ROY KEANE made a late entry to big-time football from Cobh Ramblers at 19, so it’s a bitter paradox that it’s all over for him at Sunderland because he took a big management job too early.
In at 34, out at 37. At the same age Keane started at the Stadium of Light his most successful boss, Sir Alex Ferguson, was in his second season at St Mirren following a £40-a-week part-time dug-out apprenticeship at East Stirling. Brian Clough, the other big figure in Keane’s career, was hauling Derby County out of the old Division Two after learning the rudiments at Hartlepool United.
As Keane vanishes from view, perhaps into another long and dark tunnel of introspection, Alan Shearer, older than Keane at 38, may cast a hard eye over the North-east’s latest football pile-up and conclude it would be mad to answer the clamour to take command of Newcastle without doing some time out of the limelight first.
It’s a sound argument that there was a lot less to learn about the managerial game in those muddy days when Fergie and Old Big ’Ead began. Neither was there the intensity of pressure and the level of public profile which made Keane implode with self-doubt only weeks after a win against Newcastle concluded a reasonable start and secured his team in 12th place.
The basics stay the same, though. Football nous, judgment of players, street-smartness, courage, cussedness and exceptional understanding of the characters of men are the core of the package.
The persistently alluring light on the rocks of this tough business sends out a message that great players have all this stuff on tap. Keane, according to his chairman Niall Quinn yesterday, had told himself he didn’t have it any longer, which is odd considering his age and the fact that Sunderland’s freefall is only recent.
This, surely, is where experience could have performed one vital role for Keane as he tortured himself.
Sunderland was an offer difficult to turn down. But had he been through some bad times first, away from the searchlight and the Premier League machine – at St Mirren or Hartlepool perhaps – he may have coped without so much anguish. And then called upon a well of knowledge and past episodes to sort out his problems and straighten out his defence.
Bosses at the lower levels suffer when they can’t win, too. Some are sacked, some quit, most battle on, living with failure until they turn things their way again. It’s how they learn. By contrast, it looks now that Keane has convinced himself he is burned up at the first sign of trouble.
Undoubtedly, he has floundered in the transfer market and has been uncertain of his best team, using 27 players this season. Managers used to learn over time how to gauge talent and spirit on years of scouting trips and reserve nights. Keane stepped straight into his job from Celtic’s midfield and ended up spending £70million.
He has signed men without the capability to make an impact in a Premier League stuffed with the world’s best performers. It is a league that makes you pay instantly for such mistakes.
If it’s true also that some of his players were cowed by his reputation, it may be because so recently he was snarling around the same Premier League pitches. Some time in the backwoods would surely have toned down his profile. Only a little, perhaps, in this era. But maybe just enough.
Similarly, if he has been too hard on his squad – and many of his comments suggest he admired much about them – and if he has been frustrated that they can’t match his own stringent playing standards, a few gap years may have taught him acceptance.
The enduring myth is that management is all about fear. It isn’t. It is as much about care and inspiration. At East Stirling, the star forward Bobby McCulley said Ferguson was “a frightening bastard”. But that’s not how he has got the best from Eric Cantona and Cristiano Ronaldo.
Ironically, for such a rampantly tough player, Keane also transmitted his growing sense of fallibility to his team and the fans by baring his thoughts so nakedly in public. We admired his honesty, but it’s something the great bosses learn never to do, even if they are resorting to the bottle in private, like Clough did.
Keane is “shrewd and intelligent”, according to his Irish biographer, Eamon Dunphy, who was so prescient about his downfall this week.
So we presume that Keane would have learnt more than most by knocking around places where the game retains the kind of soul he yearned for at Old Trafford.
Instead, football’s most ferocious anti-celebrity failed in a leap into the unknown based on his big name as a player. The lesson is plain. The game is personality-crazed and it is churning them over at increasingly high speed. But its old rules about wisdom and experience remain unchanged.
P.S. IT’S ALL about timing. Steven Gerrard is having a £150million apartment tower in Dubai named after him and getting a free suite in return. If only Peter Crouch had stayed at Anfield a few months longer.
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