Pitch battle is Keane’s biggest
So you might have Arsene Wenger complaining about there being too many foreign managers in the Premiership, say, while Harry Redknapp suddenly starts speaking perfect English. Or maybe Gianfranco Zola coming over all Terminator-like while Alex coos and chirps and gurns for the BBC cameras. Or how about pasty-faced Roy Hodgson taking to the sun bed while Phil Brown is heard to say something sensible, for once.
Above all, who could resist the image of Giovanni Trapattoni kung-fu kicking the tactics board in the Irish dressing room before – after just a brief pause to slaughter a pig – whipping out one of his four (or is 14?) mobile phones and texting Stephen Ireland to suggest that he should go and perform the standard anatomical impossibility. Meanwhile, over in Ipswich, all is touchingly serene as Keano illustrates his club’s current plight by miming a melancholic piece on an invisible viola…
Okay, then, back to the drawing board.
Cork’s favourite son seems to be assailed from all sides just now, whether it be former colleagues going public on the supposed madness of King Roy or his own goalkeeper dropping a clanger in the dying seconds which ensured that Ipswich snatched a draw from the jaws of a first Championship victory at Sheffield United on Tuesday. And just when he needed a break, along comes his chief executive to assure everyone that the gaffer’s job is 100% secure. Uh-oh.
In inimitable fashion, Keano threw the book back at Yorkie yesterday and took a few sideswipes at the Sunderland hierarchy along the way. But it’s the pitch battles he has to win now. Ipswich’s current predicament is not entirely a shock.
Pre-season friendlies might be a unreliable barometer but after seeing a very ordinary Ipswich side lose to both Finn Harps and Cork City during their Irish summer tour, I recall saying to a colleague that it looked like it was going to be a long season for Keane in Suffolk. What I didn’t foresee was that it could end up being a very short one.
Of course, Keane barely had his feet under the table when Ipswich came a-calling here back in July but, now, 10 games into the Championship season, with £7m already spent and 11 players in and 12 out – in short, with the manager’s fingerprints all over the club – they still haven’t managed to achieve lift-off.
Time is hardly running out for Keane – unless he decides to run out first – and a victory against Barnsley at Oakwell today would dispel the gloom surrounding the worst start to a season in the club’s history. Yet, it’s already clear that this will be a pivotal year in determining Keane’s long-term future in the game.
For a managerial rookie, his start at Sunderland was nothing less than spectacular, lifting a dispirited side from the depths of the Championship to the title. And that on a transfer outlay of about a million less than he has expended at Ipswich. “Maybe I got lucky at Sunderland and maybe I’m being found out now,” he said recently, causing some impressionable types to think that Keane was indulging in a bout of deep-seated introspection. In fact, the comment was delivered as a sarcastic rebuff to his critics.
As a proven winner in his playing career, Keane knows better than anyone that there isn’t enough luck in the world to carry a manager and a team to victory across the length of an entire season. The problems at the Stadium of Light came, as they so often do for promoted sides, when Sunderland began to find the going tough in the top-flight.
But we were not to learn if Keane was the man to rectify that situation because, citing interference from above, the tough opted to get going, leaving Ricky Sbragia to steer the club away from the rocks of relegation.
Ipswich, a blank slate by comparison, provides a wholly different challenge, and a defining one at that. It’s almost impossible to see how Keane could have a future in management if he doesn’t turn things around at Portman Road and, in order to do that, his side urgently need some winning momentum.
To that extent, the essence of his job is actually no different to Trapattoni’s or any other manager, for that matter. For both good and ill, Roy Keane might bring a uniquely complex personality to the task, but whether one rules primarily through fear, charm, logic, temper, discipline, instinct, intelligence – or a sometimes combustible combination of all of the above – at the end of the day, Brian, it’s results, results, results which maketh the manager.
And breaketh him too.
