Roy Keane’s club links beginning to grate with O’Neill

Martin O’Neill seemed to see relaunching Roy Keane’s club management career as a sort of side project when he recruited the Corkman as his Republic of Ireland assistant last November. Barely six months on, though, he was displaying the first signs of fatigue yesterday at the regularity with which the press corps keep linking Keane to the various vacancies at club level.

A few weeks ago Keane was being linked with a return to Manchester United as an assistant manager to Louis van Gaal: nothing came of that and so yesterday there was the inevitable talk of the Celtic job.

O’Neill said it was nice that the 42-year-old’s profile in his current position is already prompting suggestions that he might be whisked away to bigger and better things. However, it was said with the air of a man who, for the second time this week, was coming to terms with a tedious downside to his managerial duties with Ireland.

O'Neill spoke with obvious affection for the "brilliant" club Neil Lennon announced yesterday he was leaving, insisting he had "a really great time", and admitted, with some small hint of regret, that he "might well have been still there if not for other reasons".

Keane, he acknowledged, was certainly an obvious enough candidate to be linked with the job. “He has an affinity with Celtic, too, and stepped out of Man Utd, I know at the end of his career, to play at Celtic when he had an opportunity, I believe, to play in Spain.

"He turned that down to go to Celtic so I'm sure his name will be linked with it, but if you tell me that they have stopped taking bets on Henrik Larsson, then maybe it's done." 'Great fit' Indeed, somebody had told him that the bookies had the Swede as a shoo-in for the job and O'Neill obligingly spoke long and glowingly about the striker and how he could be a "great fit" for the club.

Eventually, however, he admitted: "Look, in an attempt to try to be nice, if you had mentioned Charlie Hurley was up for the job at Celtic, I probably would have gone on some meandering journey about what a great, great player was my hero and how he's got a good chance of getting the job and I would then have to speak to Charlie before he takes it because I'm thinking of Charlie being my next assistant . . ."

“Can I just say,” he continued more seriously, “that I wouldn’t be surprised if his [Keane’s] name is linked with a number of things but it started off with him as assistant manager to Louis van Gaal – and that hasn’t materialised.

“If something does materialise, we’ll have a conversation and I’m sure he would tell me first of all what might be happening if that was the case. And then I would have a discussion with him and I would hope that if it was something so extraordinary that you would seriously really have to think about it, I could understand that. But that has not happened. Generally speaking, he’s pretty well committed to here.”

O’Neill, of course, also spoke in glowing terms about Lennon himself and suggested he would do well in his next job whatever it might be.

His own news, by comparison, was rather mundane with 24 of the 25 players who were supposed to train yesterday doing just that; a level of commitment that, he said, delighted him. Calf injury David Meyler was the exception and the Hull City midfielder was due to have a scan on a calf injury after the session ended.

“It’s too early yet to make a call on Sunday but I don’t think we have anything to be overly concerned about and we’ll take it day by day,” he remarked.

The northerner said that this extended period with the squad will be “terrific” for him and that his intention is to work closely with the players on some of the changes he wants to make to the team’s style of play and, hopefully, get a few good results.

“I don’t want to be driving them mad with three sessions a day or anything after the long season they had, I want it to be enjoyable but I want to get some work done as well. The games we’ve chosen are particularly difficult; I wasn’t choosing matches to try to improve our coefficient but I still want to win. Obviously there’ll be a bit of experimentation but I want to try and do well; I wouldn’t want to be going into September on the back of a very poor run.”

As for opportunities to impress, he concluded: “I think the players would say that as long as they get a fair crack of the whip they have no complaints and my hope is that by September, 99 per cent of the players will be able to say that.”