For someone so hateful of football’s politicians and “bluffers”, Roy Keane knows how to work a room. He called his weekly press conference for the typically unrelenting time of 8.45am and had reporters breakfasting from the palm of his hand.

For northeast journalists there were tart observations about Sam Allardyce’s sacking by Newcastle (“Contracts mean nothing in football. Perhaps we should get rid of contracts”), for the Irish press some great lines about the FAI (“just watch them . . . it’s better than Big Brother”). For general ears there were some caustic put-downs of Clive Clarke, the Sunderland reserve who claimed that Keane doesn’t speak to his players but instead goes round “booting chairs and throwing things”. Said Keane: “I’ve never thrown a chair. [Dramatic pause]. Now, chairs . . . ”

Nobody mentioned the elephant in the press room, the one with the league table tattooed across its massive flank and its trunk making the shape of a noose. No hard questions were asked about 21 games in which Sunderland have been defeated 15 times and ejected from two cups. It was straight from the Sir Alex Ferguson manual, rule 17. In difficult times, make yourself the story and take the focus off the team.

“Supporters are prepared to be patient with Roy Keane because everyone knows we’ve got a potentially brilliant manager on our hands,” said Martin McFadden, editor of the Sunderland fanzine, A Love Supreme. “He was seen as Jesus Christ mixed with Che Guevara last season and is one of the few managers who takes 100% responsibility.”

Yet as Keane acknowledged after last week’s FA Cup calamity against Wigan, there is a limit to any credit line and the one he built up because of Sunderland’s extraordinary promotion is close to running out seven months on. It has come down to an examination, the sort no young boss, whatever their gifts, can avoid; a pivotal point such as the one Ferguson reached when asked to prove himself after being sacked by St Mirren. Sunderland have 17 games to save themselves and must start winning ones such as against Portsmouth at home today. The biggest cheer of the afternoon at the Stadium of Light is likely to be reserved for Portsmouth boss Harry Redknapp, who turned down the chance to manage Newcastle yesterday, but then the home crowd will demand their team do their utmost to make Redknapp regret his decision.

Keane, however, will be concentrating on his own job. Of what, as a manager, is he made? Like a challenge by Alf-Inge Haaland, he saw it coming. “It’s a test for me,” he said. “I’ve only been a manager two minutes and if I thought for a second I was going to go through a career of 20 to 30 years without having tests . . . I think what gauges you is how you deal with these so-called tests. And I’m very comfortable about that.”

Keane talked about his young defender, Paul McShane, whose form has wavered but who “doesn’t go hiding”, and said something he would hope applies to himself: “You’ve got to step up to the plate and accept the disappointments. I always think of Babe Ruth. People go on about all his home runs but he said he had more strike-outs than anybody in the history of baseball. He wasn’t afraid of disappointment. He stood up.”

It was a different Keane from the one so despondent following last Saturday’s defeat by Wigan’s second string that made him “question everything . . . clearly I’m not doing my job”. For Keane-watchers, aware it is in his character to be not so much self-critical as self-lacerating, it raised the possibility of him being prepared to resign if things don’t improve. “I’ve not thought about that,” he said. “I signed a three-year contract and I hope to honour that and I hope the club will honour that. And I’m pretty sure that after those three years the club will be in a stronger position than it was. You look at the league table at the moment, but you’ve got to try and see beyond that to where we’re going.”

Keane admitted it took him until Thursday to get over Wigan. Therapy was a cold night watching Sunderland win 6-1 over the misleadingly named Norton & Stockton Ancients in a youth fixture. “I enjoyed the game, we’ve got some good players coming through, players coming back from injury, and we’re hoping to add a few,” he said.

This is the guy who, when he won manager of the month last season, declared himself “irritated” by the award and pledged to “stick it in the garage”. Keane continued: “Last year I wasn’t jumping off the roof when we got promoted, I wasn’t drunk, I wasn’t dancing in the streets. I was at home walking the dog. And I said, ‘Listen, this is where the test starts’. My gut feeling was we were going to have a tough season but at the end of it a good season, and that’s not wavered. We’ve brought players in and it’s been a big test for them but I’ve still got faith they’ll come through it with flying colours.”

Steve Gibson, the Middlesbrough chairman, observed that the most important thing for any manager to be good at is “recruitment”. Keane transformed Sunderland with good signings in the Championship but does not appear to have got much for the £36m he spent while acquiring 11 players last summer. There is some criticism that the 14 signings he has made for Sunderland were people he played with for Manchester United, Celtic or the Republic of Ireland, but this is a first-time manager who arrived to find his club did not have a chief scout, or a single scout abroad, shortfalls he has worked hard to rectify.

“In an ideal situation we wouldn’t have brought in so many, but we had to,” he said. “We might bring in three or four in this window then in the summer one or two.”

Having passed on Robbie Savage, his targets, such as Reading’s Stephen Hunt, are young and hungry but experienced in the Premier League. “I could have signed 20 players last week and pleased the fans for that afternoon but none were players I wanted,” said Keane. He is not in football to make anybody happy — though he can’t help pleasing journalists.