Keane Will Shake Us Up Again

WITHIN days of the big news on May 23, 2002, the t-shirts were rolling off the screen presses. You’d see them occasionally on the streets of Dublin, a lot more down in the Rebel County of Cork. 

Michael Collins and Roy Keane. Two heroic Corkmen shot in the back. 

On that date, Irish soccer manager Mick McCarthy sent Keane, captain of the team and star midfielder of Manchester United, home on the eve of the 2002 World Cup finals in Japan and South Korea. It meant that Ireland would face its matches without who many considered to be its star player. 

After the World Cup, there was some talk about Keane coming back. There was more talk when Mick McCarthy left as manager a few months later. There was talk when the new coach, Brian Kerr, was appointed last January. 

Then in February 2003, after a meeting with Kerr, Keane seemingly put an end to speculation with an announcement that he was done with international football, to prolong his career with Manchester United. 

“The unequivocal advice given to me by my doctors was that I should not return to international football. In the light of such advice I regret that I am compelled to confirm my retirement from international football.”

And that, it was thought, was that. Until Tuesday. 

Dublin-based newspapers had been full of the rumors since the previous weekend. Many discounted the news, even when on Tuesday morning several papers put the speculation on the front page. 

Then, a little before 4 p.m. local time, the news reached Ireland that Keane would return. “It cannot have been an easy decision for him but his desire to represent his country is immense,” said Kerr. 

After nearly two years of bitterness and recrimination from fans at home, it’s not hard to see why it would be a tough call. 

Ger Gilroy, who hosts Dublin’s top sports call-in radio show on Newstalk, started his program at 7 p.m. with a song from the Smashing Pumpkins that starts off, “Today is the greatest day I’ve ever known. . .”

News broadcasters throughout the evening shouldered aside Iraq, the upcoming immigration referendum, and half a dozen other stories to lead with Prodigal Son Roy Keane’s return. One radio presenter, rather losing the run of himself, compared the event to the Second Coming of Christ. 

But shortly after Keane’s announcement, it was clear that not everyone would be happy about it. “He let Ireland down,” said one caller to a Dublin station. “We don’t want him back.” 

“I’ve decided I’m not going to support the team if he’s back playing, and a lot of my mates, people I work with, people I drink with agree with me,” said another. 

“He’s now past his prime,” another said. “He’s only doing it for ego. He betrayed the country. We could have gone much further in the World Cup if he’d stayed.”

When judging whether to welcome Roy back, a lot of minds are casting back to 2002. 

It was the new Civil War, quipped the less creative columnists here (like me). But in fairness to them (and me), it wasn’t too far off. 

While Keane had made vocal complaints about the conditions the team were training under, the final straw had come in a closed team meeting, in a fiery confrontation between Keane and McCarthy in which the former called the latter an English bastard. 

Keane was sent home, and speculation that he might return was only ended during an interview with RTE’s Tommie Gorman. Until the last moment, a wealthy patron even had his personal jet standing by at Manchester Airport with a flight plan already filed to head back east. 

From the moment the reports started coming back from the training ground on Saipan, the arguments began back in Ireland. Was it Keane’s ego, or was he right to complain about the third-rate training facilities? 

Was Keane a hero or a victim? Was he standing up for the team or was he being manipulated by Svengali-ish confidante, controversial broadcaster (and Keane’s biographer) Eamon Dunphy? 

It sounds like hyperventilation now, but at the time it seemed the most serious issue facing the country. Families, colleagues, barstool football commentators all fell out over it. 

On the day Ireland played Cameroon, the first match in the tournament, Eamon Dunphy showed up wearing Cameroon’s national colors. 

Fortunately, the Irish team more than acquitted itself by its performance, sans Keane, in Japan and Korea. While there was a nagging feeling that the team could possibly have done better with his presence, when Ireland drew level with Germany, ensuring it would make it to the next round, the team were playing out of their skins. 

People you’d never met before were watching the matches with you in pubs, reflexively grabbing your hand, showering you with pints when the critical goals were scored. The only equivalent I have experienced in American sport might have been the 1980 Olympic hockey match against the Russians. 

And suddenly the loss of Keane didn’t seem too bad. But when his autobiography written by Dunphy came out a few weeks later, it caused more controversy in England (over things Keane admitted doing while a Manchester United player) than it did in Ireland. When McCarthy published his own book it was a damp squib. 

Niall Quinn, one of Keane’s Irish teammates, published his own book later that year. Despite being labeled a coward and a Muppet by Keane, Quinn still had considerable sympathy for his ex-captain. 

His description of Keane’s statement at the team meeting was searing: 

“It was the eloquent tone of Keane’s speech that was 100 times worse. If you sit down and dissect, and tear, and shred the living daylights out of the man who is supposed to be in charge of all this, and you do it systematically and brutally ... Mick was on the floor. There was shock in the room. 

“People talk about Irish patriot Robert Emmet’s speech from the dock. They talk about the oratory of Brendan Behan, Eamon de Valera, Michael Collins. But Roy Keane’s 10-minute oration can be mentioned in the same breath.

“It was clinical, fierce, earth-shattering to the person on the end of it and it ultimately caused a huge controversy in Irish society.

“We’ve had the Maastricht Treaty; we’ve had divorce; we’ve had referendums on abortion. We’ve had changes of government over the past 20 years you wouldn’t believe. We’ve had an influx of investment and wealth in the country. 

“We’re kind of cocky as a nation right now. But this thing stopped the country in its tracks like nothing had ever done, and it’s still going on. 

Keane may have handled it badly, but what he represents isn’t so much about football as about Irish society itself. 

Keane is arrogant, brash and scarily talented. At Manchester United, he found a club where he was provided world-class facilities and surrounded by professionals. 

Irish soccer, on the other hand, was stuck in a pattern of amateurism, distrust and even resentment of talent and success, and above all the go-along-to-get-along mentality. Disputes were handled quietly, not discussed openly. 

Not unlike Ireland itself. 

Keane’s refusal to suffer fools, to accept anything less than the best from everyone around him, was a shock to the system. The Football Association of Ireland (FAI) all but admitted that Keane was right about the conditions in Saipan. They hired ex-Baltimore Technology CEO Fran Rooney to reshape the FAI. 

But some of the larger issues that Keane raised, by implication, about Irish attitudes toward success versus lowest-common-denominator consensus were never really developed. 

Now that he’s back, it’s those questions, rather than whether he starts against Poland next week, that matter the most. 

Welcome back Roy.