Legends like Roy Keane deliver even when a cause is lost

Roy Keane follows one of the great truisms of sport: the measure of a player can be in how he plays when his team are being beaten. Picture: Matthew Lewis/Getty Images

Micah was laughing but Roy wasn’t joking.

This time the sole source of shtick from this renowned double act was courtesy of Mr Richards himself, cackling in an irritating and ill-timed manner having misread that instead of playing up again to being Angry Old Roy, his Sky colleague had just articulated the essence of the young Roy Keane.

Keane’s issue after his former club’s latest defeat wasn’t that they had lost. As much as he has always detested losing and had little tolerance for even a string of draws — only a few months ago the best he could say about Stephen Kenny’s upturn was that he was doing “okay… I thought winning was part of [the] package” at top-level football —  he’s always understood that every team, even a Manchester United, are bound to lose sometimes. But as he’d elaborate: “There’s ways to lose football matches.” 

And the way United had lost to City on Sunday wasn’t it. “They gave up.” For him that was “shameful”, “unforgiveable”, and “unacceptable”.

He appreciated that there was a collective malaise at work. The manager was bound to be criticised “and the tactics” while the question marks over the captaincy and lack of proper leaders within the dressing room all were “a reflection of where the team is and where the club is”.

But to him there was a matter of personal responsibility. That while you couldn’t control the performance of others, or sometimes even your own, you could always control your own effort. And every United player to virtually a man had neglected and forgotten that basic principle.

“Your own bit of pride has to kick in at some stage,” he said. “That doesn’t come from the manager, the staff, the supporters. That should be in your DNA.” 

Keep playing, no matter the result. Don’t give up.

To illustrate his point, he highlighted the tepid effort of Scott McTominay in tracking back in the lead up to Manchester City’s fourth goal. Keane qualified his criticism by noting the Scottish international generally “seems an honest enough kid, don’t get me wrong” but in that play he hadn’t been honest. He could have tackled. Taken his man out. “Do whatever you can.” 

Instead, like everyone else in a red shirt, he had given up.

Time and the forum didn’t allow Keane to expand on the point but as a counter to what he had just witnessed in the Etihad last Sunday, Keane could have educated Richards and everyone else by transporting us from Manchester, 2022 and taking us back to a certain game in Fairview Park, Dublin, 32 years ago last month.

Back then Keane was both on the books of Cobh Ramblers and undergoing a FÁS apprenticeship run by the FAI. As well as playing for the club’s senior League of Ireland team, he was also lining out for their U18s who had made it to a FAI Youths Cup quarter-final when they were drawn against one of the big Dublin clubs, Belvedere Boys. Ramblers took an early 1-0 lead at home, courtesy of a header from Keane. In the last minute though his FÁS classmate, Graham Brereton, playing full back for Belvedere, whipped in a ball that ended up going straight to the Cobh net to bring the tie to a replay.

Keane at the time undoubtedly cursed such an outcome but as it happens it was probably the best thing that ever happened to him. 

At the replay in Fairview Park was the Dublin-based scout, Noel McCabe. As Dave Hannigan would put it in his book The Garrison Game:  “That was Keane’s lucky break. Without it, all [his] diligence, all that marvellous application, might well have come to naught. What if Belvedere hadn’t equalised and there had been no replay? What if McCabe had decided to attend another game instead, and spotted some other bright young thing? What if, as he was entitled to do under his contract, Keane had chosen not to play for the youths team that weekend? What if? Indeed.” 

Luck though, as Keane or someone else could say, is merely when opportunity meets preparation. He still had to prepare for it and capitalise on it. And on that February afternoon he had every reason not to avail of it. Just like on a certain western Pacific Island 12 years later, his team’s logistics were shambolic, “a fucking cock-up” as he’d succinctly phrase it in his first autobiography.

The bus was late picking the team up in Cobh. The traffic up was heavy. Most of the journey was consumed with the worry that they wouldn’t make it to the venue in time. They finally did, but with only minutes to spare. By then, as Keane would say in his autobiography:  “We were knackered.” 

Then they were subsequently hammered, much like United were last Sunday, only Ramblers failed to even score while conceding four at their own end.

But that’s where Keane distinguished himself from everyone else on that field as well as everyone in red in the Etihad last Sunday. He still played for something more than the result. His own bit of pride kicked in.

“I played for myself,” he’d admit in his first book. “Even when I knew the game was lost I kept going. I’d show those Dublin bastards that I could fucking play… I was like a man possessed — by that strange a compound of anger, frustration, and personal pride. That compound can turns games; even the most hopeless situation can be retrieved.” 

Keane would quickly add that it didn’t turn things that day in Fairview — or at least the result. But it turned his career. Made it. Gave birth to it. During the game McCabe had conveyed to Ramblers vice-chairman John O’Rourke that he wanted him to go on trial to Nottingham Forest and then that night McCabe would go home and confirm as much when penning probably the most important scouting report in Irish football history: “In my opinion he is a player to go on trial with Forest. Right away.” 

It wasn’t that he had done anything spectacular. Brereton told his father straight after the game that he felt Keane “did nothing”. But Brereton’s father differed, as did McCabe. 

They were hugely impressed by his competitiveness, strength, “progressive in his tackling”, tidiness on the ball, his capacity at “finding players”. His game was no longer modelled on his childhood hero of Glenn Hoddle. His favourite player now was Bryan Robson, “a great player without doing tracks. Wasn’t brilliant but was awesome.” 

It’s well-known that since their collaboration for that 2002 book Keane and his ghostwriter Eamon Dunphy no longer communicate, but part of what brought them together remains: Their appreciation for what Dunphy termed — and Keane personified — “the good pro”. 

United at the moment may have an abundance of what Dunphy would call “sunshine players”, happy to make themselves available to receive the ball “when you are well up at home”. 

What they lack are players willing to do the same “when you are struggling”. 

Good pros.

Dunphy elaborated on that concept. “Every game is a test,” he’d write in Only A Game? “and there are so many ways to cheat, to walk away from your responsibility to the team.” 

That is what Keane was on about last Sunday. It wasn’t some indulgent rant about an unacceptable standard, but one of the great truisms of sport: The measure of a player can be in how he plays when his team are being beaten — and know they’ll be beaten. Think Lee Keegan last September and how he continued to rage and fight against the prospect of a sixth All Ireland final defeat. Keane that afternoon in Fairview. Beaten but not defeated. Legends only born or enhanced in the face of defeat.

Keane knew. A day like last Sunday can be the day that seals your exit from a big club. Or in his case, the day it can seal your arrival to one.