Keane carries pain to the next battle
Conor, one of my brothers, is Bear.
In the last year or so Conor’s influence in the world has changed. When you are close to somebody you are the last to notice these things but now when he says wise things I wonder should I be writing them down to quote later or just telling him to shut up as I have always done. I’m thinking of getting his name changed. He should either be Father Bear. Or Confucius. Sometimes even Confucius chooses the wrong time to come out with what other philosophers call the “bloody obvious”.
The other night we were in the parents’ sitting room with the father, looking at the TV when the news came on that Roy Keane had turned down the chance to rule Paradise and was going to work not just under Martin O’Neill with Ireland but possibly under Paul Lambert at Aston Villa too. “Roy Keane,” said the brother “is a very smart man.”
I was going to write that one down in the “needs work” section when I saw the Father’s face behind Bear. Arms outstretched and eyes wide. He was silently putting out the message “ah for feck’s sake. Smart man is it?”
Confucius, he may know many things but he didn’t know about the betting slip in the Father’s pocket. Roy Keane not going to Celtic had turned our chance of great riches into a useless piece of paper.
We’ve backed Roy to the hilt in every scrape and controversy that I can remember but sometimes enough is enough. On balance though, Confucius is right as usual. Roy is the greatest athlete-warrior this country has ever produced (I’ll say a few prayers tonight as penance at the Christy Ring statue on the way home for that. BOD? Great but not the greatest — Getting speared doesn’t make you a warrior. I think Sun Tzu said that one). Keane is more, also he is indeed one smart man and his latest career decisions prove it. By the way, I’ll call the brother Confucius if he will call me Sun Tzu. Sun Tzu wrote my favourite book The Art of War. I much prefer it to the other book I have read. Sun Tzu and Confucius lining out for Cloyne. That’ll draw them in.
As a student of Sun Tzu I feel as qualified as the brother to speak about Roy. I think he has read the same book.
Engage people with what they expect: it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment.
For the past while Roy has been making the few bob as a pundit on ITV. Being Roy Keane meant that he was getting quoted more often than Confucius and Sun Tzu put together but if you have watched him down through the years you could see that most of the time he was just enjoying himself. People like to cling to the old image of Roy Keane as some sort of psychopath. This dark tormented soul who can see no good in anything that everybody else might enjoy. So he gives them what they want. If you watch him just after he says something like telling Steven Gerrard that he dived for a penalty in Istanbul and that England will struggle in the World Cup (both correct) you can see the lips quiver just a little as he looks down at the desk. He nearly wants to laugh.
Adrian Chiles asks did the United players ever think of giving Ferguson the bumps like the Arsenal player did with Wenger when they won the Cup, a few weeks ago? “Throw him up but not catch him maybe,” Roy said. Anybody who took against Roy Keane years ago said, ah get over it for God’s sake. The fact is he gets over things quicker than the media or most of the rest of us do. Things went bad with Ireland. He went back and played for Ireland. Things went bad with Niall Quinn. He went and worked with Niall Quinn. He had a long war with Patrick Viera. But he was the life and soul of the party in their documentary together. Things finished badly for him at Celtic. He still goes there regularly and took his time to think about it when the job was offered to him.
Roy Keane moves on. He learns and adapts. He takes the pain and he carries it into the next battle.
But if you are in the demented anti-Roy Keane camp what are the chances you said sometime in the last few weeks: ‘Roy Keane is going to walk out on Ireland? Nothing new there’ (it would be new actually). And when you thought about his future in management you probably said ‘he’s too thick to learn’. ‘He had the chance under O’Neill but his ego is too big’. ‘He can’t work with ordinary players’. ‘He can’t accept authority’. Blah de blah…
So what do you say now? He lulled you into the predictable patterns of response. Next comes the extraordinary moment. Roy Keane working hard as an assistant in two jobs. Learning his business. Accepting authority.
He’s going to League of Ireland games. He’s giving talks to women’s football teams. He’s responding like he did when he was the one left behind at Rockmount when all the other lads were shuttling over and back to trials. He is regrouping and coming back.
Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move fall like a thunderbolt.
The great thing about watching Roy Keane is not just the sight of a great warrior making his path but the unpredictability about him. He’s proud enough to take on any battle. He doesn’t take a market survey to find out if the public will think that he is A) Just very assertive; B) Too aggressive; C) Scary mad. He doesn’t trawl through social media worrying about what people think about him. He can’t be bullied or bothered by people with smart online names. As was said in these pages last weekend, you wouldn’t want to be writing his book. There’s no end to the twists and turns.
He’s gone from not being mentioned in the running for jobs in League 1 or the Championship to a stage where he is going to be short odds for almost every job that comes up in the next few years. There could be a fair few betting slips going into the dustbin in Cloyne.
He came and spoke to us one night a few years ago when I was still hurling with Cork. His presence in that room was something most of us will always remember. He spoke well and he stayed around for a very long time afterwards just talking and answering our questions. We could see the warrior in him and we tried to take that into our battles but you could see that someday he’d be a great general too.
He has had a couple of attempts. They ended badly but people forget the genius of his first season at Sunderland and exaggerate the ordinary outcome of other campaigns he led. He wasn’t a shark in the transfer market but a lot of managers of promise make that mistake.
I don’t know how he will get there but I still reckon he will be a great manager of Ireland some day. The challenge for the FAI (who to be fair to John Delaney, have also shown a great ability to move on as well) is to grow a team that will be worthy of his talent and passion.
Meanwhile, for the next few weeks the World Cup is just a TV event for us. After the years of austerity we could have done with a party. When Ireland went to the Euros in Poland we had an expensive manager who didn’t believe we were up to anything more than keeping the score down. Roy never took on a battle he didn’t believe he would win.
Before our friends in the IMF and the EU threw us under a bus and we were forced to pay for their mistakes as well as our own we could have done with a Roy Keane sitting down at the table somewhere in Europe with the death stare and the toughness we needed. When the time comes I hope we can give him a team that stands up to his demands.
Treat your men as you would your beloved sons. And they will follow you into the deepest valley
Smart man. I can’t wait until we all follow Roy and his boys into that valley…
