O’Neill stresses the joy of Roy

Martin O’Neill says he never detected any sense Roy Keane had fallen out of love with football before asking him to be his assistant as Ireland manager.

In extracts from his new autobiography, Keane reveals O’Neill’s approach had been the perfect tonic for a football man who’d grown somewhat disillusioned with the game.

“I played the cool character but I had a real buzz about myself,” Keane writes of O’Neill’s offer. “It gave me a bit of joy and I’d lost that in football, definitely. I was doing the TV work, still going to watch matches and enjoying them but I had no purpose in my life.”