Mick Clifford: Did Roy Keane boycott the wrong World Cup?

For anybody over a certain age the name of an obscure island in the Pacific may trigger trauma as it will forever be linked to a time of national disaster.

For it was there that Roy Keane made a stand in the name of something or other and determined that he couldn’t play for his country in the 2002 World Cup.

Instead of moving on to the finals in Japan and South Korea, he headed home. Depending on where you stand on this issue that shook the world, he either went of his own volition or was dispatched by his manager.

The screening on RTÉ of Saipan: Rebel Without A Ball was to coincide with this year’s World Cup which has kicked off in a desert kingdom where the prevailing attitude to human rights could have been lifted from the reels of Laurence of Arabia.

And who has popped up to remind us all of the corruption and deceit at the heart of the affair?

The man himself, the boy Roy.

“The World Cup shouldn’t be here,” he said on ITV last Monday.

“It shouldn’t be in Qatar because of the treatment of migrant workers and gay people, because of the nation’s flippant disregard of human rights, because of the broad brush corruption at the top of the sport.”

Simpler times

If that is so, some voices have asserted, then what is he doing there himself? In order to dissect that conundrum we should first return to the scene of the grime in Saipan.

The world and the World Cup were all so much simpler back in 2002. The Irish team departed for Saipan on the day of a general election. Bertie Ahern, a man of his time, met them at the airport. “A lot done, more to do” was the Fianna Fáil slogan. The boom was about to get boomier and by the time Bertie was finished six years later, the whole country was done like burnt toast and there was no more he could do about it.

But as the team flew out that day there were no existential crises to rain on anybody’s parade.

Climate change was little more than a rumour.

The idea that an economic collapse could threaten to topple the capitalist system was the stuff of science fiction novelists.

Putin was still at the scheming phase of his quasi-dictatorship. Donald Trump was still a joke. Relatively speaking, the world was a benign place.

Then it happened. Dispatches from the Pacific front began to trickle home.

First of all Roy was in no mood to play. Then he relented and got a few things off his chest in newspaper interviews. Mick McCarthy called a meeting to assert his authority and the skin and hair began to fly. The chasm in Irish society was like nothing seen since the Civil War. Roy or Mick? The man who got the team to the finals or the team that Mick built?

A notable development at the height of it all was a protest march to Bishop Lucey Park in Cork city centre, conveying to the watching world that Roy Keane may well have been Irish by birth, but he was Cork by the grace of God.

Would we have won the World Cup if McCarthy had never called that meeting and confronted Roy?

The question joins other great imponderables of the nation’s trajectory. What if Mick Collins had stood another round or two of pints in Clonakilty before heading back up to the city by which time Beal na mBlath would have been emptied of the enemy?

What if Brian Boru had left his tent to answer the call of nature in Clontarf when the assassins came calling? We will never know the road less travelled from these forks in Irish history.

Fast forward twenty years and the world is in an awful state of chassis but at least Roy made it to this World Cup.

He is no longer the warrior king of the Premiership. In the intervening years, he tried his hand at management with mixed results.

One suspects that at the heart of his failure to emulate the great managers lay an inability to accept that those in his charge were either unwilling or unable to reach the peaks of human endeavour at which he had performed during his playing career.

Today, his sphere of terrorising influence is not between the white lines of a pitch but from the perch of a TV studio. Those around him remain in fear and awe.

This was most recently evident in a promotional clip for World Cup coverage in which Roy sat at a breakfast table with his old teammate Gary Neville and former Man City player Micah Richards as they shot the breeze about the tarnished game.

At a few junctures in the conversation, Roy said something that was mildly amusing.

On each occasion, the other two literally bent over laughing as if he had just reissued the best lines ever to emerge from a master of the form such as Billy Connolly. The impression lingered that their exaggerated mirth was really motivated by fear. Is this where Roy expects us to laugh?

But back to Qatar, the latest staging post for a game that has long disappeared down the road to perdition.

Cowardice

Roy’s observation about the sell-out in giving the finals to this dictatorship was prompted by the decision of European teams to reverse a decision to protest the state’s human rights abuses.

The captains of the teams were to wear a ‘One Love’ armband for their opening games, but FIFA threatened that any who did would immediately be booked.

That was enough to send the millionaire players scurrying for cover.

Their cowardice was in sharp contrast with the decision of the Iranian team to remain silent during their own national anthem in solidarity with the protests back home over the death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini.

Roy called it like it is, hitting out at the corrupt regime and the failure of the pampered European players to follow through on even asserting themselves in the mildest manner.

But, but, but. Is it not hypocritical of him to do so while he is furthering his own TV career and raking in some big bobs for the gig in the very stadiums built on the blood of exploited immigrants?

Maybe it is, but who among us can cast the first stone?

Besides, circumstances and his own adherence to standards of excellence deprived him of appearing at a previous World Cup.

Surely he is entitled to be cut some slack on this occasion, especially as the whole event would be relatively boring without his box office presence in front of the microphone.

Like, if Roy Keane isn’t entitled to a break, who is?