ROY KEANE INTERVIEW:He'll be back. Football is in his blood. TOM HUMPHRIEShears the true story of what was going on behind the scenes on Wearside and what the future may hold.

SMELL OF SUCCESS: A beard, for God’s sake, does he think he is Jesus?

HE FLICKED the button on the car phone speaker and killed the call. When the road offered him a decent chance to do so he spun the car around and pointed it the other way. He made another call and kept on driving. Home was empty when he got there. No Theresa. No kids. He had a cup of tea and waited. He doesn’t remember how long it took, but he remembers looking out the window and seeing the journalists gathering at the gate.

It had been done.

He learned three days later that he could have had them moved on. They stood on the neighbours’ walls and blocked the road. They wanted one thing. They wanted a few quotes, certainly, but mainly they wanted a picture of Roy Keane walking the dog.

He looked out the front door one day and the flashbulbs popped. Makes you look like a criminal looking out your own front door.

Meanwhile, everybody he had ever met and plenty he hadn’t were weighing in with their opinions. He lists some of the names and some of the opinions, shaking his head in sadness. Some of the sadness punctuated with laughter. “Tony Cascarino says he will never work in management again! He never signed his new contract! He’s grown a beard! He was remote. He was isolated. He had lost the plot. A beard, for God’s sake! Does he think he is Jesus?”

He gets to Alex Ferguson’s name on the roll call of expert contributors. Well . . .

“Alex Ferguson. My old manager comes out and says, ‘You never know what he is going to do next’. What did he think I was going to do? Go backpacking around Mexico? I have five kids. Football is in my blood! I’d just had enough at Sunderland. Things had changed. End of bloody story.”

Funny thing is, he says, there was no crisis in the Keane household, apart from the intruders at the gate. No sobbing. No wailing. They sat tight. He had never done cool, clean exits. This was part of a series. They’d ride it out.

On Saturday afternoon he got a text from Sunderland’s owner, Ellis Short, apologising for a piece which had been written by an assistant of his in the Guardian.

He stared at the phone for a minute. There had been no text from Short saying goodbye or thank you or can we talk about this. Now Short was saying sorry about a piece in the Guardian. Must be bad. “They made out afterwards that the guy who did the talking was some kind of minion, but this was the same man who came and interviewed me a few months earlier about my plans for the club. They knew what they were doing. If the number two is doing a piece calling me a maverick and saying I couldn’t be trusted, I’m unstable, etc, you know things haven’t been right.”

Yes, things had changed at Sunderland. Richard Bevan of the League Managers Association (LMA) came and told Keane he was sitting still in a tornado of negative spin. The LMA took the Guardian to law and an apology and €11,323 was quick to materialise. Keane gave the money away. Couldn’t touch it.

The folk at the gate drained away like snow into slush into water. They missed the best photo opportunity at the end of the day. When the dust had settled, he went back to his apartment up in Durham. His old friend and assistant, Tony Loughlin, had lived just down the street during their time together at Sunderland.

Now it was time to clear Roy’s apartment. So they hired a van and did it themselves. Early one morning. The settee, the television, the armchairs, the works. Two removal men straining muscles they never knew they had and laughing to each other as they waited for a geezer with a camera to pop out from behind a hedge to snap the dynamic duo doing the heavy lifting. Reminded him of his days working for Cork Timber years ago.

All things pass.

THE MATRIX: “He’s on €30,000 or €40,000 a week, and he is upset about the appearance cheque.”

WHEN YOU try to sign a player now, the agent won’t let him come near you until the deal is done. Everything is agreed. Every “i” is dotted, every “t” crossed. Then you get to meet your blushing, pimply bride.

Scene: Roy Keane is sitting in his office at Sunderland. Across the table a young fella is slumped, gum in his mouth, ripped jeans, and he comes from what Keane describes decisively as a “crap club”. He mutters something to Keane.

“Sorry?”

“Who else ya buying?”

Recalling the morning and the meeting and the player now, he gives a quick flourish of teeth and rolls his eyes.

“I should have told him there and then to get out of my office. But I signed him. We needed bodies at the time. He got a contract for too much. You learn. I learned. If the word about a player is that he is bad news, well, then he will be bad news.

“But when we came up we had 13 or 14 players starting into the Premiership. You’ll sign anybody who will play. I would be giving contracts to players I didn’t rate that highly. I needed the bodies! You learn. Every manager does. There’s an image of me as being intolerant of anything different to what I would have done late in my career, but I rolled with things.

“I gave the benefit to lots of players. I had the police come to the training pitch and had to go off with them for one of the players one day. Christmas dos, parties, etc. Things got out of hand and I sorted it. Three players were caught on video one night with a girl. I had to go and sort it out. I wanted one to play the next game. We actually needed him. Niall and the board overruled me. I took their opinion on board.”

There’s an artificial intelligence that rules the football world. Players are subject to it above all else. Money. The Matrix. They don’t teach you much about its corrosive influences down at Lilleshall on the FA coaching courses, but it drives young men crazy.

He recalls another player at Sunderland being left out of a League Cup game one night and letting it be known around the precinct that he was royally pissed off. Not because he was missing a game, but because he was obsessed with his appearance money. No game, no little cheque.

“He’s on €30,000 or €40,000 a week, and he is upset, not about missing out, but about the appearance cheque. Jesus.”

Once upon a time, when Roy Keane was a young blade at Manchester United, he drove a red Mercedes which carried the registration “Roy J16”.

“That’s not the proudest moment of my life,” he says when you remind him. “I was stupid, but at least I had done a few things in football.”

At Sunderland he would look at the players shuffling out to the training ground in the mornings and half of them moved with the enthusiasm of men arriving at 5.30am at the pithead. “Nothing but a 12-hour shift down the mine ahead of them.”

Players. Players. Players. He had too many of them. He knows that. When Sunderland were surfacing from the depths, they had too few players and his reaction was to overcompensate. Too many players means you are over the recommended limit of grumpy players.

And then he brought in Antonio Gomez from Liverpool to work on the physical side, and suddenly they had fewer injuries too. Kenwyne Jones got injured playing a friendly for Trinidad and Tobago against England, but everyone else seemed to become indestructible.

“If you are left out of the team, you will be grumpy. I certainly was. If you have two or three pissed off, you have a chance. If you have seven, eight or nine of them pissed off? Well, the atmosphere changes. I knew that was an issue. I knew come January a few of them would move on though.”

Some old timers attempted to take advantage of familiarity. He had to pull Kenny Cunningham up on his habit of calling him Roy all the time when the rest of the panel called him Gaffer. A venial sin.

Dwight Yorke’s sin was of the mortal variety. “One day I get Yorkie texting me from an international game asking can he miss a league match the following week because he has business to take care of. No!”

And some of them, he isn’t sure yet how to categorise them. He remembers bringing Clive Clarke, on one of his rare Sunderland appearances, to play at Stoke, where he had been a player.

“He had been there. I swear he actually thought he was Stanley Matthews coming back to them . . . Kissing everybody.

“He got back on the bus with presents for his baby, delighted with himself.

“He went on loan to Coventry, and on a night we got beaten in the cup to Luton the staff came in and said ‘Clive Clarke has had a heart attack at Leicester’. I said, ‘Is he okay? I’m shocked they found one, you could never tell by the way he plays’. But Clive Clarke goes and does a piece in some newspaper telling the world that I have lost the dressingroom. He wasn’t there! How does he know? Clown!”

The club’s station in life changed. So did the players. And the ethos. He read a quote a few weeks ago from George Graham which reminded him of meeting the Tottenham lads he signed last summer.

“George said, if you are buying a player he has to see it as a step up. I thought that was spot on. You don’t want to be signing players who make out they are doing you a favour coming to your club.”

So he ended up, inadvertently, with too many players and a quiet staff.

Any bollockings were always issued from Keane’s tongue. It was boom, boom, boom when he hit the training pitch. Incoming! Incoming!

“On the days when I was there I would step in and pep things up, but sometimes afterwards I would think to myself that the staff should really be catching this. It was a little worry.

“In an ideal world, if a player comes to complain to a staff member – and they do, because footballers can be moody bastards and I was one of the worst – you want the staff member saying, ‘Look, keep your head down, shut up and get on with it in training’. You can’t be saying, ‘I’d have you in my team. He’s not been in for two days, so how does he know how good you were today?’

“You can’t have your staff man wanting to be mates. I think in retrospect there was a bit of that.”

When Keane left, his successor gave back the fines – Sunderland say 50 per cent of each fine was returned – which he had imposed for disciplinary issues during the year. He shakes his head. Hmm.

DAYS OF HEAVEN: It was just two years since they met in secret in the Irish countryside.

A FEW weeks in death’s waiting room. At the end of last October, Sunderland beat Newcastle United 2-1. When Keane arrived at Sunderland they were second from bottom in the Championship mire and charitable commentators included the word “Sunderland” in any sentence which also included the words “sleeping” and “giant”.

Now, in their second year of Premiership football, they had beaten Newcastle United. Damned Mags. That’s Freedom of the City stuff.

It was just over two years since they had met in secret at a house in the Irish countryside. Keane and Niall Quinn and the nascent Drumaville consortium. Whoa. Salman Rushdie, the Ayatollah and who?

They’d met, had shaken hands and worked out what sort of football club they wanted to build. One with values and foundations.

And they were doing it. For two-and-a-bit years. Keane’s mantra to Quinn and to Drumaville was that he would do the football his way. Always they nodded happy assent. He’d called Tony Loughlin, one of his oldest friends in football, and they headed for the northeast, partners in crime.

Drumaville wanted ambition and drive and value. Those qualities blew into the windswept Charlie Hurley Training Ground on Day One. His players got the best of everything. His staff looked and sounded smart and savvy. Sunderland did things with a bit of class. Values.

“I’ve always been 100 per cent behind the values at Sunderland. We tried to change the whole mindset – the training ground, the atmosphere, the way we approached matches, the way we dressed, hotels. That doesn’t win the games for you, but I wanted us to be seen – and so did Niall – as a proper, well-run club.

“I would go to other clubs and come back to Sunderland and wonder how people coming in to play us would see our club. I think we had a bit of class. It is a fantastic football club. I have no bitterness towards the club.”

And they found traction quickly, taking the elevator from the basement to the top of the Championship table.

He’d taken the job at Sunderland and now he was the front for everything. Programmes, season tickets, media, etc. “Box Office” was the buzz phrase. He was box office. Being that way is part of his DNA, but . . .

“At the same time, I’m 35 and learning the trade. Sunderland offered me the job and it was a punt for them. And Sunderland was a punt for me. We knew there’d be mistakes, but everything in football gets so much spin that there’s no breathing room.”

They beat Newcastle and then they lost three on the spin after that. Stoke. Bad. Chelsea. Understandable. Portsmouth. Hmm.

By the time they were to play Blackburn on November 15th, the story had gone mad. He got a call on Thursday from Louise, the public relations woman at Sunderland. It can’t have been an easy call to make.

“Roy, they say you are resigning?”

How do you respond when your employers are asking you if you have left the building?

“Really?” he said looking at the phone and narrowing his eyes, sniffing the air and seeing if he smelled any rats. “Well, I’ll see you in work tomorrow.”

As it turned out, he had to attend a meeting the next morning and he didn’t get to training. By the time he met the team that night the story was almost being run as verifiable fact across the media universe. Sunderland beat Blackburn on Saturday afternoon.

He chuckled to himself and moved on. Maybe he shouldn’t be coming in at all. They beat Blackburn, but failed to turn a corner. West Ham did them next time out. Then Bolton came to the Stadium of Light and scored four.

Niall Quinn rang him on the Monday. They were talking football, which was unusual. In fact, it was, Keane concedes, the first time in two-and-a-half years Quinn had mentioned team matters to him.

“And Niall would say, he was chairman, we had lost 4-1, he had to make the call. Fair enough, but he was talking to me about the players needing to come into work with a smile on their face. That really concerned me. The day I walked into Sunderland, putting a smile on the faces of well-paid players was the last thing anybody wanted me to do. Players had been taking the piss out of the club for years. If they wanted them smiling all the time they should have employed Roy Chubby Brown.”

Not Roy Keane.

“My question to Niall was, who are you listening to here?”

Alarm bells went off and red flags went up. Quinn keeps his ear to the ground. People speak to him and he interprets the winds. Keane wondered what was beneath these words.

“It wasn’t Niall. It was the undercurrent. Where it was coming from. Smiles on players’ faces? It’s my job to get them training well. There was good spirit. That’s what had kept us in the Premiership last year. Our spirit. That got the alarm bells ringing. Without a shadow of a doubt. The American fella would have been on Niall’s case.”

HEIMAT: “That’s why I loved it there. That’s why football is in the blood.”

THEY LOST once at Everton, 7-1, in their first season in the Premiership. The worst ever, but David Moyes was a gentleman afterwards. He got it just right. Not over the top, not patronising, not insincere. Keane liked that. There’s a common feeling with a lot of the managers, a loose sense of professional brotherhood.

He enjoyed Martin O’Neill’s company greatly. Many more.

“Rafa was good. Sam Allardyce was very good. Gave me good advice. I hope I’m not being rude about anyone else, but they showed time and effort and bit of class. Brucey of course. Incey. Roy Hodgson. At heart they are romantics. Almost every club is one step forward and two steps backward, but you ride on, always having to believe you are the one who can sort the club out.

“A year before I got them I could never have talked to the Malbranques or Cisses. You build bit by bit. Hang in there until you have your nucleus of seven or eight on long-term contracts, and they will be the lads you will depend on and who will make your team and your club. We were getting there with Sunderland.”

He likes that, the shifting sands, the business of trying to chart a course for a club. Other managers are rivals, but basically they are all figuring out the same thing. How to lift the deadweight of a club from A to B, lift it across this mire of low values and puny fellow travellers.

When the Sunderland job came up, he fully intended to move there. He and Theresa did the rounds of the estate agents and schools. For one reason or another nothing ticked all the boxes. Commuting didn’t tick the boxes either, but taking over a club at the bottom of the Championship table as a new, young manager is a high-risk business. They decided to play safe and put the family first. He drove to work, took a flat in Durham and stayed there when he was working. He drove home when he wasn’t.

He was never going to be a five-day-a-week training ground animal. He radiates too much edginess for that. The treadmill would make him stale and make those around him stale. The job was 24 hours a day nonetheless, building a scouting network, changing the outlook, hunting players, watching matches. They all rolled the sleeves up, and it worked.

As it worked, he was never moved by the results. Not even on the best days. When they got promoted, a great moment for the staff and the players for whom he still today can’t give enough praise, he slipped away for a cup of tea amidst the jubilation. And what moved him when the end came was getting the calls and text messages from people who worked at the club.

“The tea lady at the stadium, Audrey. Brilliant. That’s why it was worth it. A few other messages I got, a few of the senior players too, but three or four younger ones really moved me. Bill the masseur, he is Sunderland through and through. The messages were class, the effort, the thought, the words. Just class. I thought, that’s why I loved it there. That’s why football is in the blood.”

Since he left he has always made sure to be doing something on the day of a game. He doesn’t want to be sitting at home checking, checking, checking on the teletext.

“Will I always be interested in their results? Of course I will. Sunderland is a brilliant football club. Brilliant. It was the best decision I ever made going there. And it was the best decision to leave. In between, I loved my time there.

“You think of all the spin, all the hype, and you think, why do I want to go back into that? But it’s those things, a text from a tea lady or a young player. It makes it worthwhile.”

So he waits for another club to enter his bloodstream and demand his energy.

AMERICAN GRAFFITI: Ellis Short is of Irish descent, but not Irish temperament.

THE OWNERSHIP at Sunderland changed last September when American businessman Ellis Short took a 30 per cent interest. Things changed within the Stadium of Light.

“When I became a manager, Niall became a chairman. I always believed we were working together, not one working for the other. It worked well. I couldn’t have faked that if I didn’t feel it working. Drumaville, they were spot on and it worked.

“I was more comfortable with Drumaville. I never saw them after matches, I think, but they stuck to what agreement we had. They’d come in, watch the games, and get a flight back home to Ireland.”

Short arrived from a different background. He is from Missouri. He runs Lone Star Funds from, as you might have guessed, Texas. Dallas, Texas. He is of Irish descent, but not very much of Irish temperament.

“We had sat down with him a couple of times, Niall and I. I went down to London to meet him twice. I thought, hmm, the dynamics are changing here. He said he had read my book. I felt he was thinking from the start that I wasn’t for him. He sort of knew this wasn’t going to be a long-term relationship.”

From early on there was pressure to change the working arrangements. Short wanted Keane at Sunderland day in and day out. But as long as Sunderland were winning matches the case for relocation was weak.

“To be fair to Niall, I think he would have been under similar pressure. And maybe this is an understatement (laughs), but Niall would be more diplomatic than me. He can roll with things.”

Defeat sucks the air out of a club though. That time when Sunderland lost to Everton by seven goals to one, Keane ignored his phone for a day or two and sat nursing his thoughts.

The setback to Bolton wasn’t like that at first. On Monday he met Mick Brown and the scouting staff and did other bits and pieces. He took that call from Quinn, though, and it played on his mind.

The next day, Tuesday, he noticed Short’s name coming up on his phone a few times. He decided to ignore it. Not today. Not today.

On Wednesday he was heading back to Sunderland anyway. There was a reserve game down for that night and he had work to do. He packed the car up and hit the road. He had calls to catch up on. Ellis Short. He didn’t punch in the numbers thinking that he was going to sort this American out for once and for all, but within 30 seconds things had gone bad.

“It started with a demand to know where I had been the previous day, that he wanted me available at all times. It was the second day in my career as a manager that I had ignored calls. It was disappointment. Same as after the Everton game.

“Then there were accusations about how often I came in, about moving my family up. And it was the tone.”

He’s not saying it was ideal, the two-hour drive to Sunderland. It caught up with him in the end without a shadow of a doubt. He could see that. But this was a matter of tone, a change of conditions.

“At United, I finished and I knew I was just an employee to them. At Sunderland it was the same. I left and people came out saying ‘he’s gone and we’re all more relaxed’. It was them and me. I think the United experience helped me. It didn’t upset me, what happened at Sunderland. It was a business decision. Even for me I suppose it was a business decision. I couldn’t give my heart and soul with this fella on my shoulder. That, I’m sure, is how he works.”

So he put the phone down and when he had turned the car he rang Michael Kennedy, his friend, his lawyer and his representative, and said, “Michael, speak with whoever you have to speak to. I’m done with Sunderland.”

Quinn came on later and said he hadn’t known the conversation had gone the way it had. Keane said there was no way he could work for this guy. That was it.

IDEA FOR A SITCOM: “We’ll all move in together sure and see how that goes!”

HE THINKS of the call. The mood he was in. The end of the affair.

It was a good time. Better than any of the spin merchants outside gave it credit for being. He says, again, if he wasn’t loving it, he couldn’t have faked it.

“There was great enthusiasm there. It was a brilliant time.”

He knows now that with his next job he will more than likely be moving house. The driving and the nights away from home wore him down. He enjoys the small things, like checking on the kids at night.

“I’m happy to move house. Theresa is happy to move. I’m not tied to Manchester. I’m from Cork. I’d be happy to go anywhere. I would be happy to manage a Championship club.

“If we had found something right for us, we would have moved to Sunderland or nearby. I felt I was able to travel, though, because I’m not a player anymore, physically I am not on the pitch every day. I was never going to be on the training ground every day. That would have been bad for me and the players. And while it worked, it worked.”

Suddenly, though, down the phone was a voice demanding to know why he wasn’t in Sunderland. “How come you aren’t there? Why are you not living there?”

He wishes he had handled it differently. Not a different outcome. Just wishes he had asked Short why he didn’t live in Sunderland himself. With Niall as well. “Niall doesn’t live there, the new owner doesn’t live there. I wish I’d said, ‘you move up and I’ll move up. And Niall too. We’ll all move in together sure and see how that goes!’ You always think of these things when it is too late.”

THE SIMPSONS – THE MOVIE: Now Church Street is quieter and calmer and so is he.

IN THE last few weeks at Sunderland he reckons he lost patience with himself more than anything else. He came to realise that, in a management gig, whatever moans he had just came back to himself. After a lifetime of being a player and passing all moans upwards, it was a revelation.

“I am comfortable with that. I’m learning. Staff. Players. Everyone. They come to me. I like the buck stopping here.”

The fog lifted after a few weeks and he has enjoyed the weeks of calm. He went skiing in France with the family, a first-time experience for him. Nursery slopes for the warrior.

At the end of January he ticked another item off that long list of things a person vows to do before they kick the bucket. Football has always owned his Januarys, but with free time like putty in his hands he took off with Tony for the Super Bowl in Tampa, Florida. The Steelers. The Cardinals. The Big Show.

Along the way the two friends took in Orlando. Keane brought Locky down to Church Street, the gaudy, central strip of Orlando’s town centre. Where does time flee to? The last time he had been beneath these lights was 15 years ago in another life, another story. The World Cup. Drinking with Irish fans three or four nights before World Cup games. The place teemed with life back then and beery, innocent Irish hope.

He was torn between youth and cold professionalism. He did some of the beery stuff. More than enough of it. But he had his first run-in, too, with an Irish management and the way it did things. Himself and Maurice Setters disagreed sharply about the benefits of a gruelling training session in the merciless sun and soupy humidity. There was a hammy attempt by Jack Charlton to paper over the whole business in the press tent the next day, but Keane’s body language articulated all that needed to be known.

This time Church Street is quieter and calmer and so is he. The boys hit Universal Studios in the morning. Keane had been there last year with Theresa and the kids. He had sat outside in the sunshine with the youngest on his knee while the others queued for The Simpsons ride.

When the family had come out and pronounced the experience to be the best thing ever, he had chuckled and presumed they were teasing him. He’d missed it! They hadn’t! Now he and Locky grinned as they lowered the safety bars and the car climbed towards the perfect blue skies, winching itself up and up to the top point of the rollercoaster’s immense arc, to the frozen instant where the thrills start, that pregnant moment from which they would take their precipitous, swooshing dive toward Mother Earth and then climb back up again. Aaaaaaaaagh! White knuckles! SweetMotherofSuffer- ingGForceJesus! Sideshow Bob and a platoon of bungling incompetents are threatening to derail the whole shuddering handcart. Roy and Locky get flung this way and they get flung that way. They get swallowed by a giant baby and spat out again, they slide backwards into the inferno of hell and are pulled free at the last second, they crash, they hurt, they burn, they shudder.

And then the lights go on. Locky and Keane are in the same small room they entered just a little while ago.

They are told to exit to the right and to have a nice day. Keane feels that his breakfast wants to see fresh air again. He feels his treacherous knees weak and shaky beneath him.

His brain is making corrections, though, the whole experience, it has been a simulation, a triumph of spin and imagery and expectation over reality.

He stepped off the ride and out of the room, leaving the cartoon world behind. Real life was still outside and elsewhere. In the back of his head he knew that all along.

They grinned to each other, Roy and Locky.

Right boy, what’s next?

Owners, managers and players

""I went down to London to meet him twice. I thought, hmm, the dynamics are changing here. He
said he had read my book. I felt he was thinking from the start that I wasn't for him.
– on Ellis Short

'Maybe this is an understatement, but Niall would be more diplomatic than me. He can roll with
things.'
– on Niall Quinn

'The staff came in and said Clive Clarke has had a heart attack. I said, 'Is he okay? I'm shocked they found one, you could never tell by the way he plays'.
– on Clive Clarke

"Rafa was good.Sam Allardyce was very good. Gave me good advice. Brucey of course. Incey. Roy
Hodgson. At heart they are romantics.'
– on other managers