Keane in the company of aristocrats

If Irishman Robbie Keane had any doubts about the size of the challenge facing him at his new club, Serie A side Inter Milan, they may well have been dispelled by his first public outing on Sunday night, just 24 hours after he had signed a five-year contract with the Milan club.

Keane went to Pistoia, near Florence, in the role of spectator to watch his new club beat the Kuwait Olympic team 1-0. Given the late July heat and the all too friendly nature of the game, the match did little to arouse spectator emotions and left one pundit commenting that there was more movement in the grandstand from Inter fans looking for Keane's autograph than from players out on the pitch.

At the relatively tender age of 20, Keane has stepped into one of the hottest hothouses in all Serie A. Inter Milan, (Internazionale Milano is the full version) is one of the great aristocrats of Italian soccer. Thirteen times winners of the Italian title and Champions Cup winners twice, Inter is a club where expectations are often unrealistically high and patience often brutally short.

Both players and coaches come and go with alarming frequency. In the last decade, Inter have employed nine different coaches while in the same period talented players such as German Matthias Sammer and Dutchman Dennis Bergkamp have come and gone, rejected as "failures" by the club, its fans and the enormously influential Italian sports media.

Keane is clearly about to plunge in at the deep end, joining a club that not only once housed compatriot Liam Brady but which is now home to some of the most famous names in football, including Brazilian Ronaldo, Frenchman Laurent Blanc, Dutchman Clarence Seedorf and Italian Christian Vieri.

To some extent, Keane may well be helped by the fact that, although Inter first expressed an interest in him last January, his purchase last weekend came as a relative surprise to fans. With the club's ideal first-choice strikers, Ronaldo and Vieri, both currently out through injury, Inter had been looking to reinforce their squad with a view to their immediate involvement in the third preliminary round of the Champions League (against either Swedish side Helsingborg or Bielorussian side Bate Borisov later this month).

Inter's first market move regarding strikers came during the Euro 2000 finals when they bought the Turkish and Galatasaray striker Hakan Surkor, for a reported £5 million. Subsequent to that, the Milan club had sought to further strengthen the squad with the purchase of Lazio's talented Chilean striker Marcelo Salas. Only when the Salas deal definitively fell through last week did Inter re-activate their interest in Keane.

The Irishman, however, joins at a potentially good moment since the injuries to both Ronaldo and Vieri mean that team places are there for the taking. Ronaldo is still recovering from knee surgery undergone last April and is not expected to return until next spring, if at all this season. Vieri's injury, a thigh muscle problem, is less serious and he is expected back for the start of the Serie A season on October 1st.

Even allowing for the absence of Ronaldo and Vieri, Keane will still face stiff competition for a regular first-team place since Inter not only have Sukur but also Chilean Ivan Zamorano, Uruguyan Alvaro Recoba and Italians Corrado Colombo and Anselmo Robbiati (scorer of the winning goal against Kuwait on Sunday night).

Keane may also be helped by the fact that in a summer which has seen Argentine striker Hernan Crespo move from Parma to Lazio for £44 million and his compatriot Gabriel Batistuta move from Fiorentina to AS Roma for £30 million, his £16 million price tag will seem relatively modest. Even by Inter's own standards, Keane's purchase price is still well less than half of that splashed out by the club last summer for Vieri.

Keane is the first Irishman to play in Serie A since Liam Brady, who spent seven seasons in Italy between 1980 and 1987, playing for Juventus, Sampdoria, Inter and Ascoli. One of the outstanding foreign players of his generation in Italy, Brady won two Serie A titles with Juventus before the arrival of an obscure Frenchman called Michel Platini forced Juventus to reluctantly off load him to Sampdoria.

The fact that Keane is relatively unknown to Italian fans and media has led to some colourful reporting over the weekend about his background. Although the course of his playing career from Tallaght United via Wolverhampton Wanderers to Coventry City was amply and faithfully covered, one leading sports daily suggested that Inter's latest purchase had started out life as a shepherd, herding sheep on the outskirts of Tallaght.

We can only presume that the correspondent in question has never been to Tallaght. On the other hand, not many Tallaght players have made it all the way to Inter Milan.

Paddy Agnew can be contacted at pagnew@aconet.it