The medals don’t make the man

TYPICAL Keane — unpredictable to the end, he goes out with a whimper rather than the expected bang.

There was something not quite right about yesterday’s low-key retirement announcement: and that a mere doctor could stop the phenomenal juggernaut that was Roy Keane seemed somehow aggrieving. You might fancifully have expected Roy to demand some steel rods be inserted in his limbs, a course of electroshocks to be applied and he’d be good for another season. Robo-Roy, upgraded.

But sadly Keane is not, of course, the deadly oppo-killing machine we have always pictured in our fevered collective imagination, he’s just a fella with a dicky hip and a young family to bring up. Mortal after all, then.