Keane - back where he belongs

So Roy Keane is back in the Premiership after one of the most unlikely journeys in football.

Could anyone have dreamed when he was drummed out of Manchester United 16 months ago, the mists of rage still swirling around his head, that Keane would so soon be preparing to take on Alex Ferguson in the heat of the world’s most exciting league?

The chances were that Keane would have retreated to the Cheshire bunker where he lives behind fortified walls, only to be seen walking his dog, only to be heard sticking the knife into a player or manager who did not live up to his own exacting standards.

The odds were on Keane becoming a footballing recluse, secure in his past triumphs but one who might struggle to find a niche to suit his volatile talents.

How wrong we were.

Instead he teamed up with Niall Quinn, his former Irish team-mate and, yes, one of those he described once as a “muppet”, and took Sunderland from 23rd in the Coca-Cola Championship on the day he took over last August to the Premiership returnees they are today.

On the way he demonstrated that you should not judge future managerial credentials by the glossy brochure of playing days, but by the intelligence gleaned at the coal face of a decade in the Premiership.

Everything pointed to Keane being the spawn of Ferguson. After all, he was the man whose machete tongue flayed his own team-mates and supporters on a regular basis when captain at Old Trafford.

He ridiculed Rio Ferdinand, tore into the Rolex-wearing, Ferrari-driving culture, lambasted kids who had played 20 matches and thought they had made it and famously criticised the ’prawn sandwich’ brigade.

His verbal gutting of former Irish manager Mick McCarthy at the World Cup remains one of the most acidic character assassinations in the world of sport.

Ferguson’s ’hairdryer’ was a gentle breeze compared to the tempest which raged within Keane.

However, that is not the man who has rejuvenated Sunderland.

It is not the man who has served notice in one stupendous season that here is a potential successor to the great man himself whenever Ferguson feels like relinquishing the Old Trafford reins.

Where once Keane could not tolerate mediocrity in those around him, in management he has learned to put aside the red-card recklessness and eyeball-to-eyeball strops of his playing days and accept its inevitability while seeking to improve.

No touchline spats with referees or fellow managers, no slaughtering of the innocent, if incompetents, no howling at the moon.

Keane has displayed dignity and no little diplomacy.

Just once he sat in the players’ canteen in the early weeks enjoying the banter he had missed since hanging up his boots. Immediately he realised that was a mistake. Players play, managers manage. Distance is essential.

Take his handling of Tobias Hysen, Anthony Stokes and Marton Fulop, three players who missed the team bus for the championship match against Barnsley.

Keane told the driver ’Let’s go’ at the appointed time, dropped them from the squad, went and won the game and then reminded the time-challenged trio that their team-mates deserved their respect at all times.

With that the matter was concluded. Steely discipline accompanied by the minimum of fuss. A resolution Ferguson could not have bettered.

And all the time Sunderland were winning match after match with the precision and consistency Keane displayed week after week on the pitch.

The Premiership, of course, raises the bar to a different stratosphere compared to the ’launch it and hope’ world of the Championship and Keane will require cash, lots of it, if Sunderland are not to follow a similar path to that trodden by McCarthy the last time they flirted with the big-time.

But one thing is clear. There will be no more single-minded football manager in the Premiership next season.

Remember Keane’s reaction when he won one of his manager of the month awards this last season. “It can go in the garage,” he said.

They were the words of a man who truly knows the difference between meaningless baubles and real trophies?

A clever man who has reinvented himself for the new chapter in his triumph-laden career.

A man who one day appears destined to lift trophies once more at Old Trafford.