Keane aptitude should not surprise us

Sideline Cut:There may well be a little bunker in Roy Keane's garage reserved as a burial ground for the various trophies and baubles he has picked up over his football career. It is amusing to think of the Corkman striding briskly into the family storeroom - an ordered place, one imagines, with the lawnmower spit-polished and the wax jackets and galoshes used for Trigger's walks arranged just so - and tossing his Manager of the Month award into a cubbyhole glittering with old FA Cup medals, innumerable Premiership trinkets, Player of the Year trophies and a couple of old United shirts.

There will be plenty of years to mount them on green baize, but for now he has other fish to fry.

Keane's poorly concealed impatience at being singled out as Championship manager for February was predictable. It is a bit like being announced over the PA as man of the match with a half-hour left to play. Anything can happen.

All old sportsmen have a touch of the superstitious. The last thing he wants is to jinx a good run for Sunderland with a token award that is basically a sponsorship wheeze and, as he says, ultimately means nothing.

Not for the first time, the bread-and-butter Championship league has become infinitely more fascinating than the more glamorous Premiership as the race for promotion heats up. A league table featuring eight teams within five points of each other going down the stretch of 10 remaining games: that scenario promises the kind of pyrotechnics and human drama the Premiership - for all its hype - simply cannot deliver.

In the Premiership, the vast majority of clubs are guided by the chief principle of simply staying up. In the Championship, teams are more gung-ho, driven by the ambition of getting into the big league. And look at the clubs chasing down promotion: Preston; Mick McCarthy's Wolverhampton; Stoke City; Cardiff; West Bromwich Albion.

These are all old-stock football towns, redolent of bygone eras when wealth and talent were more evenly distributed, and after years and even decades of languishing in the doldrums, they are within shouting distance of the big time once more.

Into the mix come Roy Keane and Sunderland. It is no real surprise that Keane has taken to management so smoothly and impressively. The lazy stereotyping of Keane during the more turbulent onfield and off-field episodes of his playing career always overlooked the fact he studied and learned from everything that happened to him.

As John Giles pointed out on the radio a few nights ago, the English press, in particular the tabloids, never tried or particularly wanted to understand the passions of the Manchester United man beyond the easy caricature of The Wild Irishman. The boozy nights of Keane's youth, the colourful, uncompromising turn of phrase and the menacing onfield persona gave them plenty of fuel, and even when he turned zealous in his approach to the game, he was often regarded as some kind of oddball.

As Keane himself noted in the aftermath of the midsummer World Cup madness of five (!) years ago, "I have this image - the robot, the machine, the winner".

During the hysterical debates that gripped this country during the fallout from that 2002 World Cup, there were spurious attempts to portray Keane as the embodiment of the new, affluent Ireland, where winning and getting ahead was the only thing. This always seemed wrong to me on two counts.

To begin with, Keane was reared in the old school of English football culture. Signed from Cobh to the unique and strange environment of Brian Clough's Nottingham Forest dressing-room, Keane thrived under the direction of the egocentric genius then in the twilight of his career.

"When I go," Clough once quipped, "God is going to have to give up his chair."

Who knew if he was joking?

Keane was ebullient on the pitch and off it and, as he admitted in his biography, was delighted to discover a flourishing drinking sub-culture when he signed for Manchester United in 1993. Ferguson's team were top dogs then, playing and partying hard.

Reminiscing about those traditional days in a long Observer interview in 2002, Keane said, "when we went out for a so-called meal, you wouldn't even see a sandwich".

He also agreed that maybe the boozing was something of a crutch to help him overcome an essential shyness, an aid used by those other Irish folk heroes George Best and Paul McGrath with far more ruinous consequences. Keane decided drinking and football could no longer mix, and he became painstaking and rigorous and unforgiving in his preparation for games. Those two worlds collided explosively in Saipan.

But in Clough and Ferguson, Keane was blessed to be mentored by towering figures on the English football landscape, both of whom remained steadfast products of their own environment while imposing their personalities on their clubs.

Keane is like that in the sense Cork has never left him and never will leave him. In his Nottingham days, he would race for an evening flight so he could drink late with his childhood pals from Mayfield. He watches Cork play Gaelic games and gave a long talk to the hurlers during last summer's championship. It has been said that in the old days he used to listen to Irish ballads before matches: rebel songs and the like.

Who knows whether that is true? But it seems clear the further in life Keane has travelled, the more important his home has become to him. And although he has always been ambitious, his aspirations were always predicated on what was best for club and country. Glory came his way but he never explicitly sought it out and hardly craves it now. Those early rejection letters wised him up to the fact he was never going to catch the eye as an individualist, and so he set about becoming the most competitive, the smartest and the hungriest player on any field. He bossed and inspired more technically gifted colleagues to greater heights. Countless players have testified that Roy Keane made them better.

And though he must have enjoyed the sportsman's pride in victory, it was always about the team, which was why he could continue to play his heart out for United in the Champions League semi-final of 1999 in the full knowledge the second booking he picked up against Juventus (after stretching to retrieve a wayward pass from a team-mate) would rule him out for the final.

And so - after reuniting with Niall Quinn and taking over a Sunderland team that had a zero-for-five record in league and cup upon his arrival - the beginning of Keane's managerial life would undoubtedly merit bon mots from old Big 'Ead. Ferguson must secretly be revelling in the prospect of managing against his old protégé.

When Keane was originally spoken of as a manager, the common reaction was that he would simply blow his fuse when things went wrong or at the shortcomings of lesser players. But Keane's tirades were always triggered by what he saw as ineptitude or unfairness. Now that he is in control, such problems won't arise. As for the players, what young professional worth his salt would not want to play under someone of Keane's stature? Another big test lies ahead against West Brom today, and Sunderland could yet fall short.

But the marvel is not where Keane the manager might stand at five o'clock today but where he may be in five years' time.