Foul Play: Not Mad About the Roy

We give the FAI a hard time for all manner of reasons, but no-one can accuse them of lacking ambition with their latest appointment. When the vacancy arose two months ago, the nightmare scenario was that nobody of any stature would want to touch the Ireland job, narrowing the field of candidates down to an uninspiring selection of yesterday’s men looking for a way back into management (Terry Venables, Dave O’Leary) and affordable C-listers such as Phillippe Troussier and Bryan Robson.

Instead, the obvious outstanding candidate has been appointed. Foul Play is thus inclined to welcome Martin O’Neill’s coronation as Ireland’s football generalissimo – but with some reservations, almost entirely centred upon the identity of the man he has chosen as his assistant.
It is true that the Derryman’s stock has fallen slightly over the last five years or so, with the Sunderland episode an uninspiring chapter in what has been a highly impressive body of work. There are also some Aston Villa fans who would contend that he singularly failed to make the most of the considerable latitude he was granted in the transfer market by owner Randy Lerner.
The zenith of O’Neill’s career thus far was his five-year stint in charge of Celtic, where he comprehensively succeeded in overthrowing the Rangers dynasty and came very close to winning the UEFA Cup.
Of course, questions persist about how much store can be placed on his achievements north of the border: these days, winning the Scottish title is widely seen as the equivalent of going out into the street and beating up a frail old man to make yourself feel more powerful, and O’Neill’s feats at Parkhead were matched by his successor Gordon Strachan. The black mark most frequently alluded to recently has been O’Neill’s apparently limited input into day-to-day coaching; his strengths are in talent evaluation, tactical minutiae, player psychology and maintenance of morale.
You may have noticed that, six paragraphs in, I’ve yet to mention the R-word. It’s true: the controversial Corkman with the notoriously short fuse, the man who reckoned Messrs. McCarthy, Quinn and Staunton could all rot in hell, the man who never misses an opportunity to lacerate the FAI, is now their second most important employee. There were many, Foul Play included, who doubted whether Keane and the FAI could ever work together after all the bad blood of the last dozen years. And, though the hatchet has apparently been buried, there still must be serious doubts about whether they can harmoniously work together.
To say that ‘the jury is still out’ on Roy’s managerial career to date would be kind. His initial impact at Sunderland was highly impressive, but it soon went sour, and a look at the lengthy list of Roy’s recruits in the transfer market is quite terrifying, raising serious questions about his judgement of players’ abilities.
Nor would man-management appear to be his strong suit: very few of the players who cowered under his command at Sunderland and Ipswich have a good word to say about him, with more than a few painting a very plausible picture of a foul-tempered sergeant-major who wastes no time in apportioning blame to everyone except himself, nurses far too many grudges, is liable to explode into white rage at the most trivial provocation, and generally has everyone in his immediate vicinity walking on eggshells. In view of all this, you have to wonder if it’s a question of when, not if, half the Ireland squad will opt out.
There is a plausible counter-argument that Roy’s unique outlook is exactly what the Republic need right now: a refusal to settle for mediocrity, a relentless insistence on high standards, a complete absence of any ‘comfort zone’. According to this theory, Roy will drive moderately talented players to perform heroic deeds through sheer force of personality, single-handedly galvanising all those around him to go the extra mile, as witnessed time and again during his undeniably stellar playing career. Even now, more than a decade on, Juventus 1999 and Holland 2001 loom large in the memory as monumental examples of one man’s will to win: on both occasions, it was as if he personally refused to accept defeat in what is theoretically a game of twenty-two players.
Still, the doubts won’t go away. Revisiting the Saipan episode may not seem a particularly constructive enterprise eleven years later, but forgive me if I remain deeply troubled by both Keane’s scorched-earth policy at the time and his complete lack of contrition since. The point is that, if we insist on judging others, we must prepare to be judged ourselves, and a man who is prepared to walk out on his own nation at such a crucial juncture in its footballing life-story cannot reasonably be trusted with a role as crucial as the one Roy is now being entrusted with.
Forget all the semantics about whether ‘Mick sent him home’, a technicality which Roy’s defenders continue to cling to with some vehemence. This implies that Roy was desperate to play in the World Cup but was prevented from doing so by the spiteful Yorkshireman, who deliberately engineered/provoked Roy’s walkout and sabotaged all subsequent attempts to broker a cessation of hostilities, leaving Roy outside the camp when he badly wanted to stay in it, dashing his World Cup dreams entirely against his own wishes.
A more realistic appraisal, and one not in the least contradicted by Roy’s own autobiography, is that he had harboured a deep-seated grudge against the FAI for quite some time, possibly on Cork-regionalist grounds which would take too long to excavate here, and under the influence of Sir Alex Ferguson (with whom he subsequently fell out bitterly) had come to regard international football with a combination of scorn, derision and contempt. There are repeated references in Roy’s book to his club-before-country mentality: Manchester United paid his wages, they ran things properly, they competed for major trophies. Ireland duty was an inconvenience, a complete pain in the hole, an embarrassing can’t-organise-a-piss-up-in-a-brewery insult to his professional standards. The final straw came when he travelled half-way across the world to compete in a World Cup with team-mates who, shock horror, were sufficiently casual about the entire enterprise to find time to enjoy the occasional beer.
I remain insistent that if Roy’s absolute priority was for Ireland to perform as well as possible at the World Cup, he could have gritted his teeth and stayed there and resolved to play as full a part as possible in the tournament, irrespective of any issues (justified or otherwise) he had with the team management or the FAI’s flight seating arrangements or the quality of the training pitches. It’s still worth recalling just how close we came to making a major impact on the Finals, outplaying both Spain and eventual runners-up Germany for long stretches, with a youthful Damien and Robbie at their fearless best. It’s still worth asking ourselves whether a fully-committed Roy Keane would have made that marginal difference that would have given us a very real chance to win the damn thing. We’ll never know, because he wasn’t there.
We can blame everyone else until the end of time. The truth is that if he’d really wanted to play, he surely could have. In the end, the team’s greater good seemed to be secondary to Roy’s need to make his point in as public and dramatic a fashion as possible. By his own account, at the precise point where we kicked off against Cameroon on opening day, he was out walking his dog rather than bothering to watch the match. And this man is about to be entrusted with the assistant manager’s role of the Republic of Ireland?
It is a blessed relief that Trap and Tardelli, who had been thoroughly taking the piss for the last 18 months, are gone. The O’Neill/Keane double act offers some grounds for optimism. The adventure ahead may offer thrills aplenty. But there may be trouble ahead. And when it arrives, nobody will be able to say we weren’t warned well in advance. Here we go...