A tendency to lash out or walk out

There is a growing assumption that Kevin Keegan will eventually take the England job. Keegan's repeated assertions that he is staying at Fulham are regarded as merely a prelude to his becoming a full-time successor to Glenn Hoddle.

For the sake of England, Fulham and Keegan himself it has to be hoped that this hypothesis is proved wrong. Public opinion makes him far and away the most popular choice, the bookies are taking no more bets on his appointment and the Keegan bandwagon is already in top gear, but as the England coach he might well leave the road at the first hairpin bend.

It is easy to see Keegan's appeal. He has always been a personable communicator and usually comes across well on television. Keegan's ability to enthuse football teams, for a while at least, has never been in question either as a player or a manager.

If he could take time away from Craven Cottage to raise forlorn English spirits after Wednesday's demoralising defeat by France and establish a feel-good factor for the European Championship qualifier against Poland then by all means bring him in.

However, the notion of putting Keegan in charge for a period which would presumably include not only Euro 2000, assuming England qualify, but the 2002 World Cup in Japan and South Korea is surely one which has not been properly thought through.

As a player with Liverpool, Hamburg, Southampton and Newcastle United nothing became him so much as the timing of his departures but as a manager at St James' Park he was a resignation waiting to happen and it would surely be the same with England.

Keegan won the fans' hearts at Newcastle and they would have him back there now. For a time he even enjoyed a successful courtship with a Tyneside football media grown ultra-sceptical through years of unfulfilled promise mingled with abject failure. But when results began to slip and the press became querulous that relationship quickly soured.

When Keegan eventually left Newcastle it was not because of the local hacks but because Stock Exchange rules demanded that the club's plc prospectus include any likely changes in the running of the company, and Keegan had already indicated that he would like to quit at the end of that season. Keegan, therefore, was told not to stand upon the order of his going but go at once.

Part of the fun of reporting Newcastle during the Keegan era was not merely that the games were highly entertaining but the possibility that any one of them could be his last. He had never really fancied management and since his role at Fulham is officially chief operating officer he could be said to have remained true to his assertion that Newcastle were the only club he ever wanted to manage.

With England, Keegan's football knowledge and strength of character would continue to be at odds with his impetuosity and a tendency either to lash out or walk out when things went against him. In 1975 he walked out on Don Revie shortly before a home international against Wales but made it up the following day.

Early in the 1982 World Cup in Spain Keegan was suffering from a back problem and was allowed by Ron Greenwood, then the England manager, to see a specialist in Hamburg who had treated him during his Bundesliga days. The manner of his departure was bizarre, a moonlight flit with FA officials remaining tight-lipped about his whereabouts.

There has always been a degree of tenacity in Keegan's make-up. After leaving Liverpool for Hamburg in 1977 he had to overcome initial animosity in the dressing-room along with reservations from the local media.

He also received an eight-week ban for retaliating after being fouled. But he still led Hamburg to both the league championship and a European Cup final and was voted West Germany's footballer of the year. Should he become the England coach events would probably be as entertaining off the pitch as on it.

Keegan would probably not plunge into the crowd to sort out a fan who had been hammering on the cover of the visitors' bench, as he once did at Ipswich but how would his temperament stand up to the backpage lampooning which has become the lot of anyone rash enough to take on the national squad? Howard Wilkinson was given Spock's ears even before England met France but laughed it off.

Remembering Keegan's extraordinary outburst on Sky after Alex Ferguson had wound him up when Newcastle and Manchester United were running neck-and-neck for the title it is difficult to believe that he would take such things with similar equanimity.

Yet he had the intelligence and the dedication to turn himself from a workaday young footballer into one of England's outstanding players, he sold out Southampton for a season simply by signing for Lawrie McMenemy, he twice revived Newcastle, as player and manager, and he is now in the process of taking Fulham back up through the leagues.

Logic, as Spock might say, demands that he be given a shot.