Keith, columnist and country need you

Tom Humphries LockerRoomIt's a tricky thing writing a Monday sports column. I swear. Very tricky. Like riding a unicycle across a tightrope which has been strung between two high buildings.

Yep, riding on a windy day, while juggling chainsaws and being heckled by incontinent pigeons and a building supervisor who wants you to geddinouddadat. And there's ack-ack fire from a plane overhead.

Yes, that's exactly what it's like. Do you look up or look down? Do you finish or do you go back to the start? Alright, subtract the elements of mortal danger and necessarv talent and that's what it's like. I mean do you review or do you preview? Do you go offbeat?

For sports journalists it's always preferable to gaze into the rear-view mirror and make ex cathedra pronouncements on whatever can be seen there. We do hindsight very well. You know the sort of thing. Was it a mistake for Kennedy to go to Dallas? Appeasement the wrong tack, Mr Chamberlain?

However, those of us unfairly incarcerated on Monday reservations can't really look back at things in the near distance. We have no rights. It's the Guantanamo Bay of sports column reservations.

Take last Tuesday's footie friendly with Australia. Reports appeared on Wednesday morning for the benefit of those who didn't catch up on teletext or late-night highlights. Then the evening papers or paper picked the bones clean. And then the selfish Sunday papers came in and sucked the marrow out of the bones to the extent of asking was it a mistake to have Robbie Keane injured in a friendly? What's left for a hack with a Monday appointment on the back page? Review, preview offbeat? Or ingeniously all three? The poor downtrodden Monday columnist gets left with about half an original thought on the game, fifty per cent of an unbaked notion that hasn't been printed and kicked to death elsewhere.

So you sift through subject after subject always wary, like Bertie driving past Omagh, that ignoring this or that might just backfire on you. Finally you decide to run with the half thought you had at the start and let the begrudgers hold a tribunal of inquiry about it.

With all the talent we have emerging at midfield, you know with Liam Miller emerging at Celtic, with Sean Thornton hoisting Mick's ass away from the bacon slicer at Sunderland, with Colin Healy finally finding a buyer, with Richie Ryan and JJ Melligan and Willo Flood coming through, with Stephen McPhail dallying on the threshold of erm, stardom, with Stephen Reid and with Andy Reid and Alan Quinn and God knows who else, with all that midfield talent available what will happen to Keith O'Neill, when his injury heals up?

Is Keith like one of those missing-in-action types who come out of the jungle years later still fighting the war? Is he in nightclubs giving it the old bling, bling of his jewellery, asking doe-eyed young women if they don't know who he is? Does he go out every Sunday expecting some hack will have done a crass little kiss-and-tell number on him, Keith must be reinstated to stardom. There are more Keith O'Neill stories than there are Keith O'Neill match appearances. When Keith comes back no Monday columnist will ever have to scratch their head again.

Keith's tally of 13 games (and four goals for Ireland, three of them in the cauldron that is Liechtenstein) begs to be added to. He last played for us away to Macedonia. Nobody deserves for it to end like that.

Listen, Keith discovered early that in football it's the thought that counts. No use in being profligate with yourself. He's spent more time thinking about playing football than actually playing it.

It has become an existential exercise. He has been experimenting with concepts of meaning and matter. If a tree falls and nobody sees it does it exist? If a player never plays, is he a player? Does he exist? Five years at Norwich and 73 games left him jaded. He experimented at Middlesbrough, permitting only 37 appearances in three seasons there and avoiding the arduousness of goalscoring celebrations altogether. Finally to Coventry, where he brought his technique to another level, appearing just 11 times in the 2001-2002 season and then vanishing entirely last season.

An engine search shows that for five years his name didn't appear in this paper without the words "injury victim", "late withdrawal", or "omitted" attached. We had no encouraging news about him from 1998 when we ran a piece headlined "steady goes the new generation" till this January when we reported on his progress in recovering from a broken hand suffered while playing on a test-your-strength machine.

Hopes were raised briefly when after a year without a sighting he played a reserve game for Coventry. Sensing that even though nobody was watching he was being untrue to himself he "tweaked" his hamstring after half an hour and returned to his Howard Hughes-like seclusion.

Many of his disciples have given up faith, walking away suggesting they'd have more chance of seeing JD Salinger on Pop Idol than they do of ever seeing Keith threaten to overwhelm a stadium with his sheer sexiness.

But lately there have been signs his experiments with vanishing entirely may be over. Perhaps he no longer fears we will hate him just because he is beautiful. There are signs Keith may be preparing to enter a new and more public phase of his life.

When, for instance, did you last see the words "Keith O'Neill" and "best player on the park" all appearing in the same sentence? Well, if you read the Coventry Evening Telegraph it was just last week.

That's right. In a breathless report on the big game between Coventry reserves and Leicester City reserves.

Other shocking claims from the report: "Keith O'Neill proved his fitness with surging runs and also went close with a curling free kick." Yes. Fitness! Proved! "The Sky Blues had the game's outstanding player in the shape of Keith O'Neill, whose surging runs suggested he has fully recovered from the broken leg and dislocated ankle that have kept him on the sidelines for the last two years." Surging runs! No mention even of that broken hand.

"O'Neill went close with a rasping long-range effort." Rasping, eh? How long is it since Keith rasped? Short-range or long-range rasping? Either way we never thought we'd see it again. That's the true story of last Tuesday night. He was so good that Coventry immediately added him to their first-team squad.

To think that over the years Sky Blue aficionados have felt justified in questioning Keith's commitment. Here is a man who could be in the movies but finds himself in what we term "footballing limbo" suffering the ignominy of being on a free transfer list instead of being a world superstar and he is giving it all at the Walker Stadium. He is surging and rasping.

This is a man who has endured more bad breaks than Evel Knievel. From niggling sciatica to a misaligned pelvis. When he joined Coventry, already virtually a circus freak because of his injury record, he twisted on the training ground and managed to break his leg in two places and dislocate his ankle.

Not what Chubby Checker had intended. He's had hamstrings by the dozen, three degenerated discs in his spine, that hand injury which was either caused by a test-your-strength machine, a punch-bag, or rehab depending on who you believe.

Sit tight, O brethren of the physio and sawbones trades. Keith ain't about to throw in the towel yet. There'll be good days again.