The great Roy Keane myth states that he is not off his head at all. He just has higher standards than everybody else. It is a myth that was exploded when two things happened on the same day last week. The first was that Keane walked out as manager of Sunderland. The second is that Mick McCarthy won the Coca-Cola Championship Manager of the Month award.

This should not have happened. McCarthy is a crap manager - at least, that was Keane's description. McCarthy was manager when Keane left the Ireland squad on the eve of the World Cup finals in 2002. Keane told McCarthy in front of the full squad that he didn't rate him as a man or a manager and then went back to Cheshire to walk the legs off his poor old dog, Triggs.

So if it's all about Keane's dauntingly high standards, McCarthy should be a failure. Not a bit of it. He is at present managing Wolverhampton Wanderers, a runaway success this season. In truth, he wasn't even a failure in that World Cup; his Ireland team qualified unbeaten from the group stages before losing to Spain on penalties in the last 16.

So it is not that Keane's standards are so admirably high. Rather, it's that his judgment is poor. Another example: in his very readable autobiography, he makes many other judgments. The most extraordinary of these is his one-word assessment of Peter Schmeichel. A poser.

Not a great goalkeeper, but perhaps a trifle inclined to self-admiration. Not the man behind Manchester United's famous treble of 1999. Not the man who played his part in the Champions League final while Keane was suspended after another of his serial bouts of indiscipline. No, a poser. That is the beginning and the end of what Keane has to say about the greatest player of a genuinely great team.

That is not a question of incalculably lofty standards. That's just plain wrong. It becomes clear that Keane is not, after all, a man looking for players who can line up alongside himself in excellence. Instead, we see a man who only values in others the qualities he possesses in himself. In short, it comes down to self-admiration.

The errors Keane made as Sunderland manager can be reduced to an inability to appreciate the biodiversity of footballing types. He quickly lost patience with players who were insufficiently like him. It followed, then, that the players he scorned lost patience with their manager. Keane was expected to be a great manager, after playing for years under Brian Clough and Sir Alex Ferguson. But Clough didn't insist on all his players being impossible mavericks, Ferguson doesn't insist on all his players being ill-tempered egomaniacs.

Keane lacked a breadth of understanding of football and of footballers. That's why, in the end, despite a promising start, he showed himself to be a crap manager.

Honda’s move could lead to new era of real competition

Who’s next? Honda has dropped out of Formula One because it reckons there are better things it can do with its money. Suddenly, a sport that defines itself by means of wealth is pleading poverty. If Honda thinks it is more important to make and sell motor cars for visiting grandpa than it is to play Scalextric, then other manufacturers won’t be far behind.

Formula One has two audiences, and it needs both. It has its heartland of petrolheads who get terribly excited about suspension systems and ultra-light wheel nuts. For these people, the end of fantasy car-building based on fantasy economics will be a blow.

But the second audience, and the larger one, is interested in the competition between men.

We are not interested in the question of who has the best gearbox; instead, we are taken up with the question of who has the biggest cojones.

That’s why we love the sport best when it rains, because the race is not won by the best car but by the best and bravest driver. As high-octane finance evaporates from the sport, so the worldwide, grid-long need for economy will bring about some kind of levelling off in the performance levels of the machine.

This retreat from mechanical excellence will lead to parity of competition, a bad thing for petrolheads but a good thing for the rest of us. It will give us a far more vivid understanding of the nature of the man who wins. Formula One can relax with the notion that recession is good for you.

Why Adlington deserves another gong this year

Strange how in a changing sporting universe, in which sporting television changes with such bewildering rapidity that many serious football fans have found themselves missing matches because they don’t know which channel they’re on, the BBC Sports Personality of the Year remains a constant in the sporting life.

It remains an award that for some reason really matters, for all that it is capricious, sometimes bewilderingly unfair, and frequently represents Britain’s traditional soft spot for plucky losers: David Steele, David Beckham, Michael Owen, Damon Hill, Greg Rusedski, Paul Gascoigne.

This year we are spoilt for choice with winners, so here is my choice. Not Lewis Hamilton, for all that he has given us great fun; not even Chris Hoy for his three gold medals and his brilliance. I’m going for Rebecca Adlington.

I was there at the Water Cube in Beijing when she won her first gold medal. In fact, I was sitting one seat away from the last British female swimmer who won Olympic gold. Anita Lonsbrough won hers in 1960. After a 48-year gap, Adlington saw her moment and seized it with glorious delight. She then won another gold to show it was no fluke.

It was the stand-out British achievement of an unforgettable Olympic Games. So here’s your choice: you can vote for someone who is about to become a billionaire and who was the first Briton to win the drivers’ World Championship for 12 years.

Or, you can vote for a woman who, aged 19 and paid £12,000 a year, ended a drought that had lasted for all but half a century. It’s a no-brainer.

- “All right. You’ve won the World Cup once. Now go and win it again. Look at the Germans. They’re flat out. Down on the grass. They can’t live with you. Not for another half-hour. Not through extra time.” Words of Sir Alf Ramsey to the England team after 90 minutes at the World Cup final of 1966, lifted from the beautifully compiled Don’t Mention The Score: A Masochist’s History of the England Football Team by Simon Briggs.

- More on the madness in modern pentathlon, in which the running and the shooting are now to be combined in a single absurd event. A competition-standard air pistol costs almost a grand and it deteriorates if it gets even slightly damp. How do you fancy leaving your gun out in the rain while you work at your shoot-run skills in practice or in competition? A further question: is it such a good idea to have young mod-penners – and the sport exists at under11 level – blazing away out of doors?