Roy being in the mix shows how badly this hunt has gone
PUNDITRY shrinks Roy Keane to a two-dimensional figure, providing entertainment for audiences and receiving a handsome wage in return. The complexities that have made Keane one of the most interesting figures in Irish life are smoothed away for the studio.
The only indications of the bright, alert mind behind the stereotype are occasional bursts of caustic wit, but otherwise he emits headline salvos like comparing the ‘general play’ of Erling Haaland to a League Two player.
It was a ludicrous comment, and Pep Guardiola duly bit back with an indirect reference to Keane’s levels as a manager. The clips go viral, the hits rack up, Sky Sports are delighted and Keane has played his part. There is a section of the audience who dream of Keane bringing that star quality, sulphurous as it is, to the national team.
The obvious, insurmountable problem with that is history – and it records that, as in punditry, management reduces Keane to a two-dimensional husk.
That is reason enough why he shouldn’t be near consideration as a successor to Stephen Kenny.
‘It’s like if I said, “He (Keane) is a manager for the second or third league – I don’t think so”,’ said Guardiola of Keane in defending Haaland.
It was a pointed if rhetorical exchange, and the Man City manager was correct. On the available evidence, Keane is a second or third-rate manager.
It’s been 16 years since his last significant managerial success, in keeping Sunderland in the Premier League.
The season before still stands as the highlight, when he inspired the club out of the relegation places in August to win automatic promotion from the Championship by the following April.
His 20 months at Ipswich, a dismal time that provided gripping copy for his second autobiography, ended in January 2011.
There ends the managerial record of Keane. Five years assisting Martin O’Neill with Ireland should constitute the most persuasive part of any case he has to take the job outright on this occasion.
But it was a fraught time, punctuated by controversies involving the assistant and ending in bitter disputes between Keane and two players, Jon Walters and Harry
Arter.
The aftermath of those rows was distasteful, too, and simply by revisiting those miserable episodes, the absence of any compelling argument for Keane to
‘IT’S 16 YEARS SINCE HIS LAST SIGNIFICANT MANAGERIAL SUCCESS’
become the next Ireland manager yawns before us, as vast and empty as deep space.
That the FAI spoke to Keane on several occasions, as exclusively revealed in these pages, can be taken as nothing other than a wailing alarm.
The process that executives insisted was progressing agreeably now seems chaotic, with energetically promoted claims that Gus Poyet was offered the job, further signals of a search in deep distress.
‘We’ve narrowed the process well,’ FAI president Paul Cooke said last week. ‘It will be revealed in April.’
That nobody appears to have any idea who might get the job now seems less the result of a deliberate strategy and more because there is no strategy.
It could still be Poyet, or maybe John O’Shea, or perhaps there is some deep-thinking Austrian wunderkind in tight pants and large white runners who we’ve never heard of, but who is doing daring work with limited resources, and who wants the exposure provided by managing even a struggling international side.
Despite all of this confusion, it still feels sure that Keane will not get the job.
Subject his record to rational analysis and he shouldn’t be anywhere near it.
Every so often you’ll hear in this country someone claiming that Michael O’Leary should be the Taoiseach. It’s not so much his phenomenal success that appeals to this constituency, but rather the impression he conveys that his work at Ryanair is the result of plain-talking and an aversion to bluffers.
That’s enough for a certain caste of his admirers, just as there are some won over by Keane’s profile and the undoubted lures his history and personality would provide.
But as Kenny found out, and as even his most dogged admirers now concede, competitive sport is about results. They are the unavoidable reckoning which every manager must eventually confront.
By that measure, Roy Keane shouldn’t be a contender.
That he might be betrays a search gone badly awry.