The man who took the lonely road leaving his team in Saipan in 2002 is taking the tough option coming back in the lead-up to the next World Cup.Roy Keane's doubters should stand back and let him rekindle the fire, argues Tom Humphries
The first casualty with Roy Keane stories is always perspective. Truth takes some shrapnel too, but perspective gets killed off right away. First scene. Bam! After that it's a free-for-all.
We know the routine. Every aspect of Keane's character gets grotesquely blown up and distorted until he floats over the great little country like one of those big inflatable cartoon animals tethered to a Fourth of July parade somewhere down on Broadway.
Look kids, it's The Soccer Psychopath.
No Mom, that's Traitorman. He has super powers, but he won't use them for the good of his great little country.
And who is that behind him kids? Tommie Gorman!
Well Traitorman is back. His powers are slightly diminished, but his desire is not yet quenched. The great little country gazes upwards in wonderment. And there are people on Primetime calling for a referendum on the issue of a footballer playing in a green shirt. Or not.
The reaction to Keane's return has been curious, and people close to the player this week expressed a little surprise that there had been so much comment and passion stirred up by a couple of simple press releases. They hadn't expected it to be a bad night for fatted calves, but they had hoped for some, well, perspective.
Even the normally sedate neighbourhood of this newpaper's letters section has been quick to ignite with the outrage of those who still take the prodigal's departure from Saipan in 2002 rather personally.
It's a curious phenomenon which pays no attention to the fact that almost uniformly, top sports people regard Keane as one of the first names they would have on their team. Almost any team. The aspect of his character which needs least media tampering with is his competitive edge. Keane gives more in a game than any other contemporary player gives.
The hostility emanating from some quarters also ignores that Roy Keane has won the big argument. The FAI tacitly admitted as much when it welcomed the player's return and interpreted it as a glowing tribute to the association's new and austere levels of professionalism.
Keane won the big argument back when the Genesis report on Ireland's World Cup campaign appeared. The post mortem on the Saipan misadventure was damning. He won the big argument all over again when Brian Kerr was appointed. Instead of a name which had once been easily chanted from the terraces, the FAI went for meticulousness and professionalism.
Keane has been quietly impressed. His return is a huge tribute to the Kerr Method. His zeal will be an addition to the Kerr squad. The business as usual sign just went back in the window.
Keane arrives back with batteries included, all wound up and ready to play. That's why he has taken the harder road and come back to international football and that's why Brian Kerr wanted him back. The player may be slower and fractionally more mellow than of yore, but he is still fiercer than anyone else we have got.
The current Irish management has long been troubled by the phenomenon of Basel. In that crucial European Championship qualifying game last autumn against the Swiss hosts, the Irish appeared to have everything. Motive. Opportunity. The perfect preparation. Yet on the pitch the team were curiously and unprecedentedly dispirited. No words or events could kick-start them. It was the tamest exit most observers could remember an Irish team taking.
Now they have Keane, and his cattle-prod tongue. It's not easy to play like the Irish did in Basel if Roy Keane is in your side.
The mind skips back to a workaday World Cup qualifier in Cyprus a few years ago. A cool night on the island. A small crowd. You could hear every word and oath that slipped from Keane's lips. The Irish players arrived from their hotel and pool in almost fatally relaxed mood. Keane dragged them kicking and screaming into top gear. It was clear then that his idea of what was acceptable and the average player's idea of what was acceptable was different.
That's what will be returning sooner or later to the Irish squad. A guy who questions everything. Money isolates modern soccer players. As does the uniqueness of their vocational experience. In the end they stick together, a herd trapped inside a bubble.
Keane questions everything. That's the key to Saipan. The key to his comeback. He is Jim Carrey at the end of The Truman Show, always imagining his relationship with the world outside.
For instance, he has never left Mayfield in Cork behind in any way except physically. He couldn't stand to return there and be derided as a big shot. Once at Manchester United in his early days he purchased a red Mercedes with the registration Roy 1.
That bauble had a shorter lifespan than a child's Christmas present. Somebody alerted Keane that he looked in soccer parlance like Bertie Big Potatoes or in the Cork vernacular "like a langer". The car was magicked away.
In all the years that Keane gazed across the Manchester United dressingroom at David Beckham you can be sure that there was no point at which he envied him. As Beckham disappeared into that fogged no-man's-land between sport and outright, full-on, vapid tabloid celebrity, Keane created a life more ordinary.
He likes nothing better than walking his four kids around the corner to the local nuns' school. He has shied away from the social whirl surrounding Manchester United players. And United, an altogether more successful and professional outfit than Ireland have been until now, haven't been spared Keane's relentless questioning.
It's an irony given that so many consumers of soccer despise him, but Keane is almost the soccer ombudsman. In a circus where some of the performers try for some of the time and none of them try all of the time, Keane is constantly railing about standards, re-assessing old truisms.
Of Saipan, it should be remembered by those still nursing their wounds that nobody took it more personally than Keane.
The facts of Saipan can be mercilessly distilled down to a few words by his detractors. He walked out! On the eve of the World Cup! Like leaving a bride at the altar! Only worse! And Keane's defence is too long and too complex. It's general and specific. It's the lifestyle and the people. His relationship with Mick McCarthy had been corroding for a long time, but the debacle of Saipan and McCarthy's "life hands us lemons, let's make lemonade" response to it was merely the final straw.
There was so much going on around Keane at the time. His failure to appear at Niall Quinn's testimonial game brought a shower of hot lava down on his head. His season with Manchester United which had just finished had been epicly disappointing. All week in Saipan, after a phenomenal 23-hour journey to get there, he looked like a man under stress. All week the wires hummed with the rumour that a Sunday tabloid was going to take a wrecking ball to his marriage. Meanwhile, those around him were barbecuing and partying and telling Keane to lighten up.
Finally, after a week of stresses, he got called to a meeting for what he perceived to be a dressing down in front of team and staff. It's still difficult to know why that particular approach was taken the night before the team moved forward to Japan and the World Cup proper, or why nobody went to Keane's room in the ensuing 12 hours to see if the breach couldn't be mended.
It's all history now, of course, and everybody has their version. Keane came home. He was sent home. He was allowed go home. He abandoned ship. He couldn't be true to himself and keep appearing at the head of what he considered to be a sham. His inability to stop asking questions, even about the composition of a five-a-side knockabout game at the end of training, led him to the precipice. He just asked himself, what would happen if I went home to my family?
And this week his decision to come back? Surely it is the answer to many questions he has asked himself and others since then. He will have asked himself why he let Manchester United apparently end his international career for him when he appeared eager to comeback at the start of Brian Kerr's reign.
He will have been re-assessing Alex Ferguson's influence on him in the light of the Rio Ferdinand debacle, the Beckham departure, the Coolmore humiliation, United's mediocre season, the awareness always heightened in an older player that he is after all just a commodity.
Coming back can have been no easier a decision than departing. Many of the faces have changed, but Keane still has to walk into that room, feel the glares, the curious stares , the wonderment and the hostility. He has to step out on Lansdowne again.
Hear the unforgiving.
The Premiership and beyond teems with Irish players who once said they cared about playing for Ireland more than they cared about anything else on earth, but who withdrew their services in the end in order to prolong their club careers. Denis Irwin. Gary Kelly. Dean Kiely. Steve Staunton. Lee Carsley. Nobody blames them. Nobody suggests that they didn't care.
So it should be with Keane. There are those who would say that he didn't care for Ireland. That charge is top of most rap sheets.
And there are those who would argue that he cared too much. For most people the act of abandoning the team was disproportionate to the troubles he had. If 21 other players could muck in, why couldn't Keane?
The answer is that he isn't programmed that way. He finds it hard to go along just to get along. He finds it hard to understand why his devastatingly accurate descriptions of how easily pleased other Irish players are with their careers should cause offence. When Keane goes on the record and thinks he is saying that Ireland and its players could be better than they are and should expect more of themselves, he feels it's a patriotic thing to say. His audience just hears the whines of a traitor.
The winning of his argument has always been on the pitch, however, and by returning he has won the final argument. He has taken the hard road again. He still has something to contribute and he will give it. He will be an anchor and a mentor and hopefully a key dressingroom influence.
We know this because Brian Kerr is too smart a man to have wanted Keane back on any other terms.
In his absence at the World Cup, the Irish team galvanised and performed heroically, but even in the manner of the exit to Spain in Suwon there were glimpses of the ramshackle. Nobody knew that Spain had been reduced to 10 men. There was no set list of penalty takers. Ireland conspicuously lacked the competitive edge to finish off the match.
The following autumn, in Keane's absence, the Irish squad fell apart on the field of play. Mick McCarthy exited to undeserved boos. His players repeated the odd mantra of denial to the effect that the media had virtually hypnotised the Irish fans, conditioning them to boo.
Those who still feel personally wounded by Keane's departure, those who feel that their lifetime quota of Olé Olé moments was pilfered, those pursing the lips and making ready to boo again, might consider a different perspective. Keane is making amends. He's putting back anything he owes. He took the lonely road leaving Saipan. He took the tough option again this week.
"Honestly," he once told this newspaper with a grin, "I just want a quiet life. No ups and downs."
The rollercoaster continues.