THREE days after the announcement that he had left the club, Roy Keane's extraordinary relationship with his Sunderland board and players can be revealed.

One club director has told this newspaper that the manager and the chairman, Keane’s former Ireland teammate Niall Quinn, spoke only through text messages. The pair fell out in 2002 when Keane, in his dispute with Mick McCarthy, then Ireland’s manager, felt betrayed by Quinn. If their daily work meant communication could not be served effectively by text messaging, they used the club secretary, Margaret Byrne, as the go-between. “Mags” achieved the impressive feat of being well liked by both men.

Quinn has done much to paint a picture of relative harmony at the club and has emphasised how much Sunderland have benefited from Keane’s management. Even last month, they had offered him a new two-year contract, which he refu-used to sign. What he did not say is that under Keane’s management, Quinn was not welcome in the dressing room or on the team coach.

Some Sunderland directors believed Keane needed a mentor, somebody on his side but with the authority and seniority to challenge when he needed to be challenged and support him when it was right to support him. But estranged from his chairman and not interested in forging bonds with board members, he was too often alone.

Keane could draw little comfort from his relationships with the players. In the later years of his playing career, he railed against the sense of entitlement of the modern professional. Some of his players wore gloves, bobble hats and even scarves at training, another would walk onto the training ground with ear-phones in place and Keane wondered what football was coming to.

But he has long known and couldn’t have imagined it would be any different. That didn’t make it any easier to accept or make his first managerial journey any more fun.

One day, someone at the club asked him if he ever laughed. “Laugh?” he said, “I’m a Premier League manager.” But, away from the text messaging and the hair-gelled superstars, there will be the challenge of living without the game that has been his life’s passion. That might not be much fun, either.