Focus on Roy Keane rather than the football once again

When asked last month in the run up to the Gibraltar and Germany games if all the hullabaloo around the launch of Roy Keane’s book was an unwelcome distraction from his and the team’s preparations, Martin O’Neill just shrugged the idea off with a slightly comedic air of resignation.

“Let’s just say we came here and there hadn’t been a book,” he told journalists at the squad’s training ground in Malahide, “there would have been something else, seriously.

“He [Keane] would have slipped down there on the field and we’d have been talking about that; maybe broken his leg or something like that. There would have been something, there always is.”

O’Neill subsequently suggested that the book launch had actually been welcome enough for players in need of something to talk about and perhaps this latest story will similarly serve to relieve the boredom. Whatever the detail, though, it certainly seems to add weight to the manager’s theory that, with Keane, there is never a dull moment.

When the northerner was appointed almost exactly a year ago, he sounded in his early press appearances almost as if he saw bringing his former ITV colleague on board as adding a bit of spice to a job that, for a man with so many years of club management under his belt, threatened to seem dull.

The impression at the time was that the rebuilding of the former Manchester United midfielder’s own managerial reputation would serve as something of a side project. Clearly O’Neill himself believed in Keane’s abilities and he insisted from the start that he appreciated the scale of the press and public interest in the 43-year-old but it remains hard to believe that he expected anything like this.

From the outset, interest in the Cork man has been huge. Initially it was driven in part by the scale of the surprise at his appointment given the animosity that had existed between him and FAI chief executive John Delaney and the fairly widespread belief that he would have been reluctant to work as an assistant to somebody else.

He dealt with both issues well in his own early press engagements and appeared to settle very happily into a role which seemed to include, among other things, the establishment of a personal connection with the players. Several have spoken positively about having him around and O’Neill has always suggested that he values his input, whether it is in terms of reporting back on games or working directly with him and the squad around games.

Keane, though, has repeatedly been the main focus of attention. After his original appointment came close to overshadowing O'Neill's in news terms, there was the offer of the Celtic job which fuelled endless questions and speculation around the time of the friendly against Italy in London and the subsequent trip to the United States at the start of the summer.

When he turned the position down, he was then promptly linked with the assistant manager's role at Aston Villa which he eventually took and then, last month, there was the book. All along, meanwhile, his bitter feud with Alex Ferguson and other lingering controversies from his playing days or earlier club-management career are there to throw up stories, it seems, on the quieter days.

Much, if not most, of the time there has been very little he could have done to avoid all the attention. He is, as has often been pointed out, simply box office. But for the second month in succession the build-up to a key a stage in Ireland’s campaign to qualify for the European Championships looks set to be overshadowed by interest in events surrounding the team’s assistant manager.

O’Neill, it seems, is right. There will always be something.