And it's over to you Mick

WORLD CUP 2002/Roy Keane's expulsion: Roy Keane may not have apologised, but he has seen the bigger picture. The next move is Mick McCarthy's, writes Tom Humphries

In Izumo last night the rumours were more plentiful than the grains of rice. The neat order and down-the-line discipline of the Irish camp was dissolving into a sweaty mess of rumours, fliers and innuendos. The request from the Irish management that Roy Keane be treated as "history" looked less and less likely to be respected. Keane is going to haunt this World Cup until it's over.

In Izumo, until you'd heard the word of Roy with your own ears, you just paid your money and you took your choice with the rumours. Roy was on his way back. Roy was making an address to the nation. Roy was in tears. Roy would be reading a prepared statement. Mick was moved to forgiveness. Mick couldn't care less. Mick knew nothing about it. The Government jet was humming on a runway in readiness.

An FAI official was quoted as saying informally that he'd give up his own seat on the way to the World Cup if only Roy could be on the next plane. Another FAI official said he knew nothing about anything, but the association was pressing ahead with plans to get poor Colin Healy out of whatever home for the bewildered he is now in and to the World Cup. Great little nation. Wonderful spectacle.

And so another long night of the laptops beckoned. First, like weary peasants laying down our scythes and moving slowly towards the wireless, we gathered in a room where a mobile phone was being held in front of tape recorders. Meanwhile, in a house back in Dublin, a phone receiver was held to the telly. The phone listened to the telly. Our tape recorders listened to the phone. We listened to our tape recorders. A TV camera filmed us all.

From the morass of accusations and loose words, this much now seems clear. Roy Keane wants to be at the World Cup. Whatever cloud filled his head in Saipan has vanished. Before he left, he spoke about being happy to be going home. Now he speaks to Tommie Gorman of his hurt and concedes the possibility of a return. "I want to play for Ireland" he says "of course it hurts. Your dead right it hurts."

Whatever happens next must happen in Izumo. Much has been done already. Many of those whom Keane has been busy mowing down over the last couple of days have been busy preparing some sort of runway upon which he might effect a return landing.

Before Roy even addressed the nation last night, much diplomatic shuttling had been done. Michael Kennedy, solicitor and agent to Keane, and several other Irish internationals had whispered in his ear at length. The advice to a head-strong and wounded man has been to leave room for manoeuvre, never to say never.

For the eerily serene Mick McCarthy, his friend and agent Liam Gaskin has been busy doing the same. If Roy turns a little this way, would Mick turn a little way to meet him? Gaskin and Kennedy have been in regular contact.

Things were changing within the players' rooms as well. A squad which reeled with shock at the vehemence of Keane's attack on McCarthy last week had instinctively backed the manager and continue to do so. Life without Roy, however, holds out only the prospect of a dull and bitter World Cup campaign.

Senior players had spoken to McCarthy before and after his trip to Kobe on Sunday and explained that while they would fully respect his decision on the matter, they would have no objection to a return being engineered.

The irony is that among those shuttlling back and forth are players within the squad whom Keane has been attacking relentlessly since his return and what goodwill was left towards him was beginning to evaporate yesterday.

McCarthy told players before leaving for Kobe that he would give the matter consideration. When he returned, however, his attitude had apparently hardened again. Efforts at persuading Keane to leave aside his anger towards McCarthy and those members of the squad who had backed him were having little effect and it was by no means certain that, even if Keane made a full and contrite apology, he would be invited back by McCarthy.

As it turned out the words given to Tommie Gorman of RTÉ amounted to somewhat less and somewhat more. Keane certainly didn't apologise and at times lashed out again. On the other hand, he appeared and sounded deeply upset and troubled. For the first time, he admitted he would love to be in Japan.

"I want to play for Ireland. We'll have to see, possibly yes. I've been involved since I was 15 or 14 and going up for trials in Dublin. This is what it's all about, playing in World Cups. You just never know. We'll see . . . Of course it's hurting me, dead right it is."

McCarthy and FAI officials were sent transcripts of the interview and will by this morning have heard tapes. The next move is McCarthy's and it is a difficult one. He will appreciate that Keane came across last night as caring about the team and as genuinely wounded by what has happened. The management of the Irish team has been backed into the space between a rock and a hard place.

McCarthy made a brave decision last week to send his best player home. Regardless of who did what in the events which led to that expulsion, it was a brave thing to do given McCarthy has enjoyed such a unique relationship with the Irish public since his own days as a player and a World Cup hero. He has to have known that playing a World Cup without Keane was always going to endanger his own legacy.

Since then, the tide has being turning slowly. The details of the issue at hand have receded and the prospect of playing without Keane has settled in with players and public alike. Nobody likes the idea and awareness grows that history is unlikely to be kind to either man.

Keane did himself no favours over the weekend with his piece in the Mail on Sunday. Rumours that he was paid handsomely for the piece haven't sat well with players in Izumo. However, McCarthy ceded quite a chunk of the high moral ground yesterday by appearing in the Daily Mail with his own column attacking Keane.

With such actions, McCarthy risks losing the affection he is held in. At the end of his now infamous press conference in a Chinese restaurant on the island of Saipan last Thursday night, at which he announced Keane was being sent home, McCarthy requested that there be no more questions about Keane.

The Irish media has respected that request. While the nation has huffed and puffed about the affair, we have restricted ourselves to asking about the weather and the training and the general "how was the play, Mrs Lincoln?" stuff.

Now the Irish manager turns around and produces a column's worth of excoriation in an English daily, in which, to use the vernacular, he tells all. We don't know if he got paid for this, but it scarcely matters.

The optics are all wrong. Irish journalists here have respected the manager's wishes and refrained from asking questions about Roy since last Thursday night. They have listened as he told foreign journalists that he would no longer be speaking about Roy. The goodwill and respect which allowed McCarthy to make that call evaporated yesterday.

Today, McCarthy must speak about the Keane business and he must put an end to it once and for all. If there is no way back, no form of apology which would be adequate, let us hear that said. If there is some formula of words which can be agreed, it must be done.

One thing seems likely. The tide will turn tragically against the manager. Keane's genuine hurt will have made an impression on many. He comes across as a man whose pride makes him unwilling to say the words, but whose heart keeps beating passionately and patriotically. People won't want to see him humiliated or unnecessarily excluded.

A private phone call, a big gesture, some imaginative intervention? Are these things not possible? Now that Keane is no longer entirely ruling out the possibility of playing in this World Cup, he has taken the first step. It would be remarkably and fatally hard-headed to ignore the boy which still resides within the man who is Roy Keane. Time is running out.

McCarthy deserves better than that. He owes himself better than that. Yet, as this week rolls on, with an ominous Cameroon standing at the end of it, McCarthy is losing the PR war in a big way.

Eight years ago, one day in July, the Irish squad flew home from the World Cup and were whisked to a "party" in the Phoenix Park. Veterans of the 1990 campaign might have been forgiven if they half-expected an outpouring of delirium which had greeted the team on that occasion. Instead, they got one of those embarrassing RTÉ-run affairs in a half-deserted field. Everyone put a brave face on it, but the lesson was that even in Ireland the cheering doesn't go on forever.

That sad shambles in the Park should have marked the end of the Jack Charlton era, but Jack had a tin ear when it came to public opinion. He struggled on until the players had run wild in Limerick for a full week instead of preparing for a game, until we had drawn a game with Liechtenstein, until we had travelled to Anfield and been put out of our misery by the Dutch. By the time Jack went, much goodwill had gone with him.

Three weeks without Roy Keane will drain what spirits exist in the country. There could be more forlorn open-top bus rides when the team comes home.

Will McCarthy change?

Early on in this business, when it was reported, erroneously, that Roy Keane had questioned Mick's Irishness, a strange double-think took place in conversations. People were appalled that such a thing had happened, that a man so intrinsically associated with Ireland could be questioned in such a way.

At the same time, almost every conversation had a moment in which one party sought to explain McCarthy's intransigence. "He's from Barnsley," we'd say. "He's a Yorkshireman."

And somehow, until now, Mick has managed to maintain that duality, to remain proud both of his Yorkshire roots and upbringing as well as his Irish side. As a modern form of Irishness, it is broad and commendable, but now is the time to let the flexible, imaginative Irish side of his nature take the dominant role.

Keane has had the sense to see at least some of the bigger picture.

"You're probably right," he told Tommie Gorman. "I agree with your point, there's kids in Ireland, there's people in Ireland, it's all gone too messy. Maybe there is a way, maybe there is.

"We'll have to wait and see. We're running out of time. But, as I said, my conscience is clear and that's the most important thing in my life."

The attention swings back here this morning. The silence is sober and hopes are not eternal. If a move is to be made, it must be made quickly. It will take a big man to do it.