Roy roos the day as our Roy stays low-key
Once again, it was all about Roy on our television screens this week. But this time it was not Yer Man, it was Yer Other Man.
While Roy Keane was making a relatively low-key comeback to the punditry ranks for ITV’s Champions’ League coverage, over at the Beeb’s FA Cup draw Roy Hodgson was contorting his mouth into a bizarre grin and then sticking his foot in it.
Hodgson’s unflattering ‘funny face’ quickly went viral but it was his defence of Wayne Rooney after Manchester United’s 3-1 win over Preston which ought to give the England manager grounds for much greater embarrassment.
We all saw the incident clearly, well, all of us bar the match officials, that is: Preston goalkeeper Thorsten Struckmanns’ late arrival feet-first and at speed; Rooney’s adroit leap to avoid the challenge; and then, upon landing, his theatrical tumble to secure the penalty.
In short, the ’keeper’s challenge was reckless but, so far as I could see, the penalty wasn’t awarded for intent; it was awarded because, in real time, he appeared to have scythed Rooney down in the box. But, in fact, it quickly emerged Struckmann hadn’t, as it were, struck his man.
Rather, it was Rooney who brought himself down, as was blatantly obvious from the video replays which – to be fair to referee Phil Dowd – were not, of course, at the disposal of the match officials. (Regular readers will be relivieved to learn that, just this once, I’ll spare you my traditional diatribe on this issue).
In the MOTD studio, our own Kevin Kilbane was entertaining no doubts Rooney had dived.
Gary Lineker, although trying to maintain a neutral moderator’s stance, seemed to be of the same view. Phil Neville was more inclined to side with Rooney, suggesting if he hadn’t avoided the flying tackle he might have suffered a serious injury.
In vain, did Kilbane protest the player could have ensured his own safety by simply hurdling the challenge. Which, as it happens, is precisely what Rooney did do, being well clear of any danger before he pointed a toe at the turf and flung himself to the ground.
As for Roy Hodgson, he was unequivocal: the boy Roo had not dived. “Not for me,” he explained. “I just think he was taking evasive action. If you are a referee in the run of play without replays I don’t think any of us would have said it is not a penalty. The goalkeeper has gone with both feet. Wayne has touched it past him.”
Correct – and then he dived.
The irony of all this, of course, is Roy Hodgson himself was guilty of taking evasive action, an England manager put on the spot about one of his senior players and declining to whip up the inevitable media frenzy which would have ensued had he found his own man guilty of indulging in the dark arts.
No matter that, according to the Preston ’keeper, Rooney actually apologised to him afterwards for the manner in which he’d won the penalty: Roy had already taken his own pre-emptive action, bargaining that, on balance, he wouldn’t have to pay too much of a penalty.
If there’s a lesson in all this for the England gaffer, I’d suggest it’s that he would be better off avoiding all offers of media work where he might be required to offer something more substantial than the ususal platitudes about one of his players.
And there might even be a lesson in it too for Gary Neville, who is on the England coaching staff, not to mention our own management tag team of Martin O’Neill and Roy Keane, all of whom have, thus far, managed to avoid finding themselves in a similarly compromising position in the course of their television work.
Coincidentally, Hodgson had only recently urged Neville to prioritise coaching over punditry.
“From a selfish point of view I personally would see him being more valuable to me as a football lover than as a pundit,” he said. “Punditry is not that difficult if you know a bit about football. You don’t win and lose in punditry. You are just watching a game and giving opinions.”
I suspect Roy now understands that it’s not always so simple. As for the other Roy, the media’s obsession with Keano appeared to reach its illogical conclusion this week when he took up considerable space for saying, well, precisely nothing.
Of course, it was the fact he said precisely nothing to Alex Ferguson – and vice versa – when, awkwardly, the feuding par found themselves sharing a flight from Paris back to Manchester after Chelsea’s Champions League game against PSG, which accounted for the headlines.
Fergie we learned, hid behind a newspaper while, across the aisle and three rows up, Keane “sat impassively by the window”.
So, no death stare, no hair-dryer and no mother of all air-rage incidents. All the more reason then to extend the palm to the enterprising eye-witness journalist who managed to knock the mandatory 500 words out of this – the very definition, surely, of ‘much ado about nothing’.
