Cliched title and clunky subheading aside, this will work for those with tabula rasa on the steely, big-bearded Corkman who seems to be everywhere with his pugnacious football punditry (Viral? It’s a tap in) and advertisements made with a shy-smirking bemused manner that reads, “I can’t believe they are paying me for this”. It’s a decent entry point for a summation of the life and career if you only know “On the box Keano“, a match for Judge Roy Bean in terms of convictions and entertainment.
If you possess the grey wisdom of having also followed “box-to-box Keano" in a long career as the Republic of Ireland’s greatest ever player and Manchester United legend (and sometimes club manager), then you will have the feeling of sitting down to a reheated meal. Dave Hannigan brings to the table what any Keane admirer probably already knows, from the previous autobiographies to the podcasts and public appearances, and he asks the question himself: do we need another Keane book to add to the “umpteen” out there? Finishing this one, I don’t think so, unless there comes a time where Keane sits down again with a writer.
Some interesting elements are to be found: the consolidation of the Irish tabloids on the back of Keane’s chaotic early playing days, and the influence he’s had on Irish rugby in recent years. Hannigan tries gamely to put his own slant on Keane, revisiting “the narrative of his life in tandem with Ireland itself in the same period ... across the past half century, the most transformative in our history, his turbulent personal journey sometimes mirrored and often intertwined with the evolution of the country that made him”.
Surely Keane has never mirrored anyone but himself, and this is an ambitious reach that might be reserved for figures such as, say, James Connolly, Éamon de Valera, Mary Robinson or John Hume. In strict sporting terms such grand claims could be applied to Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali or Serena Williams, athletes who directly confronted and changed their societies; or, in an Irish context, Katie Taylor for earning respect for women’s sports. But Keano in such a subtext? I think he’d blush. When his crossing over from playing to punditry is mentioned as akin to Dylan “going electric”, it was time to do what Roy feels about leaf blowers: switch off.
