After 12 Years, Keane’s Rage Catches Up With Him

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The New York Sun

After 12 years of trophy-laden success at Manchester United, Roy Keane has gone. The parting was “by mutual consent,” they said. There are plenty of ways of interpreting that – but what was clear was that coach Alex Ferguson had had enough of Keane’s sledge-hammer attacks on his teammates. The break came last week, suddenly and, inevitably, with rancor. A confrontation between Ferguson and Keane could only be stormy. When it was over, Keane was no longer a ManU player.


Two weeks earlier, Keane had been asked by ManU’s own television network to comment on the team’s performance after a humiliating 4-1 loss to Middlesbrough. Keane, recovering from an injury, had not played in the game, and he set about the other players with such viciousness that the show’s producers felt they had to run the footage by Ferguson before airing it. Ferguson nixed the program and decided that Keane was now a dangerously disruptive presence at the club. He had to go.


That cannot have been easy for Ferguson, a dour man not overly given to handing out praise, but who once called Keane “the best midfielder in the world.” Nor is it a move that ManU fans – there are alleged to be those who worship the ground that Keane walks or plays on – will find easy to digest.


Keane’s 12-year record as a ManU player and as its captain is extraordinary. During that spell, the club won seven English championships, three F.A. cups, and one European Cup.


An unparalleled leader is the almost unanimous verdict on Keane – an all-out player who gave everything and expected everyone around him to do the same. When they didn’t, they heard about it – openly, roughly, brutally.


Keane, born in Cork, Ireland, in 1971, is the ideal player for British soccer, a combative midfielder, a non-stop worker, a fearsome tackler. He rules the midfield as by a Nietzschean triumph of the will; opponents wither under the intimidation, his teammates take strength from it.


But there is a great deal of skill there, too. No one ever doubted that Keane has a superb soccer brain. There are players who run just as much as he does, but who always seem to be chasing the ball, arriving late for the action. Not Keane, he is ever in the thick of things, drawn there by an unerring instinct that tells him what is happening on the field, how the game is developing, where the next move will be made. A rare skill, and one that lies behind his skillful passing, his ability to instantly assess the disposition of his opponents, to pick the pass that will do most damage.


Keane was a special player, and the shouting and the tumult of his bust up with Ferguson came at the same moment that a hushed silence surrounded another of the club’s former Irish greats.


Fifty-nine-year-old George Best is on a life-support machine in a London hospital, “desperately ill, but hanging in there,” say the bulletins. In the 1960s, the Belfast-born Best mesmerized the soccer world with his dribbling, his impish tricks, and his sheer soccer genius. It was the time of the Beatles, and the long-haired Best – young and good-looking – was swept up in the swinging 60s. Swept up, and destroyed. It wasn’t drugs that ruined Best’s talent, just old-fashioned alcohol. In 1974, when Best, at 27, should have been in his prime, ManU sacked him – his erratic behavior, failure to attend training sessions, and disappearances had become too much.


Best’s later life included a prison stint for drunk driving, appearing drunk on a BBC television program, and – in 2002 – a liver transplant. Even after the operation, Best continued to drink. He told the world “I spent a lot of money on booze, birds, and fast cars. The rest I just squandered.”


But it was difficult not to sympathize. In the 1970s, Best was the star attraction in New York at a New York Cosmos press conference. He was about to sign for them. Her did everything right, said all the right things, how he loved America, couldn’t wait to wear a Cosmos shirt and so on. He was confident, amusing, articulate.


Eager to see more of Best, I called the Cosmos two days later to set up an interview. There was a problem … they didn’t know where he was. He had disappeared. He was eventually tracked down on the Costa del Sol, and he never did join the Cosmos.


Best squandered his money, and along with it, his exquisite talent. No one could accuse Keane of wasting his talent at ManU. But for all his remarkable times there, Keane is a flawed player. Badly flawed. His darker side, his volcanic temper, repeatedly marred his performances. Rage – real, raw, uncontrolled rage – has featured far too often in Keane’s repertoire, to the point where it’s not inaccurate to regard the famous 2000 picture of him, with bulging eyes and neck veins, screaming in a referee’s face, as the one that tells us most about the player.


By my reckoning, Keane’s dismissal from ManU has come three years too late. He should have been sent packing in 2002 when he admitted in his biography that he had deliberately maimed an opposing player in 2001: “I waited until five minutes before the end of the game, then I hit him. “The “hit” was a high, vicious tackle on the Norwegian Alf Inge Haaland, supposedly revenge for an injury inflicted by Haaland four years earlier. Keane’s tackle shattered Haaland’s knee and effectively ended his career. Keane got a red card and was ejected, that was all.


When Keane revealed all in his 2002 autobiography, the Football Association moved in, fining him $270,000 and banning him for five games. But ManU did nothing. Confronted with proof that its captain had committed the most heinous of sporting crimes, ManU, which has a claim to being the most respected soccer club in the world, had nothing to say.


My feeling at the time was that Keane should have been thanked and invited to leave. The evidence that Keane was coming off the rails had been there earlier in 2002, when he cruelly sabotaged Ireland’s chances in the World Cup.


The Ireland team was already in training on the island of Saipan when Keane, supposedly the team’s leader, had another rage bout and launched a scathing attack on the training facilities and on the competence of coach Mick McCarthy – an attack he delivered in front of the entire team. Mc-Carthy sent him home.


Best always had a light, romantic, touch about him. It was reflected in the beauty of his play, the charm of his smile. How different from the world of Roy Keane, where a harsh realism reigned and the world looked anything but romantic, where “Contracts mean nothing … to soccer clubs, players are just expensive pieces of meat” – that was a typical Keane quote.


Best was the sort of player one would make an effort to see, a crowd pleaser. Keane fits in today’s soccer much more snugly, a hard-faced, hard-nosed worker – a skillful one, it must be said – a team player, a player of relentless efficiency. If there is artistry to Keane’s game, it is heavily overshadowed by the pugnacity. I’ll confess to being totally resistant to the Keane magic, which, I’m aware, puts me with the minority. Above all, it is the incessant rage that puts me off.


pgardner@nysun.com


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