to be on a remote island for a week of planned relaxation. His unhappiness with the predictable stuff-ups in planning and facilities burned through his words, but so did his desperate desire to play in the World Cup.
At that point he was staying and playing, but in the end the tension between what infuriated him and what he could tolerate broke. Some of the fall-out smoulders still.
The suggestion that a return to the confines of tournament living could cause old failings to stir within Keane only makes sense if you believe he is the man he was in 2002 − and he is not. The pressures exerted by Manchester United on one of their most important players about playing internationally are gone.
The awful relationship with a manager is no more. Keane even acknowledges improvements in how the FAI conducts some of its business. Circumstances have changed but so has he.
THE man whose attack on McCarthy almost blistered the paint on a Saipan hotel room does not wield his anger like a flame-thrower now. He has suggested that some of what he said on Wednesday about the players who played poorly against Belarus was tongue-incheek, but his original views required no softening.
He was correct about the display and about McGeady, too. The latter’s career so far has been played out in the space between potential and unfulfilled expectation.
We spend our lives listening to sportspeople offer opinions that are scrubbed completely free of candour and insight. Then when an individual has the courage to say what they think, that honesty is treated like a wailing alarm, warning of an imminent eruption of Saipan proportions.
Keane has had bad days as assistant to Martin O’Neill, and the decision to conduct publicity for his last autobiography when Ireland were preparing for World Cup qualifiers against Gibraltar and away to Germany was poorly conceived.
Some wondered if O’Neill knew just how important a figure Keane was in Irish life when he appointed him as his assistant; everything he says is news in this country.
So it was again following his comments in Cork, but the wisdom of O’Neill’s decision has been borne out over the past 12 months. International managers have little time to spend with players, so skillsbased training and even serious tactical work is not possible.
O’Neill is famed more for his ability to engender good morale than dazzle opponents with his gameplans, and Keane’s value in protecting the standards that made him great as a player and that he has maintained into coaching, is obvious within that set-up.
He is probably the greatest Irish player of all time, his reputation so large that even emerging stars who were little more than toddlers at the time of Saipan, know what he stood for.
His critics maintain that Saipan exposed the real Keane, and perhaps it did. And maybe this week we saw that the essence of the man remains undiluted by the passing years.
Only the best remains good enough for him.
Just ask Aiden McGeady.