Sorry saga finds a fitting end

SOCCER/The Final Analysis: Tom Humphries argues that the player's retirement was more complicated than it needed to be, but it was not a bad decision and not a treacherous one

First of all and last of all. Roy Keane is not a traitor. Roy Keane is not a comic book super-hero. Roy Keane is something in between. Roy Keane is a footballer who found himself in a difficult situation at work. A man. That's all.

The entire saga from Saipan to Scotland has been about the human frailty which we don't allow sports people to have. It has been about what happens when the people we make gods of kick each other with their feet of clay. Everyone has lost.

That's a human way to end things.

If there is a sense of national disappointment that Keane won't be playing for Ireland again, you can be sure that Roy Keane shares it. If there is a sense of relief within the Irish side that they won't be coming face-to-face with Keane again, you can be sure that Keane feels that too.

It's complicated. Since Saipan, since long before that, it has never been black and white. Nobody has had a monopoly of right. Nobody has been completely wrong.

There's a thousand nuanced things which we don't know about grouting the few things we do know about in this story.

Roy Keane for a start. None of us knows him, the troubles he's had, the troubles he's seen. Many of us have accepted modest fees to pretend we know him, to let on that we understand what makes him tick, but essentially none of us knows him. This entire argument and the convulsive national response to it has been about the shifting paradigms of what we do know. It's been knee-jerk and reactionary and excessive.

Roy walks out. Ergo he was a bastard. Moscow, Lansdowne Road and Genesis happen. Ergo Roy was a visionary saint. By Glasgow this week he had become a "wanker".

It's useful maybe to stop reacting and to begin just putting it into perspective. Try being Roy Keane for a while. See what it's like living in that head.

Be him. Leave aside your views on whether he was right or wrong. Don't even ponder what other demons eat at Roy Keane. Don't ask yourself whether he over-reacted or crusaded.

Just be Roy Keane. Thirty years old. A million miles from home on May 24th, 2002.

Be Roy Keane in Saipan on the morning after the famous row. Don't assume the position you've taken in the pub every time the argument has come up since then. Just be Roy Keane. Nobody else.

In your home you've spoken to Mick McCarthy about your views on the preparation of the team. You thought you were consulting. You know now he was hearing "Yada yada yada, blah blah blah . . ."

You've been seething. You have the sense that the manager would be more than half glad to see you go home, you've been longing for this World Cup and instead it's National Lampoon's Footie Vacation. You have been confronted in front of the team and the staff over an interview you have given as captain of the Irish team. You have exploded. The three most senior players on the team, the boys you have known the longest, have gone to a press conference to denounce you.

Now you are alone in your room. It's morning time. May 24th. You can hear the lads you've played with for 10 years moving about outside, getting ready to go to the World Cup.

Nobody knocks.

Nobody calls in begging you to give it one last go.

Nobody says, c'mon, we've all done things we regret, but we've been through a lot together.

Nobody says goodbye.

You get nothing from them. You're shaking. Sure, sure, sure, you're spiky, narky sometimes. You are temperamental and you are a loner, but you have contributed to this team. You contributed hugely. You played your guts out, you wanted everyone around you to do the same. And isn't that what teams are about? Accommodating the loners and the roustabout guys together?

But nobody knocks. Nobody says the World Cup is bigger than this. Nobody says that they know you've been having a hard time. If anyone stops to think about it they must realise that you're going through your own personal hell behind the door there. Anger. Regret. Loneliness. Just as a human being. You are flawed like the rest of them.

You go home alone. To a media siege. To months of controversy. Riding the borders of nervous breakdown country. Everyone with a half-baked opinion is an expert on you. The noise never stops.

Have you had enough of being Roy Keane now? Have you felt the hurt? Okay, switch to being any other Irish World Cup player on the morning of May 24th in Saipan. You've either liked Keane, idolised Keane or just plain respected him. Now he's in his room and you have your navy blue Umbro bag in your fist and you're off to Izumo. You glance at his room, the door closed as always, this guy you've played with for 10 years, nine years, whatever. You walk on by.

Have you felt that hurt? Keane's hurt? The players' hurt? McCarthy's hurt?

In Saipan the genie got out of the bottle and the professional relationship which underpins a team and which we pretend amounts to a willingness to die for one another, that professional relationship vanished and was replaced by something raw. The genie was never going back into the bottle.

LAST week is easier to understand now. The explanations make a little more sense. It's only flesh-and- blood people we are talking about.

Sure, Manchester United probably informed Roy Keane in plenty of time about what a resumption of his international career would mean, medically. Yet when Brian Kerr came calling it must have been possible for Roy to be impressed first by the man's meticulousness and by his innate ability with people. If Kerr thought that he could facilitate a return to the way things once were between Keane and the Irish panel, well, then it's easy to see how Keane would be enthusiastic, too. Easy to see how he felt that perhaps a few words in front of the players in another hotel room somewhere would somehow erase everything that had gone before. After all, he's had a thousand football rows and forgotten them all himself.

It would be perfect. This guy Brian Kerr sitting in front of you impresses you more than you ever imagined he would, you will come back into the warm centre of Irish life and every good moment you had in a green jersey would be a voodoo stab in the heart of Mick McCarthy. When Brian Kerr gets up to leave, you ask him when you can start.

But on Friday Alex Ferguson, the one man you trust above all others in your game and in your life, calls and explains that, yes, maybe United left the question of a continued international career at your discretion but that was on the assumption that you would say no.

He gives it to you on a plate. He, Sir Alex Ferguson, does not want you playing for Ireland. He, Sir Alex, thought you shared the dream of a Champions League win this year. Do you not? Sir Alex thought that instead of trudging around Tbilisi and Tirana with those people to whom you owe nothing, that this spring you'd want to be resting up for the latter stages of the Champions League.

It wouldn't have to be said aloud that this is the Sir Alex Ferguson who stood by you come hell or high water for the last 10 years. He wouldn't have to remind you of the morning he came to get you out of a Manchester police cell. Nor how it never leaked from his lips that you were going to quit the game after your fight with Alan Shearer. He wouldn't have to talk about standing by you when you criticised the corporate sector of the club. He wouldn't mention that Jaap Stam left when he wrote a slightly controversial autobiography but that you, Roy Keane, stayed when you wrote an extremely controversial one.

HE wouldn't need to explain that in the relationship you have with him every tackle is defensible, every lapse is forgivable, every sin is absolvable. That when it comes to Manchester United he has always assumed that you and he shared precisely the same myopic passion.

It's Alex Ferguson asking you to do this one thing. Not even asking, just explaining. You owe him big. And Brian Kerr has gone away now and in the cold light of day part of your brain suspects that things might never be the same again between yourself and the players. You were thinking wishfully yesterday. You were charmed.

And you think of the money Manchester United pay you. You think of how long you want to postpone the lonely day when you wake up and aren't a footballer any more. You think of the hassle. The media circus. The expectation. Vacillation is the human response.

Finally, you pick the phone up and call Brian Kerr and explain you are sorry but . . .

Roy Keane's decision not to return to the Irish jersey was more complicated than it needed to be, but it was not necessarily a bad decision and not a treacherous one. The world is still turning.

The timing of Keane's announcement on Tuesday was awkward and the nature of Manchester United's statement on Wednesday gave an insight into how unwilling either the PLC or the manager were to take the heat on such an emotional issue. Those things are disappointments, but they are just sideshows.

It can be argued, of course, by those of us who hoped to see him play for Ireland again, that all Keane had to do was to give six more games to the jersey. 6x90. That's all the country asked.

It is naive, however, not to concede that the decision was about more than that, about more than 540 minutes spent on the pitch. It was about the emotional derailment which the player risked by coming back. It was about the investment of energy in training, playing and travelling as opposed to long periods of rest. It was about the impact on the entire squad.

It has been pointed out that Keane has played FA Cup and League Cup games since his comeback this season. There is a difference, though, between games played as Manchester United strive to get a player back to match fitness and international games at the end of long journeys to uncomfortable places.

Keane has lost the PR war but he in time he will reflect ruefully on the strange fickleness of all that.

Just imagine. Keane and Steve Staunton, old friends, fresh enemies, ran into each other in a village square in Portugal during the summer and coldly ignored each other. Staunton is retired from the international game, preserving himself for a prolonged club career. He is still loved and respected. Keane has opted for the same route. He is despised and pilloried.

Keane has always known that his is a lonely walk. He has been booed in Lansdowne Road and then seen his international manager retain the journalist who orchestrated the booing as his biographer and confidant. He has been hero-worshipped, stitched-up, horse-flogged, lionised, canonised, betrayed. At the end it's little wonder that he did what was best for Roy Keane.

As for Brian Kerr, he has lost a Grade A footballer but dodged a bullet. The only way it could have worked out better was if Keane came back to play and all concerned were afflicted with selective amnesia about the summer war.

Kerr gave it a shot. He persuaded Keane to come back and then somehow he, Kerr, got shafted by events. Keane's reputation takes the heat there though. Kerr is spared the tricky business of beginning a progress of laying the seeds for the rehabilitation of Keane and stepping back to let the team awkwardly embrace their old captain.

Keane and Kerr may both have felt that re-introducing Keane to the society of old friends was ultimately worthwhile, but being spared the task of integration has its benefits, too.

This season the Premiership has seen plenty of the residual spite from Saipan being traded between Keane and Irish players who were there. Insults have been traded in more cases than just the celebrated Jason McAteer book review incident. Feelings still run high. The books and the newspaper columns haven't helped. Keane has had to be paid a share of the players' pool from the World Cup. They paid him so that he would have nothing to grumble about. Some players feel that McCarthy was sacrificed so that Keane could be rehabilitated. They resent his iconoclasm, his lone wolf routine.

IT was never going to be easy. Those close to the squad feel that one or two players would have been unlikely to continue if Keane were welcomed back into the fold. If that were to happen, or even if they were to remain on in a state of aggravation, the entire chemistry which the Irish team has thrived on would be altered.

Kerr played a blinder this week, his shrewdness never more in evidence than immediately after he got the news that Keane was breaking the news blackout on his future. Kerr took the players into the Hampden dressing-room and issued a passionate rallying call about moving on, about everything now being about the future. On the bus journey back from Glasgow to the team hotel in Kilmarnock he took another decision when the FAI spin doctors called.

Rather than use the Park Hotel's press conferencing facilities, he would speak informally with his back to the wall. At once he presented himself as a man to whom this was happening rather than a player in the whole thing. He made less of it all than might have been made. He avoided questions, spoke briefly and well and just moved on. Everyone, even those of us who questioned the wisdom of having a press conference against a wall in a hotel lobby, were impressed.

And on Thursday morning, in Dublin Airport, Kerr put everything in context, he squared the thing off, trimming the emotional reactions and the hyperbole.

Yes, he'd heard his own name chanted in Hampden the previous night. Yes, he'd heard the same people chanting that Roy Keane Is A Wanker. And yes, he knew straight away that the names are interchangeable. Mick McCarthy was chaired from Suwon but hung as a goat before Christmas. Keane was pilloried, thedeified, and now pilloried again.

Who can blame any one of them for ultimately suiting themselves?

On Wednesday, under the first game of a new Irish manager, Keane was denounced from the terraces as being a wanker. At the end of the last game of the previous Irish manager his name was chanted reverentially. Keano! Keano! Keano! A funeral rite for Mick McCarthy's management career.

Kerr knows a little of what Keane knows. The songs, the adulation, the hype. All bollox. Ultimately in football you'll always walk alone. That's the lesson of the last nine months.

Maybe the reasons for Roy Keane's decision last week weren't the ones we wanted to hear, maybe the manner of it left something to be desired, but in such a fickle world can he be blamed for preserving himself, for not trusting the baying mob? He has given us lots, including our qualification for the last World Cup and the millions of conversations it spawned.

The easiest, most selfish thing would have been to come back and paper over the cracks and to absorb the national sense of pleasure. Keane bit the bullet instead. It was an ugly, jagged and poorly explained way of doing things, but as such the ending fitted the story.