Roy Keane ‘not fascinating, but interesting’, says Roddy Doyle

At one point in the process, said Roddy Doyle, his mother reckoned he was beginning to sound like the man with whom he was working. "Have you got a Cork accent," she asked, and he thought it highly likely.

From January to July, after all, Doyle worked "literally" seven days a week with Roy Keane on The Second Half, and when he wasn't sitting down talking to him, he was playing him back on his headphones transcribing him.

“It’s a bit like being under water, somehow,” he said of the experience.

Keane was, then, in permanent residence in his head.

“We got down to work immediately, and there were no slow days through it all. We worked on it every day. We had four-hour sessions, which is a long, long time. Hardly a break, because we enjoyed it.”

Doyle hadn’t even met Keane before the proposal arrived asking him to work with him on the book, but after initial doubts, he decided it was a project he could not turn down. “I put it aside at first, I was working on something. But I began thinking about it, ‘am I up to it?’, I’d never done anything like this. I love my football, but never claimed any expertise, I shout at the telly, but it’s a long, long time since I thought, ‘I could have done better’.”

Challenge

“So, I wondered what could I bring to the job. There’s no doubt at all that we like listening to Roy, we like what he says, but we also like the way he says it. I thought the challenge might be to make the book seem like almost a monologue, a theatrical monologue. I wasn’t writing a profile of him, I wasn’t trying to catch him out in any way, I always felt I was kind of an amplifier for him.

“And I felt my outsider status could be an advantage, I could ask questions that would be obvious to lay people, but ones that a sports journalist might bypass. So, in a way I thought that weakness would be a strength.

“We met for an hour to talk about it, and I came away thinking, ‘yeah, this could be good’. And I think he came away thinking the same thing. It was quite relaxed. I suppose to a degree, he’s had his achievements, and I have mine. Although, the Booker Prize isn’t the Premier League,” he laughs.

Doyle has been involved with the launch of rather successful books in his time too, but the hoopla around this one has part amused, part bemused him. “There is a frenzy around it, but I can’t quite account for it. I don’t really understand it.”

Partly because there aren’t too many like him in football who are that outspoken?

Tunnel incident

“There is that, yeah. I can’t think of anyone at the moment – it’s all a bit bland. I remember really enjoying working on the famous tunnel incident with

Patrick Vieira

at Highbury. I look at it these days and you’ve got the players lining up, in much wider tunnels for a start, and they’re all hugging each other.

“But there is a slight paternal side now on my part, they all look the same age as my children, so: ‘Ah, that’s nice, that’s nice, they’re hugging each other’. But, on the other hand, I’d rather they were kicking lumps out of each other.”

Did you find him a fascinating character?

“Not fascinating, no. But interesting. And what I really liked, as a story teller, I wanted it to be more than just a book with anecdotes, I wanted to have a bit more than that. I think his readiness to openly acknowledge errors that were made, and learn from him, yeah, it was great. I thought business students should be reading this.”

The leaks? “When I found out, there was a choice: do I give a toss, or do I enjoy it? So, I opted for ‘enjoy it’.”

So, no boycott of Tesco? “No. Although, I might stay away from the Manchester one as a matter of principle.”