Keane will still dominate the World Cup

WORLD CUP 2002: Opposites don't always attract. Tom Humphries finds a player and manager always heading towards an ill-fated collision with each other

At the shops near the railway at Izumo there is a little home-made shrine dedicated to the pending World Cup and its spangling stars. One corner therein is dedicated to the team who will be staying and preparing locally.

Ireland and Mr Roy Keane. And there he is, with a Buddhas smile and a competitor's clench, appearing just as a head and shoulders shot, small grin playing on his lips, coals burning in the eyes as usual. The man they voted off the island.

He dominates the shrine just like he will dominate the rest of Ireland's World Cup. Indeed, he will continue to be the dominant figure in Irish soccer until such time as he is either re-instated to the national team or he retires. Until then, no Irish result will be complete without a post-mortem dealing with what might have been.

In one sense, a sense which escaped the principles, Saipan was the perfect place to come last week. To commit an act of professional hiri kiri a remote island whose most poignant historical monuments are drenched in the memories of mass suicide was just right.

Keane and McCarthy, the two central figures in the last eight years of Irish football, both in their own way ran upon the sword. Keane's reputation, whatever about his equilibrium, will never recover. McCarthy's greatest moment has been sacrificed as his only world-class player left him just two choices, fail with dignity or prosper on my terms.

Yesterday, after the interminable welcoming ceremonies to Japan, McCarthy said that Roy Keane would not be spoken about for the rest of this World Cup. Some hope. With the cavalry from the British and Irish media just arriving and with the practitioners of the darker tabloid arts still hungry for action, the chances are that Keane will be spoken about more in absentia than he would were he here and thriving.

The irony is that, ceremony and fuss aside, Keane would like it here. Arrival in Japan and immersion somewhat in the buzz of the World Cup has brought a new level of seriousness to the squad. The facilities for both media and players are first-class and today's match with Hiroshima marks the end of life in that no man's land between end of season recreation and pre-world cup earnestness.

In hindsight, it is a pity that Keane is not just joining the squad here in Izumo having spent the last week unwinding with his family.

That's all that's left though. Hindsight and the second guessing of people eager to move on, Yesterday, there was the odd and jarring scene to be endured of the Irish team pulling away from the Hyatt Hotel in Saipan with their dark talisman left behind alone and isolated.

Late on Thursday night the players had begun dropping by Keane's room to say goodbye to him. For some he is a dark monolith whose brooding has been a confusing and often unnerving part of life with the national squad. For others, he has been a friend, somebody they drank with in lighter days and a man whose rarely revealed warmth and humour could often be endearing.

Now they were leaving him behind on the edge of a tournament in which they had hoped to rely on him. The players found Keane calm and unrepentant and in oddly good form. "Like a fella on death row, talking about the good breakfast you get," said one.

The flight to Izumo was not as the crow might have taken it either, the plane's captain circling the island of Saipan for the travelling party to have one last look at. Players and media made little black jokes about being able to spot Roy walking determinedly to some grim landmark on the island.

Meanwhile, with Keane gone, the FAI officials were back in first-class. In the aftermath, comes the reflection and plenty of it to chew over no matter which side you take.

For Mick McCarthy, an eminently decent man trying to create a spirit in a squad, a spirit which might make that squad more than the sum of its parts, there is the thought that perhaps things might have been, could have been, different, but the genie was out of the bottle long ago.

Keane has flown his solo sorties before and he has been both right and rewarded. It was Keane who objected to the bad training pitch which the team used to use at the AUL in Clonshaugh. It was Keane who objected to the practice of FAI officials sitting in the first-class seats on planes while players folded themselves like so much origami into the economy section.

It was Keane who had the team moved from the airport hotel to somewhere more secluded on training weeks in Dublin. And it was Keane who set the tone for the entire qualifying campaign with his blank refusal to sing and be happy about the two-all draw in Amsterdam which was the first paragraph in the current story.

So Keane has had influence, has taken responsibility and has been a maverick. When he withdrew from the squad and was then talked into staying by the only man whom he, quite pointedly, says he listens to in football it was perhaps inevitable that Keane would have his say about what had been eating him.

There is no doubt though that, in doing so, he was in effect putting the issue to bed in his own mind. While the rest of the team went golfing on Wednesday afternoon Keane spoke about his frustrations with conditions on the island and especially at the training pitch, but he resisted going on the record with harsher, more explicit criticisms of the Irish management because he felt everyone had to get on together for the next three weeks.

In hindsight, perhaps it would have been wise to have offered Keane the opportunity to have remained at home for the duration of the Saipan exercise. He could have had a little treatment, a little time with his family who are the centre of his world and he could have joined the squad in Izumo where facilities are perfect and the level of seriousness has been ratcheted up a notch.

Instead, he brooded as fellow players drank and socialised with journalists he despised, watched as people got on with things despite an inadequate training ground, remained alone as players golfed and watched movies.

There's an old saying about management which McCarthy has come to understand, but Keane has yet to grasp. Managing a team is like holding a dove in your hands. Squeeze too hard and you kill it. Hold it too loose and it flies away. Roy wanted squeeze, squeeze, squeeze.

Perhaps when Keane had got his concerns off his chest in this newspaper there was no need to have it out with him in front of the other players. Keane has a tripwire temper and a hard streak of meanness in him, a trait which makes him the player and competitor he is, but which also means that any reaction from him was likely to have been of such vehemence that it left no exits open apart from his own.

The other view would be that Mick McCarthy has put up with a lot, too much indeed and that for the pre-World Cup conversation to be all Roy, all the time, was disruptive and distracting. All the more so when the player, who famously rooms alone, gives off such vibes of isolation and hostility that it unnerves the younger members of the squad and angers the senior members.

What McCarthy has achieved with Ireland over the years has been a two-pronged thing. He has kept a peace of sorts with Keane and he has moulded the remaining players into a bunch who can play beyond themselves on the basis of spirit and commitment.

In Saipan, keeping the peace with Keane was bruising the spirit of the other 22 players.

If McCarthy took a gamble in confronting Keane in the presence of the rest of the squad it was in the hope that their all too evident support would remind Keane of his isolation and that Keane would hold back from taking the final step and effectively walking out of a World Cup which he had yearned to grace.

So McCarthy made one last effort to bring his captain on board. McCarthy, though, has long since accepted that he personally is not Keane's cup of tea and would have hoped that a team meeting might have allowed other players to express to Keane the general feeling in the group that his disruptiveness over the issue of pitches and facilities was more debilitating than the pitches and facilities issue itself.

Instead, the meeting went to scorched-earth status immediately. Keane was unlikely to bow in such circumstances but the manner of his departure shocked his team-mates to the extent that it has galvanised them considerably.

One can only imagine the intensity and poison of the outburst at Wednesday's meeting. The diatribe against his friend Alan Kelly earlier in the week was astonishing, not just in it's public nature, but for its sheer vehemence. Yet, players dismissed it with rolled eyes as being just another training ground bust up for Roy.

It seems then that there must have been more than the ambience different when, a couple of nights later, Keane lit on McCarthy with such a noxious tirade that even the veterans in the team said they had never seen or heard anything like it and there were shocked whispers afterwards to the effect that Keane had questioned McCarthy's Irishness, a tack which would instantly have alienated him from at least half of the squad. There was no coming back from that.

For Keane, his case is a tragedy in so far as we can use the word tragedy in relation to sporting matters. It's a tragedy too for every person who scrimped and saved to come to Japan to watch Keane play in a national team which is 50 per cent better for his presence in it at any given time. It is a tragedy for every kid with Keane's name and number 6 printed on his back and a tragedy for Keane's family.

Mostly, though, one feels for Keane himself. There are rumours in Japan today that one of the more appalling English tabloids has been threatening "to do a job" on his personal life and even the rumour of such an assault on the closely-guarded citadel of his family must be upsetting for Keane.

There is the thought too that this was going to be his stage, one of the greatest footballers in the world playing in his prime and leading his country at the World Cup.

Instead, he'll be sitting somewhere alone watching Ireland play.

It seems so unnecessary.

Love him or loathe him, there clearly is more eating away at Roy Keane than the state of a training pitch on a small pacific island or the quotidian screw-ups of the FAI.

This, remember, is a man who endured all manner of imperfection in order to drag the country to the World Cup finals in the first place, a player in his prime getting ready apparently to express himself again on the world's greatest stage, a man who dedicated himself to the cause of country despite the fact that the national team was managed by a man he neither liked nor rated.

To throw it all away because of some logistical deficiencies? No. Other winds howl through the dark places in the brain of Roy Keane. For the rest of us, enough has been lost already. The innocence has been drained out of our great adventure.

It's time just to wish Roy Keane well and wish Mick McCarthy well and to get back to the business of looking forward.