The wearing of the green

Liam Mackey reflects on the extraordinary highs — and lows — of Roy Keane’s international career.

THE UPCOMING friendly between Ireland and Chile at Lansdowne Road may be of long-term importance to Steve Staunton and his new-look squad as they plan for Euro 2008 but, as international football matches go this summer, it’s not exactly the game most likely to set the pulse racing.

Nevertheless, the fixture will have a special resonance for one ex-international, because it was against the same South American opposition and in the same venue that Roy Keane made his senior debut for his country 15 years ago almost to the day.

Keane’s first full cap also coincided with Jack Charlton’s 50th game in charge. Charlton was a cautious football manager, but even he could no longer resist the clamour for a call-up for the 19-year-old from Cork who had made such a sensational impact in his debut season in the top flight in England with Nottingham Forest.

May 22, 1991 would have been a day to remember for Roy Keane, but in all other respects the game against Chile was a forgettable end-of-term affair, a lacklustre 1-1 draw on a bumpy pitch notable only for the fact the visitors came close to wrecking a home record which by then extended to 25 games unbeaten.

Keane’s competitive debut for his country would also end in a draw, but this time the game was nerve-jangling thriller — a 3-3 European Championship qualifying draw with Poland in Poznan the following October. With Keane and Andy Townsend both outstanding at the heart of a novel five-man midfield, the Irish had looked on course for one of their most famous away victories, but defensive mistakes saw them surrender a 3-1 lead late on and, with it, the chance of qualifying for the finals in 1992.

Given that, in the final round of games, England only barely pipped the Irish at the post the disappointment was acute, but the pragmatic Charlton already had one eye on the prospect of greater glory. “I have got to prepare a team for the next World Cup,” he had said earlier in the Euro campaign. “That’s the main thing. And it’s the younger players who are going to take us to America.”

When it comes to selecting his best-ever displays in the green shirt, the US ‘94 qualifier against Spain in Seville in November of 1992 is a definite stand-out. A scoreless draw — which should have been a win had not John Aldridge’s perfectly good goal been disallowed — was a significant point gained on the road to America, but it was Keane’s emergence as the team’s virtual playmaker which caught the eye.

In the cauldron of the Sanchez Pizjuan stadium that night, there was no cooler nor a more reassuring sight from an Irish point of view than the 21-year-old Corkman in possession. Ahead of the game, Maradona had been singing Keane’s praises, and on the night the rising star lived up to all the hype.

Almost the full range of his talents was on display: a superb first touch; tidy, close control; strong, precision-timed tackling, meaty, well-directed headers, positive and meticulous distribution and, fuelling everything, the awareness and vision to always do the right thing. Perhaps the only thing missing for regular Keane watchers were those surging runs which were already a hallmark of his game at Forest, but then playing football under Jack Charlton was a rather different matter to playing it under Brian Clough.

As Keane told me after the game in Seville: “When I get the ball, I try and play a bit of football. But, obviously, the way we play — which I suppose is the long ball game — I have to be careful.”

Nevertheless, Keane knew he had delivered in a big way.

“I may have answered some of my critics a bit,” he said. “I still think there is a question mark over me playing at international level in some people’s minds, especially because of the contrast with the way we play at Forest — which is all football — and the way we play with the international team, which is a bit different. Some people think that I have a problem adapting to the different role, but I don’t think so.”

It didn’t take much reading between the lines to discern Keane was no fan of the Charlton brand of football — something he would make clear in his Eamon Dunphy-penned autobiography 10 eventful years later — but at the time he was happy enough to sacrifice some of his natural instincts for the collective cause. In doing so, he came of age as a full international, and remained an ever-present in the Irish side which, after a heart-stopping final qualifying night in Belfast, secured qualification for the US World Cup in 1994.

Those finals would end in the disappointment of a 2-0 defeat by Holland in boiling Orlando but, by then, the Irish had written another glorious chapter in their footballing history by beating Italy 1-0 in their opening game in Giant Stadium. Keane, by now firmly established as a new hero at Manchester United, was a consistent performer in all four games in the finals, and left America as the great hope for Irish football in the coming years.

Little did anyone know then his first World Cup would also be his last.

Ireland’s failure to qualify for Euro ‘96 in England signalled the departure of Jack Charlton and the arrival of Mick McCarthy. Ominously, a petulant Keane was sent off against Russia in his first game under McCarthy, a man with whom he had issues going back to their days as uneasy international team mates. As manager and player kept a difficult, arm’s length relationship, controversy was never far away with, in a foretaste of things to come, the media already taking sides along the fault line. Results failed to paper over the cracks. With the retirement of Andy Townsend, McCarthy made Keane captain, but two campaigns were to elapse before they would at least share the satisfaction of qualifying for another major tournament.

Despite the underlying tension, the qualifying campaign for the World Cup finals in Japan and Korea in 2002 would bear witness to some of Keane’s finest performances in a green shirt, capped by an awesome display of power and poise in the critical 1-0 home win against Holland at Lansdowne Road.

Vying with the Seville game nine years earlier as a candidate for Keane’s best Irish display ever, that September 1, 2001 match against Holland would long be remembered for Jason McAteer’s goal, as a 10-man Ireland held out for victory in front of an ecstatic full house at the old ground. But if McAteer grabbed the headlines, it was Keane who had taken the game by the scruff of the neck from word go, when his no-frills introductory tackle on Marc Overmars so rattled the Dutch as a whole that Patrick Kluivert still hadn’t regained his composure when he found himself clean through on goal minutes later. The striker shot wide of the post, the first of an extraordinary procession of misses by the Dutch.

History has recast the game as a glorious Irish victory — and the result obviously lends substance to that view — but the truth is that home side were lucky to emerge with a vital win. But more than luck, Ireland had Roy Keane on their side that day because, if ever there was a time for strength in adversity, this was it. Keane was frankly immense against Holland, a powerhouse of commitment and composure just when those qualities were needed the most.

KEANE was back in Dublin for the first-leg play-off game against Iran, contributing to a 2-0 win which set the Irish up nicely for the return trip to Tehran. But Keane missed the second leg, having returned to Manchester for treatment on his knee. However, with a profile that now dwarfed that of any other Irish player, nothing was every straightforward where Keane’s international career was concerned.

“Obviously some felt the injury was too convenient and had the impression I’d done a runner,” Keane said. “Had Ireland lost out on qualifying, no doubt my absence would have been advanced as a reason. We didn’t. Got the result we needed. But the rumours still left a sour taste. Anyway, we were going to the World Cup finals.”

The operative word being ‘going’. Roy Keane never arrived.. Saipan was as far as he got, an inconspicuous island which is now synonymous with the single most divisive controversy in the history of Irish sport. You may just have heard about it, so we won’t rehash the gory detail here. Suffice to say that the long simmering tensions between player and manager erupted into a full-blown war of words, with Keane’s departure from the Irish camp the sensational outcome.

To this day — and probably forever — there are those who will insist that Roy Keane walked out on his country and others that he was kicked out by Mick McCarthy. It always seemed to me that Keane jumped just about a split second before he was pushed, but what really mattered was that Ireland were obliged to go on to Japan and Korea without their best player. And did pretty well, all things considered, only going out in the knock-out phase after a penalty shoot-out against Spain.

Saipan would continue to rumble on, first as a fierce national debate, then as a series of books and even a comic musical but, with Roy Keane having already announced his retirement from international football, it was plain old football that would eventually do for his nemesis Mick McCarthy.

Defeats by Russia and Switzerland in the early stages of the Euro 2004 campaign brought the curtain down on McCarthy’s reign as manager, and ushered in the new era of Brian Kerr. The changing of the guard was very much to Roy Keane’s liking. Kerr courted the prodigal son, Keane responded in kind and an Irish public, anxious for success after the European campaign had ended in failure, welcomed the player back into the national fold.

Unfortunately, the second coming of Keane would not be sufficiently momentous to take him, or Ireland, to another World Cup finals. Although the veteran was by now having to cope with the long-term effects of injury, his vast experience and know-how were still evident in his command performance against France in Dublin in September of last year. But even with the Cork man on song, the Irish lost the game to a sublime Thierry Henry goal.

Points dropped at home and away to Israel would ultimately take a severe toll, but there was still a chance for Ireland to qualify for the play-offs in the final game against Switzerland in Lansdowne Road. But, critically, both Roy Keane and Damien Duff were unavailable for the match, robbing Ireland of the authority and creativity which would have been needed to secure anything beyond an all too predictable scoreless draw.

Within days of the end of the campaign, Roy Keane again announced his international retirement — and this time it was for good. The World Cup qualifier against France at Lansdowne Road, on September 7, 2005, had been his last appearance in the green shirt.

Sixty-six cps and nine goals over 14 years — the bare statistics are impressive enough, but do scant justice to the extraordinary reality of the roller-coaster ride that was Roy Keane’s Irish career.

His comeback under Brian Kerr might ultimately have been fruitless, but at least it ensured that the final portrait of Roy Keane as an international footballer was of him leaving a football pitch rather than leaving an airport terminal. Saipan is part of the record but so, too, are those towering performances in Seville in 1992 and Lansdowne Road in 2001 and all points in between.

Nation-splitting controversy notwithstanding, it’s a measure of Keane’s stature as an all-time Irish great that only the most bitterly inclined would argue against his inclusion in the modern pantheon alongside the likes of Giles, McGrath and Brady.

Giles and Brady never got to the finals of the World Cup; McGrath got to two, and a European Championship to boot. Roy Keane made it to one, which is pretty good going for any footballer. He came closer than most to making it to another. That he didn’t means we’re left with a story of what was — and what might have been.