He's gone, but he'll be back - he's box office

Tom Humphriesmarvels at how a short run of bad results was somehow upgraded from blip to terminal crisis

IF THERE was a stock exchange dealing in units of pubic interest Sunderland football club went through their own Black Thursday yesterday. The big top left town. Just the tumbleweeds and some of Roy Keane's lesser signings blowing along the Wear now.

Keane's departure was unnecessary but contributes hugely to his legend. The debate and hysteria which he is capable of sparking wherever he goes gains a new dimension with each successive piece of evidence that he can walk away from it all at the drop of a lower lip or a few home points.

Keane often speaks wistfully about how he just wants a quiet life. Every chapter of his unfolding existence makes bliss that less likely. In a world where everything is inflated and distorted by way of routine Keane, who despises the hoopla, manages to be the biggest draw there is.

Perhaps it all started about eight years ago with the prawn sandwich observation, that watershed moment in manufactured controversy which somehow cemented Roy Keane's reputation as the font of most things interesting in football.

Roy's moderately astute observation about the occasionally serene atmosphere in Old Trafford was instantly afforded such standing in the treasury of football wisdom that the term "prawn sandwich brigade" has its own Wikipedia entry and needs no explanation when included in headlines and copy on the sports or news pages.

In a word association test most of us would blurt out the words 'Roy Keane' when asked what prawn sandwiches remind us of. Somewhere along the way as, Keane would be the first to agree, the world got all out of kilter (whatever kilter may be) and the values of football became as distorted as the price of footballers.

Roy Keane will always be box office but yesterday's events at the Stadium of Light tell us more about football and the way we have come to view it than they do about one of its most compelling protagonists.

When the dust settles and Keane's dogs have been walked, and been duly photographed while being walked, we will marvel at how a short run of bad results at Sunderland somehow became upgraded to a crisis.

Think. Sunderland were until yesterday a well run club with a young manager whose first season and a half of governance had brought an extraordinary basement to penthouse promotion campaign followed by consolidation on the top floor while more attractive swashbucklers like Reading went down.

Now Sunderland find themselves without a manager after a brief crisis scarcely worthy of the name. Keane's departure comes after a run of poor results but nothing which suggested a terminal ailment.

Football is football, though, and the game has become so obsessed with itself that context and perspective have vanished entirely as concepts. Football now gets itself into such a dizzying state of agitation over some inane piece of trivia that all the known pyrotechnics of controversy and outrage will no longer be adequate.

Somebody will have to press the button, causing a big bang and a blinding white light and leaving nothing but the echo of an irradiated commentator, "it is now. . ."

Football has altered our entire concept of time. Everything is accelerated. You can become a crisis club in less time than it takes to spell the words crisis club.

For Keane, of course, the end always comes with fireworks and flashbulbs and he leaves behind him as usual, the distinct whiff of cordite; this exit, though, is a little different to the others. Sunderland, for all their good intentions, are picking up the tab for football's failings and its tendency towards hysteria.

Roy Keane knew that Niall Quinn was never going to push him over the precipice. There was no need to. Quinn is smart enough an operator to know the gamble he took on Keane had paid an unexpectedly earlier dividend but the real benefits would be down the line. Keeping a man who has served both as friend and foe happy was the main priority.

Money was a concern but not a pressing one. Keane has spent Drumaville's money generously at Sunderland and sometimes foolishly, sometimes making the mistake of signing the mediocrity he knew rather then the potential he didn't know.

For his money he got not a lot of quality but he got enough to gain promotion in romantically unlikely circumstances and he got enough to stay up, which in the current market is no mean feat.

Signing players for Sunderland is a little more difficult than it is in Fantasy Football, however. There are, as Keane has lamented bitterly, those players whose wives would rather shop in London or Manchester (if not Milan or Barcelona) than by the Wear.

If you were young and could get two or three times as much money at Fulham or West Ham you would do the same. Roy himself went from Nottingham to Manchester as a young man.

Keane, though, increasingly gave the impression of being disenchanted with modern footballers and modern football rather than with Sunderland itself.

In interviews in recent years, Keane has been wont to return to the particular hurt which the manner of his exit from Old Trafford caused him. Saipan was a clash of personalities and an issue he felt worth fighting over. Old Trafford he sees as an institutional betrayal.

Despite the entertainingly Hamlet-like soliloquies which became a feature of his Friday press conferences, he has enough belief in himself to have looked in the mirror today and told himself he was the man to bring Sunderland all the way but one suspects his heart was just no longer in it.

He left because he could, because he doesn't need to put up with the hysteria and the mania and because he doesn't believe anymore there is such a thing as loyalty in professional football.

The cumulative effect of messy exits from Saipan, Old Trafford and Parkhead has been to induce a slight melancholy in Keane which prompts him to talk often about the old days playing with Rockmount FC.

He went to play for Rockmount when he was eight years old and stayed till he was 16. The friends from that all-conquering team of boys are the friends he has today, the guys who come to stay in his house, the guys he sees when he travels home.

Rockmount never let him down or disappointed him. Forest tried to short change him when he left. Celtic was a mistake, he feels now. Saipan is still freighted with much regret but United's treatment of him changed him irrevocably, one suspects. Talking earlier this year in the context of loyalty, he remembered realising on the day of his departure United had statements prepared which didn't even get his years of service to the club right.

"I lost the love of the game that Friday morning. I thought football is cruel, life is cruel. It takes two to tango, also. I am fully responsible for my own actions but some things are wrong. I left on a Friday and they told me certain things before I left that day. I was told the following week I couldn't sign for another club. I had been led to believe I could. There were certain things I was told at certain meetings that were basic lies.

"That was part of the exit plans, I am convinced. Especially with my pride, I wasn't going to accept that. They had a statement prepared and they were thanking me for 11 and a half years of service. I had to remind the manager and (Manchester United chief executive) David Gill I had been there 12 and a half years.

"I think that might have been part of the plan. Then financial stuff was mentioned. I was thinking, my God, I am happy to leave. I won't go down that road. A week later they announced £70 or £80 million profit after telling me I hadn't played for six weeks and so they weren't prepared to do this and that. I told David Gill I had broken my foot playing for Manchester United against Liverpool. Pretty sad."

Pretty sad. And Sunderland a club who have attempted to transfuse the body of the Premier League with a little of the colossal decency of their chairman are the ones who will lose out. Keane wasn't going to wait around to see if Niall Quinn's face would become increasingly more anguished. He wasn't going to spend too many more Saturday's being abused from the sidelines as he was at last Saturday's defeat to Bolton.

Roy Keane will master management. The struggles he was experiencing at Sunderland were a mere blip and January's clear-out of long faces and redundant mediocrities would in all likelihood have energised him. Keane doesn't need the hysteria or the abuse anymore, however. Standing on the sideline watching his team play doesn't consume him or energise him as playing did.

He has his money, his wife, his children, his dogs and home. Walking away is an act of sanity and self-preservation and a curiously dignified thing to do in an era when managers creased and bent with worrying cling white-knuckled to their desks until dragged away by security.

He is too edgy a character to retire to golf or punditry. He will be back and the knowledge among chairmen of what he is capable of in terms of his successes with Sunderland and in terms of his departure will ensure he is instant box office gold again.

The fact he is capable of walking away at any time makes him such a compulsive figure. When the circus opens at a new club the show will begin again and we'll all be ringside stoking the madness.

YEARS ON THE WEAR TIMELINE OF KEANE'S STINT AT SUNDERLAND

2006

August 28th: Appointed Sunderland manager. With team in the Championship relegation zone, he sets about making immediate changes by signing six players before closure of transfer

window.

September: Starts with victories over Derby County and Leeds Utd.

2007

March: Wins second consecutive manager of the month award with Sunderland having climbed to third in the table.

April: Victory over Burnley puts Sunderland on the brink of promotion to the Premier League, which is secured when Derby Co lose to Crystal Palace.

May: Sunderland clinch the Championship title by wrapping up their campaign with a 5-0 win over Luton. Keane declines chance to celebrate with an open-top bus parade.

July/August: Brings in a host of summer signings, including Scotland goalkeeper Craig Gordon for a record £9 million.

August: Begins English Premier League campaign with last-gasp 1-0 win over Tottenham.

November: Despite a winning start Sunderland take just seven points from their next 13 games - the last of which is a 7-1 thrashing by Everton - to slip into the bottom three.

2008

February: Form lifts after Christmas with wins over Bolton, Portsmouth, Birmingham and Wigan.

March/April: Consecutive wins over Aston Villa, West Ham and Fulham steer Sunderland to safety.

September: Victory over Middlesbrough lifts Sunderland to sixth but claims he will not "tolerate people abusing me" after fans react angrily to an unconvincing League Cup win over Northampton.

November: A run of just one win in six games, culminating in a 4-1 thrashing by Bolton, leaves Sunderland in the bottom three.