Colin Sheridan: Roy Keane is still Ireland's most relevant footballer

Seventeen years after his last game for Manchester United, Roy Keane is now as he was then; Ireland's most relevant footballer…and it's not even close

STILL RELEVANT: No player, Irish or otherwise, has come within a galaxy of asserting the same influence Roy Keane did over a league for almost a decade. Pic: Bradley Collyer/PA Wire

Mon, 17 Oct, 2022 - 07:45

Colin Sheridan

Colin Sheridan is a writer and columnist. A former officer in the Irish Defence Forces he has extensive deployment experience as a peacekeeper with the United Nations, having lived and worked in the former Yugoslavia, West Africa, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Palestine.

The playwright Eugene O’Neil famously said that man is born broken, and lives by mending. One can only wonder how broken Roy Keane must’ve been at birth to mend so relentlessly in life. Born to the working class. Too small to get picked. Too proletariat to curry favour. Too tortured to handle authority. Too Cork. Too Irish. Too outspoken.

Too rowdy. Too unpolished. Too spiteful. Too demanding a captain. Too impossible a manager. Too obsessive a professional. Too this, too that, too the other. Too too. Yet, seventeen years after his last game for Manchester United, Roy Keane is now as he was then; Ireland's most relevant footballer…and it's not even close.