Tom Humphrieson the news that a young manager has lost his job. It's no big deal. Hold those smelling salts. He'll learn and he'll be back
ROY KEANE knows his football history. He will take some comfort there today. Bobby Robson, whose noble backside once warmed the chair which Keane has just vacated yesterday had a disastrous start in management. Robson was sacked by Fulham after a few months and then endured four poor seasons at Ipswich as he learned his trade.
Keane will remember too that before he himself arrived at Old Trafford one Alex Ferguson had endured the locals coming at him with pikes and torches. Fergie was still in stockades after three years with United before a cup win saved him. In December 1989 a memorable banner at Old Trafford noted that after “Three Years of Excuses, It’s Still Crap. Ta Ra Fergie”.
That was 15 years after Ferguson had started in management.
Even Cloughie wasn’t immune. Sacked by fourth division Hartlepool in his first job. He walked on. He learned.
Football management is a job where wonderkids are rare and where prowess on the field is absolutely no guarantee of being able to deliver from the dugout. Yesterday a young manager lost his job. No big deal. No swooning. No smelling salts.
Roy Keane will take yesterday’s disappointment in his stride. We have been at these crossroads before. We have stood by this very ditch and surveyed the aftermath of a Roy Keane collision and wondered if he would ever get driving on the road again.
This time it’s a little different. Less shattered glass. Fewer signs of damage. Less to see, except Keane himself, who keeps us riveted always.
This time he’s not crawling from the wreckage as the world explodes all around him. His gentleman employers at Ipswich Town have described his departure as amicable. A lot of people would have bet against ever hearing a sentence which concerned Roy Keane and contained the words “departed” and “amicably”.
Apart from a heated exchange with some supporters after his final game in charge, Keane seems to have had a dead man walking serenity about him in the past weeks. He talked of how much it was hurting him to be trying and not succeeding. He talked of the shadow of the sword hanging above his neck.
Several players backed him as they did again yesterday.
Depending on your point of view, Roy Keane doesn’t do exits well or he does them with great aplomb and some wonderful pyrotechnics. From Ireland, from Manchester United, from Sunderland and even from Celtic the sunderings were painful and messy.
Yesterday revealed a side of Keane which is sometimes too easily buried under the prickly armour of his native defensiveness. What drove him as a player and what will make him persist and finally succeed as a manager is a relentless capacity for self-criticism.
Yesterday Keane spoke of his disappointment at having to part company with Ipswich, he spoke highly of his players, and he said with uncharacteristic openness he had loved his time at the club and his time living in Ipswich.
He is mellowing. And that may have been a necessary part of his development. This is still a nascent managerial career. Since joining Sunderland in August 06 he has only two full seasons in charge of a team from beginning to end. He has one spectacular success on his CV in the shape of Sunderland’s bottom of the table to top promotion season.
One or two reports using the hyperbole always employed in relation to Keane and his adventures have described his tenure at Ipswich as a miserable failure but Keane came in determined to change the culture of a club which was a little too civilised and a little too happy with itself for his liking.
Patently he hadn’t succeeded as of yesterday but there were mitigating circumstances.
At a club which has never spent more than €6 million on a player (and that was 10 years ago) Marcus Evans proved to be a very frugal owner. Ipswich compete in a league which is always made competitive by the annual arrival of teams who land softly with parachute payments from the Premier League. It’s a slog but being able to afford some inspiration helps.
Ipswich couldn’t buy the inspiration. If footballers complain of homesickness in Manchester or the lack of shopping opportunities in the north east, well Ipswich has never been a destination which they craved. With a tight wage structure and a limited budget Ipswich wasn’t the sort of destination an oily young agent would be recommending to his players.
As such, the sales of some players without ready-made replacements may have been unwise. Keane didn’t curry easy favour with the fans when it came to selling or buying. Shipping out Danny Haynes (beloved for his scoring exploits against Norwich) Owen Garvan (home-grown via Home Farm) and Jon Walters (whose best season in a blue jersey was Keane’s first in charge) wasn’t going to be forgiven when the misfiring Hungarian Tamas Priskin was bungling around the box.
On the other hand Keane was careful about protecting the young prodigy Connor Wickham from overuse and seems to have rebuffed several lucrative offers which would have brought cash to the table and kept Wickham on loan at the club for another year or so.
Wickham, with his height and energy and ability, is just what Ipswich will need over the next few years. Keane deserves some credit for refusing to be the one to sell him on.
For a man who often says privately that all he wants is some peace and quiet perhaps he had found an unlikely home.
Truth is Roy and Ipswich were an unlikely match. When he went there in the spring of 2009, the fit seemed engagingly odd, a romantic piece of wishful thinking. A rustic club with a tradition which bred the knights Ramsey and Robson and a love of expansive football which didn’t get them very far but kept the locals entertained. And a manager from the school of hard-nosed pragmatism.
Keane, who carries always the whiff of cordite from his last gunfight, was an odd figure to see strolling on high street. We looked. Keane and Ipswich. Ipswich and Keane. This could be heaven or this could be hell. He could build something here. Or fail spectacularly. We could look across the fields one day and see Portman Road ablaze.
A failure at Ipswich, it was said, would bring the curtain down on Keane’s short managerial career.
In the end, oddly, it was all rather more banal than that. And more encouraging. Keane’s tenure at Ipswich was a failure on the field – which is where it counts – but for Roy Keane himself it may have been a worthwhile experience.
In the past few weeks as Ipswich’s results veered sharply away from their impressive early season form and even away from the dogged nature of the second half of last season Keane kept looking for ways to work through it. There weren’t any signs he was going to crack open like a stressed boiler, scalding everybody in the vicinity. Just a guy trying to get it right.
That he failed to get it right in time is something he won’t dispute. The reasons why it didn’t come together as one piece are understandable. He tightened his defence considerably, stopped losing the ball in midfield. Finding a way to create from midfield and subsequently finding a way to score were the next tasks on an incremental journey.
He will go off to the wilderness which all managers visit and lick his wounds and see what can be learned. Perhaps the managerial structure he has deployed at Sunderland and Ipswich will have to be dismantled and new faces but older faces brought in.
Keane himself is not yet 40 and is still learning how many ways there are to skin cats.
Ironically the remains of the month of January contained opportunity, A couple of good purchases could have altered Ipswich’s season. The schedule brings two games with Arsenal and one with Chelsea the sort of occasions which often lift a club like Ipswich. The credit for bringing Ipswich to the League Cup semi-finals will be lost everywhere except on Roy Keane’s CV when somebody next looks at it dispassionately.
That’s the thing. The blessing and the curse for the man. Very few of us can ever look at Roy Keane dispassionately. And that quality, the ability to sharply divide opinion, that is what will keep him working.
Roy Keane: The Facts
1971: Born Cork, August 10th.
1987: Joins semi-professional League of Ireland club Cobh Ramblers after building reputation with Cork junior club Rockmount.
1990: Signed by Brian Clough for Nottingham Forest for £10,000.
1991: Makes Republic of Ireland debut in 1-1 draw with Chile in Dublin.
1993: July - Joins Manchester United for then British transfer record £3.75 million after 154 matches and 33 goals for Forest.
1994: Marks first season with United by helping club complete their first League and FA Cup double.
1997: Named United captain following Eric Cantona's departure. September - Injures his knee trying to foul Leeds' Alf Inge Haaland at Elland Road. Misses rest of the season with cruciate ligament damage.
1999: April - Sent off against Arsenal in FA Cup semi-final replay for two bookable offences. Also booked in Champions League semi-final second leg against Juventus, ruling him out of final against Bayern Munich.
2000: May - Named PFA and Football Writers' Association player of the year before lifting another Premier League title.
2001: April - Sent off after lunge at Haaland in United's derby encounter with Manchester City.
2002: May - Keane is sent home from the World Cup after a row with Republic of Ireland manager Mick McCarthy.
2003: Despite the efforts of new Ireland manager Brian Kerr to tempt him back into the Republic's set-up, Keane announces his intention to retire from international football. April - Announces he will play for Republic of Ireland.
May- Makes first appearance for Ireland since McCarthy bust-up in friendly with Romania.
2005: October - Announces his international retirement for a second time.
November- Leaves Manchester United by mutual consent.
December- Signs for Celtic on an 18-month deal.
2006: January - Makes Celtic debut in embarrassing Scottish Cup defeat to First Division Clyde.
May- Finishes the season at Celtic, who win the Bank of Scotland Premier League.
June- Announces his retirement from football.
August- Confirmed as new manager of Sunderland.
2007: April - Earns automatic promotion to the Premier League for Sunderland. Team clinch Championship title the following week.
2008: May - Sunderland finish three points clear of relegation zone. December 4 - Leaves Sunderland after crisis talks on Wearside.
2009: April 23 - Takes over at Championship side Ipswich on two-year contract. May - Ipswich finish ninth in the table.
2010: May 2 - Ipswich get off to a woeful start but recover to finish 15th.
2011: January 7th - Sacked by Ipswich with the club 19th in the table. His final game in charge was a 1-0 home defeat by Nottingham Forest on January 3rd.
