Saturday, November 26, 2011
WHEN it comes to clinching an argument in football, the traditional line of last resort is "show us yer medals".
So you can be sure that Robbie Keane won’t be making light of the fact that, with just a single medal (for the 2008 League Cup) to show for a long career traversing the high lands of English, Scottish and European club football, he finally added a second last week when he helped LA Galaxy to their MLS Cup final win over Houston Dynamo.
There was no goal in that game for Keane, though he did have a legitimate effort wrongly ruled out for offside. But his role in Landon Donovan’s winner was crucial, the Irish skipper picking up a pass from David Beckham, improvising neatly to beat his marker and then, with the opposition anticipating a shot from just outside the box, playing a reverse pass which put Donovan through on goal to dink one over the Houston ‘keeper Tally Hall..
The clever execution of what our American friends like to call an "assist" was a reminder that Keane is an accomplished maker as well as taker of goals, an aspect of his play which was acknowledged later by Donovan. "People – justifiably so – see Robbie as a goal scorer, but he’s a great soccer player," he said. "I remember the first day he got out here, watching him pass the ball I was really impressed and I realised what a good passer he was. The pass he gave me for the goal was fantastic, absolutely world class."
Not that Keane’s three goals and two assists since joining LA Galaxy are likely to cut much ice with critics for whom, it seems, the player can do no right. World-class? Nah, it’s only in America and your granny could flourish on a football pitch there, right? But it’s not only in America. In Tallinn a couple of weeks ago, after Ireland had all but secured their place at the European Championship finals, the Keane-sceptics were still on his case. Afterwards, I heard someone remark, in all seriousness: "Apart from his two goals, Keane did hardly anything."
Well, for the record – apart from his two goals, like — he was involved in both incidents which resulted in red cards for Estonian players and it was also his pass which found Aiden McGeady in the build-up to Keith Andrews’ goal. And all this, having bust a gut to get back from an injury which had originally been expected to rule him out of the play-offs entirely. Instead, by the time he was posing with that MLS cup alongside his mate Becks last week, Keane had managed a remarkable six games in two weeks, a pretty heavy workload for a man who was accused of seeking cushy semi-retirement when he opted to head for LA.
Quite why Keane has always attracted such a disproportionate volume of often highly personal criticism is a bit of a puzzle. His commitment to his country has never been in question while you would think his record of 53 goals in 114 appearances should be enough to silence all the doubters. Perhaps it’s something to do with his always animated and highly visible presence on the pitch. Keane is never too far from the heart of the action, whether leading from the front or dropping back to help out his midfield. But that also means he is frequently in the line of fire when things don’t quite come off, and invariably responds by waving his arms in frustration or appealing to the referee. Things that can draw annoyance and even ridicule from the stands.
But that’s Keane: there has always been something of the playground footballer about him even as a pro, a characteristic visible in the joy with which he celebrates the good times and the petulance which can surface when things don’t go entirely his way. But that’s also another way of pointing out one of his most admirable qualities as a player: for good or ill, he never hides on the field of play. Anyone who knows anything about the game knows that there are plenty of cute ways of shirking responsibility on the pitch but, whatever other trumped-up charges might be thrown at him, Robbie Keane can never be accused of that.
Away from the action, Keane has never gone out of his way to court popularity, a slightly prickly persona making it hard for people to warm to him in the way they have to other successful Irish sports stars. But America seems to have been good for him in this respect too. Perhaps feeling somewhat liberated to be making a nice living in a nice climate which is far removed from the media goldfish bowl of English football, the mature Keane seems to be – as they might say in those parts – more comfortable in his own skin these days.
Certainly, I wasn’t the only one on the press side of the fence to be impressed with how well he handled his media duties as Irish captain in the high pressure run-up to the crucial play-offs, hitting all the right notes as he talked about how much qualification would mean to him, his fellow players and the nation as a whole.
And, even when he was hors de combat, his ability to hold an oul’ tune didn’t do him any harm in the end, either. His critics will probably never go away but, as Keane prepares to lead his side out at next summer’s Euro finals, his accusers’ complaints are sounding increasingly lame, self-serving and out of touch. As for that ‘show us yer medals’ challenge, Robbie Keane may have them in plural at last but then he always had a better answer anyway: ‘show us yer goals’.
* liammackey@hotmail.com
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