Colin Sheridan: We need more, not less, of philosophical Roy Keane
NATURAL: Roy Keane, working for Sky Sports.
If you need cheering up this Monday morning, take five minutes and watch Roy Keane talk through his dozen career red cards. It’ll be an easy find, and an even easier way to spend a little bit of time away from your stresses and strains. Every sending off tells its own little story - animus with others, class snobbery, loathing of self. To be clear, Keane is supposed to be talking about football, but really, he is talking about everything. In doing so in such an unapologetic way, Roy Keane may have become our most important critical thinker.
You may not always agree with him, but his ability to simplify seemingly complex problems is a life raft for those of us drowning in a sea of spin and bullshit. They say seldom seen, more admired, but in Keane’s case it is the opposite. Those days he doesn't feature on our screens and in our timelines seem lesser. Emptier. Yes, there are cartoon character elements to his persona, which he undoubtedly plays for laughs - the biblical beards and the performative snarls - but, over time, something else entirely has emerged that has confounded all of us. Even the Saipan haters. His honesty was always obvious, the philosophical nuance, not so. The only shame is that his musings are confined to football.
Imagine that, instead of restricting himself to Super Sundays and podcasts with Gary Neville, Keane appeared on Newsnight opposite Suella Braverman or Rishi Sunak. You wouldn’t want him there as a subject matter expert or anything, but as a human polygraph, sniffing out the lies and the poisonous gaslighting, unafraid of raising his studs to inflammatory language and gross incompetence. Picture him in a studio with Boris Johnson, the flaxen haired manchild squirming in Keane's company, fully aware he’s about to be tackled harder by the former Rockmount enforcer than he ever was by Jeremy Paxman.
‘You really think that’s going to work? Calling them hate marches? You’re a bigger fool than you look, you.’ Give him the arts, too. I want to know what he thinks of Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon and Marvel movies. Have him review the latest Knausgård novel and the essays of Susan Sontag. He wouldn’t need to read them all. We, the people, we don't read them all either, that’s the point of Keane. He doesn't claim to be an authority on anything. He doesn’t need to. As one of football’s greatest midfielders, we already know, but his ability to deintellectualize things is a prescient gift in an age when so many industries rely on exclusionary language to separate the Us and the Them. Keane bridges it. He was so good that on his best night, he conquered Zidane. Usually, such genius alienates. Keane, in his third act as a plain-speaking philosopher, unites.
The key to Keane is to not put him in charge of anything. Like a football club, or our national team. He may want that, but it is imperative that this never happens. It’s not that he wasn’t good at it - I’ll forever defend his remarkable tenure as manager of Sunderland AFC, bringing them from bottom of the championship to mid-table in the Premier League (and unhappy about it), but subsequent bodies of work at Ipswich and with Martin O’Neill with the republic of Ireland have provided enough evidence to suggest that being in charge of things is not the best use of his substantial powers. Technocracies don’t tend to work, anyways. Unless we could find a Michael D type role for him, where he could say what he wants but not have to worry about pleasing the board.
There is another dimension to the Keane Phenomenon that is fascinating to study. That is, England’s reluctant appreciation of him. It has been a slow burn. As a player, he was outrageously underrated, which had as much to do with him not being English as it did with him being Irish. His indifference to authority was of a different kind to Eric Cantona’s, who was a little more aware of his legacy than he would like us to know. Keane just didn’t care. Not about Fergie, nor tradition, nor the public's perception of him. It didn’t help, either, that England’s “Golden Generation” lacked the very type of leader and player Keane was. The media appropriated his best attributes and overlaid them onto Stephan Gerrard, and later Frank Lampard, but it never worked. Fine footballers through they both were, they were never in the Corkman's league. Their shortcomings hardened England's refusal to properly accept him. Even in his second coming as a manager, he remained, for them, the thug, the savage, the bully.
Now, he is their darling. They can’t get enough of Keane, and he has somehow managed this reversal by appearing to remain true to himself. The irony is that it was Beckham that married a popstar and so desired to be a style icon, but it is Keane - middle-aged and a little thin on top, that is launching fashion campaigns for Adidas with his dog Jet - is a rich one. The next stage of this love affair will undoubtedly see the English try to claim him, like they did with Cillian Murphy before, and with Evan Ferguson last week. I really hope they do, just to watch the red mist fall, and the studs come up.
They say that if you’re ever struggling to name a character in a story you’re trying to write, just pick your favourite sports team jumble a few names up. It’s not a rule you could so easily apply to the NFL and their cohort of quarterbacks, unless the character you’re writing is the son of a Wealth Manager from Connecticut.
Brock Purdy. Jimmy Garoppolo. Mac Jones. Tyson Bagent. Mitch Trubisky. Tyrod Taylor. All of them sound like made-up people. Well, last night the New York Giants - honouring a tradition as old as the game itself - started a young chap with the memorable name of Tommy DeVito under centre. DeVito, a New Jersey native, became a mini media sensation when he proudly admitted to still living at home with his parents (he is 25), and having his mother make his bed every day. "I don't have to worry about laundry, what I'm eating for dinner, chicken cutlets and all that is waiting for me when I get there,” DeVito told reporters. “My mom still makes my bed. Everything is handled for me. Honestly, I don't even know if I could find a place closer to here than where I live. It takes me 12 minutes to get here."
His living situation provoked a predictable number of witty reactions on the internet, particularly around the cost of living in New York, and the apparent reluctance many young men of certain ethnic backgrounds display when faced with the prospect of moving away from their moms. Given the simplicity of the life he described, you’d imagine DeVito is a head coach's dream. With injuries to the two QBs ahead of him, he’ll likely have a few games to prove himself. What odds he’s still living with Mammy DeVito by Christmas?
A lucky friend of mine was in Madison Square Garden on consecutive nights last week to see two young athletes with incredibly bright futures in their respective sports. Wednesday night saw the San Antonio Spurs visit the Knicks, so all eyes were on the rookie sensation Victor Wembanyama. The following evening, it was the turn of Cobh’s own Callum Walsh, who successfully defended his WBC US Silver Super Welterweight Title, winning by unanimous decision. The hype around 22-year-old Walsh is real, and with professional boxing in a state of entropy at present, the Corkman’s rise may yet prove every bit as exciting as the emergence of the wunderkind Wembanyama. Watch this space.
A sold-out Aviva stadium for yesterday's FAI Cup final was as encouraging a sign as we could hope for that domestic soccer can assert itself as a force in capturing the imagination of Ireland's sporting consumers. The fact it did so under the cloud of another FAI money scandal is indicative that, while playing standards and marketing of the game may well be improving, unhealthy habits remain. For true, sustainable progress to be possible, the governing body can ill afford any more commercial or financial missteps. What level of transparency the handling of this latest controversy receives will be a true indicator of whether yesterday's occasion was a false dawn, or a sign of better things to come?
