Keane aiming to stretch his career with the power of yoga

IT was a revelation akin to George W Bush announcing that he was a paid-up member of Greenpeace or the Pope converting to Islam.

Seasoned Roy watchers probably spent the weekend wrestling with the notion, working out what it adds to the Keane enigma. Meanwhile the boys in Mayfield are probably terrified that he’s “after turning into an ould doll.”

The bottom line is that Our Boy Roy mightn’t be as immune to celebrity trends as we would have thought because the ultimate Red Devil has declared himself a yoga fan. He’s even gone so far as joining a local class for “older ladies.”

He’s hooked.

Such is his faith in the favoured pastime of Gwyneth, Madonna and Geri that he’s even persuaded his team-mates Ryan Giggs and David Bellion to join in.

And, girls take solace in the fact, that Roy and the boys are finding their stretches more draining than anything else they’ve done in their careers.

“It’s still hard. I lie down and she can push my leg back to 90 degrees. You should be able to do that on your own but I don’t know whether it’s an Irish thing or just the time I came up in, but I never stretched. There’s benefits. You loosen the muscle and take pressure off your joints,” he told The Irish Times.

In the twilight years of his career, Roy is also indulging in hot stones massage and ordering his salads without sauce.

But do not fear, he hasn’t lost the run of himself entirely as like all good immigrants, his thoughts are increasingly with the ‘Ould Sod’.

We’ve discovered he found himself “aching a little” last week as the mates from Cork took their return flight from Manchester.

“I still miss that...You feel you’re missing out on that. Missing out on the crack with them, missing out on the crack with my three brothers. There’s times when I’d be thinking that the brothers are all closer to each other than I am to any of them,” he said.

As for Mrs Keano, these days she’s kept awake as Roy reads out excerpts from a Cork slang dictionary he just bought.

“My wife is laughing at these words. I’m looking at bazzer the other day, a bazzer is obviously a haircut. I couldn’t get it out of my head. These are words I’d forgotten about. My wife laughs at me but these are things which remind me of what I’m about,” he said.

The new soft and cuddly Roy hopes he’ll return to live in Cork at sometime in the future, but at the moment his life still centres around football and his kids.

Who knows he could set up the ‘Roy Keane School of Yoga’ in Knockaheeny?