“It’s something I’ve got to try. I keep asking myself, ‘Do you want to get
back on that roller-coaster?’ I think I would be a good manager. But I’m
sure if you ask any manager in the world, he would tell you he thinks he is
going to be a good manager when he’s going down that road. But very few are,
it’s a tough bloody life. If you think being a player was hard, a manager is
a hundred times worse.” - Roy Keane, two weeks before becoming manager
of Sunderland
In the end, it is the details that fascinate us. Did Roy Keane really inform
his Sunderland chairman by text message that he was resigning as manager?
Did he leave without saying goodbye to his players and staff? Could it
really be that he deliberately chose to go two days before yesterday’s match
against his old club at Old Trafford? More fundamentally, was the game no
longer worth the candle?
In the search for the minutiae, the bigger picture stands before us unnoticed.
He became manager of Sunderland on August 28, 2006. On that day, Sunderland
were bottom of the Coca-Cola Championship. They are now a Premier League
team close to the bottom but with enough good players to haul themselves
upwards. Mid-table, or perhaps slightly higher, is their Everest.
Was that failure? Hardly. Yet his walking away from his first managerial job
is deeply disappointing for those who believed in him and reassuring for
those who neither believed nor liked him. That has always been the thing
about Keane, there was no neutral ground. He swapped one island for another,
one shirt for another, a tracksuit for a suit, and always the fascination
grew. But this exit diminishes Keane because it raises a serious question
about his ability to manage a football team. For more than two years, he did
a good job, improved the club, but then left at the first truly difficult
moment.
Before you would give this man a job, you would want to know what in God’s
name happened at Sunderland?
THEY called it Niall Quinn’s magic carpet ride and you have no idea how much
he would have hated that nonsense. But it began in the spring of 2006 when
Quinn, a former and much-loved Sunderland player, went in search of the
wealthy men who would help him buy his old club. A fellow with a string of
pubs, a property developer, another publican, another developer and then
Sean Mulryan, the daddy of them, who built much of Canary Wharf. Two
billion, they say he made. Once Mulryan was in, the others quickly got on
board. The Drumaville Consortium was up and running.
It was, though, Quinn’s baby and from what the investors could tell, he wanted
to be the club’s next manager. They had tried to get Martin O’Neill but he
said no. Quinn reiterated that he would do it if they didn’t get the right
man. It was decided to invite Keane to a meeting at Mulryan’s house in
County Kildare.
First, he was asked if he would be prepared to work with Quinn and said he
would. His short career at Celtic had been a mistake and he just wasn’t sure
what he wanted to do next. Critically, considering what would unfold two and
a half years later, Keane’s passion for professional football had been
dimmed by his experience of it.
Manchester United had fired him eight months before. A Friday morning that
began in the normal way on the training ground ended with a meeting and a
sacking he never saw coming. Vulnerable is the man who forgets there is also
a bullet for him. That leaving broke his heart but it is only now we can see
that clearly.
When Keane said he would be prepared to work with Quinn, the Drumaville
backers thought that was grand then, just get the two boys together and take
it from there. They were jolted when he reacted badly to finding Quinn
already in the house. Keane might be prepared to work with Quinn but they
needed to first square things. Having expressed his displeasure to his
hosts, Keane turned to Quinn.
“Niall, you and I need to speak outside.” They spoke in the corridor, mostly
Keane talking, Quinn listening and some sort of agreement was reached to put
behind them the bitterness of their falling-out over Keane’s exit from
Ireland’s 2002 World Cup squad. Then they returned and talked turkey with
Sunderland’s new backers. The money men were greatly impressed by Keane,
especially Mulryan.
They wanted Keane to take the job but he wasn’t sure he was ready for
management and turned them down. Into the breach came Quinn and Keane went
off to the FA’s coaching centre at Lilleshall. He had deliberately chosen
not to sign up for the course preferred by ex-professional footballers and
instead found himself in the company of men who ran underage teams, Sunday
league teams and, in one case, a pub team. People who had scrimped and saved
to be on the course, many of whom wanted nothing from the game except the
joys of involvement. Keane was in his element, their love melted his
cynicism. He was ready again for the challenge of professional football.
By now Quinn was managing Sunderland but the bus Keane had missed was actually
heading straight for a warehouse wall. Four matches into Quinn’s reign,
Sunderland were in trouble and the call to Keane was quickly made.
Drumaville had the manager they wanted. Because they wanted him badly and
admired him in the way that so many do, they put themselves in a relatively
weak position and him into a strong position.
After his short stint as manager, Quinn’s natural position was chairman. He
had, after all, put the consortium together and received a significant
shareholding. He saw his job as the buffer between his new manager and the
club’s owners, liaising between a strong-willed manager and a group of men
who knew virtually nothing about running a football club.
But the difficulty for Quinn is that Keane isn’t like other people and
couldn’t just decide that all the reservations he had felt about his former
Ireland teammate now counted for nothing. In Keane’s eyes, they were never
going to be friends and if they were going to work together, it would on the
manager’s terms.
So, certain practices became enshrined. The chairman would be expected to stay
clear of the manager’s way; he would not come to the dressing room, neither
did Keane want to see him at the training ground and it became standard
practice for the manager and chairman to communicate by text message. If
they had to communicate in a manner unsuited to text messaging, they used
the secretary, Margaret Byrne, as the go-between. “Mags,” as they called
her, was highly rated by both men.
It was not the ideal manager/chairman relationship but as long as the team was
winning, no-one outside of the club noticed. For over two years it worked,
partly because Keane was good at management but also because Quinn got the
Drumaville backers to pay up every time Keane went to the transfer market.
He named the player he wanted and almost always, the money was provided.
Such was the esteem in which the manager was held that none of the others
expected him to justify the spending. They remember him going to one board
meeting and that was it. No-one expected him to join the owners for a cup of
tea after the game; that wasn’t his style.
Once, Mulryan made a rare visit to the Stadium of Light. It was rare because
among his many sporting passions, there is no place for football. He
wouldn’t cross the street to watch a game and only got involved because it
seemed an interesting business opportunity. And Keane fascinated him. He met
the man and instantly decided he was a genius. Of course, there was a touch
of madness there as well but what did you expect?
Knowing Mulryan’s faith in Keane, another Sunderland director thought Keane
should take the trouble to join the owners for a few minutes on the day
Mulryan was present. “Roy, would you please come up after the game and meet
Sean and the lads?”
“I don’t do that s***,” replied Keane.
“This is unreasonable, Roy.”
“I don’t do directors,” said Keane. But they considered they had the best
young manager in the Premier League and weren’t put out. Their investment
was in good hands.
WHEN did it all begin to go wrong? Perhaps in the decisions to sign Pascal
Chimbonda, El Hadji Diouf and Djibril Cisse; players with up-and-down
careers that never quite tallied with the levels of their talent. In his
first Premier League season, Keane had tried to go with British and
Irish-born players but at the end of that campaign, he knew the team needed
more quality.
The transfer market found his weakness and the club’s. Not long before
Drumaville bought Sunderland, the club had fired its
chief scout to cut costs. When Keane arrived, there was no meaningful system
of recruitment in place. And neither was he starting from a good place: good
recruitment is as much contacts as the ability to judge players. When you’ve
been a loner, recruitment is a nightmare.
Keane got players, plenty of them, but not the ones at the top of his list. As
time passed, he was reminded of what it was that irritated him about very
well-paid footballers. The lack of professionalism, the gloves and the
bobble hats and the scarves some of them tried to wear at training, the
meticulous way they fixed their hair before leaving the changing room, the
bullshit of the badge-clutchers who played for no other reason than the
money.
He tried to sort them out, railed against low standards, bad timing, excess
body fat, and when three of his players were in a nightclub two days before
the Chelsea match, he wondered what he was doing. A couple of months before
that, the team hadn’t played well at home to Northampton in the Carling Cup,
a few supporters abused him and afterwards, he reminded people he had not
come to Sunderland to be abused and he would not accept it.
All the time, the sense grew that Keane wasn’t enjoying his work. There were
reports, too many to dismiss, of flare-ups on the training ground involving
the manager and too often, one saw the fear in the players’ performance.
The case of the midfielder Liam Miller was revealing. Three times he was
transfer-listed by Keane. Miller decided to keep his head down, work hard
and try to play his way back into the team. Keane noticed the effort,
praised the player’s renewed efforts to journalists and once used Miller’s
tenacity as a stick to beat other players when they had underperformed.
Miller wasn’t in the dressing room when that was said and Keane never spoke
directly to him.
That refusal to develop relationships with the players, to balance sometimes
vicious criticism with a little empathy, meant that when the string of
defeats came, Keane’s limited enjoyment of the job disappeared, replaced by
demons who came to torture his soul. The only way to face the challenge of
bad results is together and Sunderland, the manager and his players, were
anything but together. In the circumstances, text messages to the chairman
were of limited value.
Keane’s adviser and friend, Michael Kennedy, urged him to sign the two-year
contract offered. Keane refused to sign, saying he hadn’t done enough to
merit an extension. Most managers, feeling the heat, would have snatched
that contract and signed it before getting inside. Keane retains a nobility
that went out of the game when big money arrived.
Whatever the medium for his resignation message, the end was inevitable
because he no longer had the stomach for the fight. That probably isn’t
accurate enough. Rather, he no longer had the stomach for the game.
People noticed that when kids came to the training ground, he smiled and was
soon bantering away with them and bringing them on a tour of the facilities.
It was as if he was back on that FA course, talking with the bloke who ran
the pub team, listening while the fellow was saying why he preferred 4-3-3
to 4-4-2 and loving it. At the training ground, he would show the kids into
the changing room, “Careful now, lads,” he would say, “or you’ll be tripping
over the hair gels.” They didn’t notice the loathing, but it was there.
If Keane is to come back, either he or the game will have to change.
Bumpy ride: the Roy Keane rollercoaster comes off the rails
HIGH POINTS
1990 Nottingham Forest pay £10,000 to sign Keane from Cobh Ramblers
1993 Signs for Manchester United and helps them to a Premier League
and FA Cup double in his first season
1994 Helps Ireland reach the second round of the World Cup finals in
the USA
1997 Named Manchester United captain when Eric Cantona announces
retirement
2007 Sunderland win place in the Premier League in his first season as
manager
LOW POINTS
1999 Misses United’s 1999 Champions League victory through suspension
2002 Misses World Cup finals after a bust-up with Republic of Ireland
boss Mick McCarthy
2002 Nasty tackle on Alf-Inge Haaland in a derby ends the Manchester
City player’s career
2005 Leaves Manchester United under a cloud after a rift with Sir Alex
Ferguson
2008 Keane quits Sunderland, notifying his chairman, Niall Quinn, by
text message
- Roy Keane is the 18th managerial change this season after Kevin Bond
(B’mouth), Alan Curbishley (W Ham), Kevin Keegan (N’castle), Keith Downing
(Cheltenham), Alan Buckley (Grimsby), Geraint Williams (Colchester), Lee
Sinnott (Port Vale), Iain Dowie (QPR), Juande Ramos (Spurs), Harry Redknapp
(Portsm’th), John Ward (Carlisle), Aidy Boothroyd (Watford), Stan Ternent
(Hud’field), Simon Davies (Chester), Maurice Malpas (Swindon), Steve Holland
(Crewe) and Alan Pardew (Charlton)
BEST OF THE BLOGS
Dan Joe (Goal.com) Keane is playing cry-baby again. He’s a
Championship manager at best
TheBrutalTruth (Guardian) In the heat of the moment, in the two
biggest battles of his career, he walked
Myguideireland (Myguideireland) Sunderland were sinking until he came
along. People have short memories
jonathangrosskopf (UK.eurosport) It was only a matter of time; he is a
perfectionist and cannot stand fools gladly
What are you looking at?
Roy Keane on ...
HIS NASTY STREAK
‘Aggression is what I do. I go to war. You don't contest football matches in a
reasonable state of mind’
FOOTBALL PUNDITS
‘I wouldn’t listen to these people in the pub and yet they’re on TV. I’ve
done it once. Never again. I’d rather go to the dentist’
HIS ALF-INGE HAALAND TACKLE
‘I’d waited long enough. I ****ing hit him hard. “Take that, you **** and
don’t ever stand over me sneering about fake injuries”’
HENPECKED PLAYERS
‘Some so-called big stars are soft. If they don’t want to come [to Sunderland]
because their wife wants to go shopping in London, it’s a sad state of
affairs. Clearly their wives and girlfriends run their lives’
HIS ROW WITH IRELAND’S BOSS
‘I will never play for Mick McCarthy again. In two years, if some chairman is
daft enough to give him a job, I will look at it [playing for Ireland]
again’
COACHING IRELAND ONE DAY
‘Nobody would play for me but we'd have great facilities’
HIS TUNNEL ROW WITH PATRICK VIEIRA
‘I'll ****ing see you out there. Shut your mouth up, you. Every week you
pretend you're a nice guy’
FLASH YOUNG STARS
‘Rolex watches, garages full of flash cars, mansions, set up for life. Forgot
the game, lost the hunger that got you the watches, cars and mansions’
