Newspapers plan well in advance. So it is six weeks since I was asked to review this book: a standard lead time. The only difference was that, although publishers generally besiege reviewers with advance copies, the text of The Second Half remained as jealously guarded by its publisher as the Third Secret of Fatima.
Thankfully, while waiting, I never grew as frustrated as the former Cistercian monk who, in 1981, hijacked a flight between Dublin and Paris, armed with a bottle of mineral water, and forced it to land near Paris, while he demanded that the Vatican release the Third Secret of Fatima.
It took another 19 years before the Vatican released that secret, a wait possibly explained by the fact that it wasn't stored for safety in the Tesco at Burnage, in Manchester. The Second Half is now released – and, although it is a better read than the Third Secret, one is similarly left to wonder what all the secrecy was about, as neither text contains revelations of real depth.
The first thing to say is that Roddy Doyle has done a tremendous job of ventriloquism in capturing and distilling the tone of Keane’s voice and occasionally highlighting a wryly dark, self-aware humour that lurks behind more bombastic comments. Doyle also successfully draws Keane out to engage in spheres of retrospection that he may have previously been reluctant to delve into in public, for reasons of privacy or as a defence mechanism, knowing that any chink-in-the-armour comment would be seized on out of context.
Reflecting on his achievement in steering Sunderland to promotion, Keane muses on his inability to enjoy moments of success, always too conscious of a need to keep his feet on the ground. “But if you can’t enjoy winning, there’s something wrong,” he admits.
When not recalling litanies of results that all former managers mull over – knowing that a wrong offside decision or scuffed last-minute shot can end their careers – this is often a thoughtful Keane, aware of the inner contradictions that drive him, even if the text also throws up numerous unaddressed contradictions.
Breathless blurb
The publisher’s breathless blurb promises us “an unforgettable personal odyssey which fearlessly challenges the meaning of success”, but even James Joyce would struggle to conjure an unforgettable odyssey from a narrative in which half the space is devoted to a chronicle of Keane’s not especially memorable tenures as manager of Sunderland and Ipswich. Keane’s comments on players such as Michael Chopra (currently playing in the Indian Super League), Tamás Priskin (now in Hungary) or Pablo Couñago (an Ipswich player Keane never rated, who plies his trade in Finland) are perceptive and pertinent. But these relatively minor players receive more space here than most of the major stars whom Keane played with for Manchester United or Ireland.
All the headlines have been about his ongoing quarrel with Alex Ferguson and silly events such as a drunken punch-up with Peter Schmeichel in a Hong Kong hotel in 1998, which was so loud that it woke Bobby Charlton, who had been dragged along, like Great Uncle Bulgaria, on a preseason Asian tour.
But the book’s more interesting moments deal with the conundrum facing all ex-players who, at relatively young ages, need to construct a life outside (or on the fringes of) football. Sacked by Ipswich and unemployed for the first time, Keane describes his unease when conscripted into a paid autograph-signing session, sharing a table with Denis Law and thinking, You shouldn’t be here – you’re better than this.
He does a PR gig in Nigeria with Marcel Desailly and sees blank faces in the Lagos audience when he describes his managerial career after his time as a player ended. He realises that “the only face they saw up there was Roy Keane: Manchester United. They weren’t seeing Sunderland or Ipswich.”
This may be a similar problem for readers whose interest in Keane is still primarily as a United and Ireland player. He does detail his uneasy demise at United, his unwise move to Celtic (declining more adventurous, lucrative and challenging offers elsewhere) and his brief Ireland return under Brian Kerr, when he feels he should have automatically been reinstated as captain.
But the bulk of this book deals with life as a former player. Therefore, at times, this reads in the way that an autobiography ghosted for Bobby Charlton would read if it delved too heavily into Charlton’s later career as manager of Preston North End – interesting, but frustrating if you wanted to know Charlton’s feelings about playing with George Best.
A writer once noted that, in the lost childhood of Judas Iscariot, Jesus Christ was betrayed. In most memoirs we similarly see that the seeds of personality are indelibly shaped by childhood experiences. A drawback of The Second Half as a standalone memoir is that it generally declines to cover much ground explored in Keane's previous biography. It takes it as a given that readers are familiar with the first half of Keane's life and feels no need to briefly recount his childhood, his glory years at United or the Saipan saga that seemed to cause more division than the Irish Civil War. A young reader would be puzzled by it if unaware of Keane's falling out with the FAI or his glory years, which made him so synonymous with United that there was near disbelief at the acrimonious parting detailed here.
Interesting observations
Beyond his score-settling arising from that departure, there are interesting observations. Keane realises that any manager’s first day at a club is the first day of the clock ticking on his future departure; the longest part of any manager’s contract negotiation is agreeing in advance how much it will cost a club to sack him. He also realises that the managers who enjoy long careers are those most adept at “managing upwards” in a club, men who realise that handling the expectations of executives is as important to survival as managing players.
But, by starting where it does, it often feels like a memoir with a middle only. It captures the malaise all footballers feel when their playing careers end, although Keane has admirably reinvented himself in several roles. It is a fine read, as befits interviews remastered by a master storyteller, but Keane remains too private for this to become a sports classic like Andre Agassi's searingly honest memoir, Open. However, compared to worthy but dull memoirs, such as Kevin Kilbane's Killa or Kevin Sheedy's So Good I Did It Twice, it feels like War and Peace.
Keane is caught in the paradox that the more he says, the less of an enigma he becomes. A Sunderland player recalled the awe engendered by Keane’s first appearance in the team’s dressing room, but how this awe dissipated with familiarity.
While this second memoir may settle scores in an ongoing quarrel between two ageing millionaires, there is the risk that too much explaining may diminish Keane’s uniqueness. With each memoir it becomes harder to remain a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma when bound up inside a bestselling hardback.
While this is an engaging glimpse into one period in his life, I rather hope that any third volume will recount the totality of his life and will not be rushed out simply to rebuff claims made by someone else in a row that fewer and fewer people care about.
