Oh Keano
There was a guy that used to write for The Independent called James Lawton. He was what gets called a doyen of sports writers. I would imagine him sitting down with a good claret and putting the world to rights with Michael Parkinson and Hugh McIlvanney.
He wrote well - opinionated, fruity, forceful, dramatic. I'd often gravitate to his column. I'm not sure I once agreed with a single thing he said in around 10 years of buying and reading the Indy.
It seemed like he wrote about Roy Keane every week. He fucking loved Roy Keane.
Perhaps I should love Roy Keane. He grew up in the same area of Cork as my father, was a Celtic and Spurs fan as a kid, and of the two ex-Man Utd players I've regularly had people telling me I look like, he is meant clearly far less as a passive-aggressive insult than Wayne Rooney.
I found myself in a minor (very minor) twitter spat about Keane recently and thought, since I've already dealt with Graham Gooch this month, I might as well have a go at slaying another of my sporting betes-noires.
Keane was a fine footballer, obviously. Very good. Very accomplished, very talented.
That's almost the point. The myth (self-myth) of Keane is that he was not the most talented but worked the hardest, shamed more gifted team-mates, drove teams on purely with his singular will to win.
Sure, sure. No.
He was always really really good at football. He can't really have had the hardest route to the top considering he was signed to a top flight English club (Forest) from small-town Ireland when only 18, then was a record signing for the Premier League champions when still in his early 20s.
I mean, he was always obviously excellent. At running, passing, shooting, tackling. There's sometimes an implication about e.g. Glenn McGrath, when he played cricket, that his astonishing ability for bowling at the top of off stump shamed less accurate bowlers who were just as talented but too wasteful to do the same thing - as if McGrath's gift wasn't itself the result of innate and fortunate ability.
So with Keane's collection of talents - as well as working hard, he was lucky to be so good at so many of the unspectacular elements of football. Don't buy that "I wasn't talented" stuff. Of course he was.
He was also, as I've mentioned, lucky to join the champions in 1993, a team on the up. He didn't make them champions. They already were. Ferguson made them champions. Cantona, Schmeichel and Giggs made them champions. Keane was not involved in the breaking of the drought.
Also of singular importance is how the club did after he left under a cloud, having fallen out with pretty much everybody.
He left while they were struggling more heavily than at any time in Ferguson's reign - they then, pretty rapidly, pulled themselves together with a makeshift midfield in early 2006, then won the title in 2007, 2008 and 2009. Gosh, they missed their driving force, didn't they? I mean, you'd still hear that, wouldn't you, that's the mad thing. "Utd have never fully replaced Roy Keane" ...
His biggest fans truly believed that United might have, I don't know, reached five Champions League finals and won them all with Keane still at the club.
The same kind of thing applies to his most infamous debacle - Saipan 2002. Oh, yeah, Keano's fucking will to win couldn't bear the mediocrity of it all. And that Keane-less Irish team (well, lacking the lesser Keane, anyway) somehow or other drew with Germany and only went out on penalties to Spain. What, they didn't fall apart? How did that happen?
But I actually read Lawton saying the other players didn't share Keane's will to actually win the tournament, and though they might have been happy with a strong, solid showing, he would have driven them to better.
Here's the thing. Maybe Keane's will-to-win was just, you know, being an arsehole. Maybe the Haaland incident, besides being criminal, is deeply unprofessional. Maybe he was a superb player who'd have been better if he'd kept it buttoned. Maybe Michael Carrick's been a better central midfielder for Man Utd.
Maybe he's an ok pundit who'd be better if he didn't feel the need to "tell the truth" (which isn't the truth) all the time. Maybe he'd be a good manager if he could lighten up a bit.
James Lawton, in his Keane-groupie prime of around 1999 to 2005, was constantly comparing Keane's great drive with Beckham's fancy dan bullshit.
While Giggs (who, let's not forget, played top class football for more than a decade after that) was always - I employ a little poetic licence - "desperately seeking to relight the embers of a talent which once dared to burn so incandescently" and Becks was "sacrificing his not-inconsiderable gift for striking a football on the altar of transient celebrity culture" and it was "laughable that this "so-called golden boy" be considered in the same sentence as truly gilded luminaries such as Charlton, Robson and Edwards", Keane was always "seeking to instill his insatiable will to win on team-mates too often scared to confront the ghosts of their club's great history, just as he did on that never-to-be-forgotten night in Turin when, on a booking and due to miss the final, he drove the side on to unlikely triumph", as if he's the only fucker who ever played well when he was due to miss the next game. Lawton used to mention that shit every week.
Again, though, regard. David Beckham left Old Trafford in 2003. They didn't win the title again until 2007. He won titles in four countries. He was a total pro. And you know what, I bet his training regime and will to win was easily the equal of Keane's.
He wrote well - opinionated, fruity, forceful, dramatic. I'd often gravitate to his column. I'm not sure I once agreed with a single thing he said in around 10 years of buying and reading the Indy.
It seemed like he wrote about Roy Keane every week. He fucking loved Roy Keane.
Perhaps I should love Roy Keane. He grew up in the same area of Cork as my father, was a Celtic and Spurs fan as a kid, and of the two ex-Man Utd players I've regularly had people telling me I look like, he is meant clearly far less as a passive-aggressive insult than Wayne Rooney.
I found myself in a minor (very minor) twitter spat about Keane recently and thought, since I've already dealt with Graham Gooch this month, I might as well have a go at slaying another of my sporting betes-noires.
Keane was a fine footballer, obviously. Very good. Very accomplished, very talented.
That's almost the point. The myth (self-myth) of Keane is that he was not the most talented but worked the hardest, shamed more gifted team-mates, drove teams on purely with his singular will to win.
Sure, sure. No.
He was always really really good at football. He can't really have had the hardest route to the top considering he was signed to a top flight English club (Forest) from small-town Ireland when only 18, then was a record signing for the Premier League champions when still in his early 20s.
I mean, he was always obviously excellent. At running, passing, shooting, tackling. There's sometimes an implication about e.g. Glenn McGrath, when he played cricket, that his astonishing ability for bowling at the top of off stump shamed less accurate bowlers who were just as talented but too wasteful to do the same thing - as if McGrath's gift wasn't itself the result of innate and fortunate ability.
So with Keane's collection of talents - as well as working hard, he was lucky to be so good at so many of the unspectacular elements of football. Don't buy that "I wasn't talented" stuff. Of course he was.
He was also, as I've mentioned, lucky to join the champions in 1993, a team on the up. He didn't make them champions. They already were. Ferguson made them champions. Cantona, Schmeichel and Giggs made them champions. Keane was not involved in the breaking of the drought.
Also of singular importance is how the club did after he left under a cloud, having fallen out with pretty much everybody.
He left while they were struggling more heavily than at any time in Ferguson's reign - they then, pretty rapidly, pulled themselves together with a makeshift midfield in early 2006, then won the title in 2007, 2008 and 2009. Gosh, they missed their driving force, didn't they? I mean, you'd still hear that, wouldn't you, that's the mad thing. "Utd have never fully replaced Roy Keane" ...
His biggest fans truly believed that United might have, I don't know, reached five Champions League finals and won them all with Keane still at the club.
The same kind of thing applies to his most infamous debacle - Saipan 2002. Oh, yeah, Keano's fucking will to win couldn't bear the mediocrity of it all. And that Keane-less Irish team (well, lacking the lesser Keane, anyway) somehow or other drew with Germany and only went out on penalties to Spain. What, they didn't fall apart? How did that happen?
But I actually read Lawton saying the other players didn't share Keane's will to actually win the tournament, and though they might have been happy with a strong, solid showing, he would have driven them to better.
Here's the thing. Maybe Keane's will-to-win was just, you know, being an arsehole. Maybe the Haaland incident, besides being criminal, is deeply unprofessional. Maybe he was a superb player who'd have been better if he'd kept it buttoned. Maybe Michael Carrick's been a better central midfielder for Man Utd.
Maybe he's an ok pundit who'd be better if he didn't feel the need to "tell the truth" (which isn't the truth) all the time. Maybe he'd be a good manager if he could lighten up a bit.
James Lawton, in his Keane-groupie prime of around 1999 to 2005, was constantly comparing Keane's great drive with Beckham's fancy dan bullshit.
While Giggs (who, let's not forget, played top class football for more than a decade after that) was always - I employ a little poetic licence - "desperately seeking to relight the embers of a talent which once dared to burn so incandescently" and Becks was "sacrificing his not-inconsiderable gift for striking a football on the altar of transient celebrity culture" and it was "laughable that this "so-called golden boy" be considered in the same sentence as truly gilded luminaries such as Charlton, Robson and Edwards", Keane was always "seeking to instill his insatiable will to win on team-mates too often scared to confront the ghosts of their club's great history, just as he did on that never-to-be-forgotten night in Turin when, on a booking and due to miss the final, he drove the side on to unlikely triumph", as if he's the only fucker who ever played well when he was due to miss the next game. Lawton used to mention that shit every week.
Again, though, regard. David Beckham left Old Trafford in 2003. They didn't win the title again until 2007. He won titles in four countries. He was a total pro. And you know what, I bet his training regime and will to win was easily the equal of Keane's.
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