Cooped up in luxury . . . now that's hardship

TIPPING POINT:Roy Keane believes 'Wazza' (Wayne Rooney) to be "mentally active" and that can spell potential trouble in terms of the ungodly horror that is boredom, writes BRIAN O'CONNOR

ROY KEANE has informed us he believes his old Manchester United colleague Wayne Rooney’s brain could have an impact on Euro 2012: just not in a good way. Anyone who thrills to the sight of a really top player reading his way through a game will recognise Rooney’s acuity on a football pitch. But those who reckoned his off-pitch mental agility extended little further than totting up the cost of a three-way might have to think again.

Keane believes ‘Wazza’ to be “mentally active” and that can spell potential trouble in terms of the ungodly horror that is boredom. It’s not just Rooney either. According to Keane, who, let’s face it, knows a thing or two about the minefields that hotels can present, British and Irish players don’t react well to being cooped up in luxury, for free, for weeks. And it’s not just the Mayfield Maharishi who has pondered this phenomenon.

As the Irish squad rested in Dublin, before heading to Italy for a week en route to Poland, Seán St Ledger also pointed out the pitfalls of boredom, as if it were some medieval boils and locusts plague instead of the desperate normalcy it represents for most of us not blessed to be professional footballers.

At this point it is worth pointing out that sarcasm is an easy response to such po-faced pondering on the intricacies of the football mind – and it’s fun too.

All the same it’s clear there is something about the Anglo-Irish soccer mentality that doesn’t respond well to having a few hours a day of free time which can’t be occupied by electronic gizmos that go ping, or cheered with the ingestion of a couple of gallons of beer, or isn’t enlivened via the roasting of several tabloid-friendly slappers.

Certainly there doesn’t appear to be a similar quandary surrounding the Spanish and Italian camps whose more straightforward approach to the game happens to coincide with an aptitude for actually winning competitions. More pertinently, it might be pointed out that when people are bored it is usually with themselves that they are bored most. And one person clearly bored out of his brain right now is Keane.

This is the man who thundered in his biography about whinging footballers always searching for excuses. It is a tome written in an impressively strident voice that admittedly carried a certain Drumcondra twang – “bluffers, con-men and whingers”.

Not so long ago Keane, the flint-eyed sniffer-dog of football bullshit, would have puked on his TV Times if anyone offered boredom as an excuse for not performing up to scratch. Maintaining a profile, while waiting for the next management gig, appears, though, to have softened that famously stern approach to playing the bullshit game.

So Rooney’s supposed cross of having to remain in camp, away from Coleen, the entourage and the Vegas slots, but with the not inconsiderable consolation of being able to examine at leisure his various millions in various online bank accounts, is given credence instead of being scoffed at with the derision it deserves.

As Keane pointed out in blunter times, footballers are no slower in reaching for an easy excuse than they are in reaching for an easy earner. Any one will do despite how, when it comes to valid excuses, several are always less convincing than one. But in football there’s never a shortage of cop-outs.

For instance always a real doozy is the supposedly mind-bending challenge of playing away from home, as if being dropped onto a pitch in say Burnley or Bari is like landing on Benouville on D-Day: a hostile atmosphere and all that, with the howling masses on the halfway line instead of safely fenced in far, far away.

And if at home of course, the pressure of expectation is too much, or the pitch is crap, or the tactical formation is naive, and the coach is shagging the winger’s wife so of course he’s playing him, and 20 grand a week really is peanuts compared to what’s available at PSG, and by the way, my knee hurts.

How many excuses did the Chelsea players reach for when Andre Villas-Boas was in charge and not soothing their egos to the point where being paid millions wasn’t enough to make them do the minimum required of any professional – try their best.

Not so long ago it was the power of the pound that allowed managers grab a hold of players’ privates, knowing that with a firm enough grip, their hearts would follow.

Carlos Tevez blew that out of the water and his subsequent re-entry into the Manchester City fold could turn out to be an epochal moment when shame was officially removed from the football dictionary, apart from tabloid headlines.

Now, no doubt, there are footballers out there who don’t rush to the excuse-cellar, and yes it is unfair to daub all of them with the one brush. But modern football revolves around such a massive financial axis it’s hardly surprising it now possesses a ridiculously inflated sense of its own importance.

Self-absorption is the prism through which youth is allowed view life. Rooney for instance is 26 now, married, has a kid, but in football’s rarefied bubble, he probably still qualifies as a young fella, allowed to believe the sun rises and sets around his Harley Street thatch.

That such self-absorption is facilitated by an environment where shinola about boredom is spouted by someone like Keane – no stranger to self-involvement himself it has to be pointed out – says a lot about the football bubble and how often age has nothing to do with the raw material its inhabitants continually give to the cartoon stereotypes.

Or maybe that’s being mean: it’s just that football’s focus on its own fundament can irritate like hell, especially in the face of something really important.

Matt Hampson is just 27 and hasn’t time for boredom. This corner was at the British Sports Book of the Year Awards in London last Monday when Hampson won best biography with his account of coping with the catastrophic accident that has left him paralysed from the neck down.

As the nominations for the award were read out, film of Hampson in his pomp as an England under-21 prop was played on a big-screen, sprinting between training cones, the epitome of athleticism. It was impossible not to glance away towards the young man in the wheelchair, requiring a ventilator to breathe, looking at these pictures of himself, and not wonder what torrent of emotions they were provoking.

Hampson slowly negotiated himself to the stage where Paul Kimmage, who wrote Engage with Hampson, stressed the towering class with which his young friend has faced the consequences of an accident that would have crumbled most men. The conspicuous lack of self-pity that Hampson continually exhibits, the reluctance to continually travel the “why me” route is humbling, until Kimmage’s reminder of the substance of the man he was working with. “Matt had a choice, to get busy living or get busy dying,” he said. “Matt chose to get busy living.”

Maybe with all the free time Rooney and Co have to fill in the coming weeks, reading something besides the Daily Tit might be productive. If nothing else, it might enlighten them on the value of choice.