Roy Keane puts the boot into Eden Hazard

Roy Keane was hogging the headlines again yesterday when he stood over his comment – originally made during televised Champions League coverage - that, if he’d been in the same Chelsea team as Eden Hazard, he would have kicked the Belgian in training for the way in which he linked himself with a possible move to Paris St Germain last February.

“If you’d asked me if I was playing with anybody, whether I was at Forest, Rockmount, Cobh Ramblers, and they were constantly talking - if it was true - they wanted to leave and they had a poor attitude to training, then I would kick them in training, yes,” said Keane yesterday, before dryly adding,”but I have kind of done that with most players, I suppose, even lads who didn’t want to leave.”

That was the studs up angle again spotlighted by the TV cameras at the press conference room at Ireland’s training centre in Versailles but, later, in the company of a handful of print journalists, Keane adopted a more understanding tone when asked about Hazard’s precipitous decline in form at Stamford Bridge over the course of much of the season just ended.