Expressing anger frequently makes an individual even more angry and any legitimate objective can get lost in the adrenalin high, writes Tom Savage
One of the basic principles of good negotiation is that you concentrate on interests, not positions. You attack the problem, not the man.
At the beginning of this fracas (assuming you discount the pre-history of mutual dislike going back to the early 90s) Roy Keane arrived in Saipan to find footballs missing and a practice ground unsatisfactorily hard.
His interest lay in displaying his unique talents on a world stage and ensuring that the team he captained would express, to the ultimate, the potential they had.
His position, however, is that he is a perfectionist.
A perfectionist who, in his own words, has "earned the respect to have my say" and who, in response to the facilities issue, decided he'd had enough and would go home. That departure was averted and the crisis and issue seemed to be over.
The next step was to express his position vividly to two journalists rather than persuasively to the manager or one of those responsible for the inadequacies in provisions as Keane saw them.
This mis-cue was met by Mick McCarthy. His long-term interest lay in ensuring that the Irish team could do their country proud by emerging through the qualifying rounds and progressing as far as possible towards winning the World Cup. That meant having Roy Keane as a central part of the team.
If that was McCarthy's interest, his position was quite different. His position was that he was manager of the team, that one of the team had stepped very publicly out of line, posing at least an indirect challenge to his authority.
In a bid to reassert his position, he gathered all of the team together for a "clear the air" meeting. The very term puts a shiver up the spine of any good negotiator. When people talk about clearing the air, they're usually on the brink of complicating an already flawed negotiation. They have no port to go to, no objective to achieve, other than a venting of anger.
There is a widely-held and unjustified folkloric belief that getting it off your chest is not just individually therapeutic, but collectively beneficial into the bargain. The reality is that expressing anger frequently makes the angry individual still more angry, that anger loosens tongues and that any legitimate objective gets lost in the adrenalin high of attacking the man, not the issue.
That is undoubtedly what happened when Mick McCarthy staged his air-clearing meeting. It was a crucial mis-reading of Keane. A man of his mindset was never going to take group reproof. He was never going to buy the euphemistic presentation of it as about "clearing the air", instantly deciding that he was "being backed into a corner and had to come out fighting".
Come out fighting he did, with an argumentum ad hominem of memorable profanity. This, according to Roy Keane's own post-factum comments, reinforced his view of himself as fearlessly truthful, reinforced his view of his team mates as essentially gutless, and above all reinforced his view of Mick McCarthy as the only possible winner of the encounter.
I doubt if McCarthy has felt like a winner, starting with the moment Keane let fly. McCarthy may publicly claim team unanimity against any possibility of Keane's return, even if the gears were oiled by an apology, but he knew very quickly that as many as eight out of 10 people in Ireland regarded him as having failed in his key task: to get a winning Irish team into the field against Cameroon and later opponents.
That view, garnered and magnified by media back home and transmitted to the team in Saipan, was going to undermine any expressed unanimity and create a context in which a win might be impossible.
At this point, Keane could have done what RTÉ's promotion of its exclusive interview led listeners to believe he was about to do: make the big gesture, apologise for the insults to McCarthy, and get back into the team. Instead, like a pilot repeating the error that has tilted his plane towards stalling, he sat in front of the camera, apparently unable to respond to his interviewer's anxiety to help him, repeated all of the self-buttressing assertions on which he seems to depend, and, for good measure, alienated some key members of the team.
There was a simpler solution. It lay in unequivocal apology. Up to yesterday evening it looked as if it might still lie in unequivocal apology - gracefully accepted. Both would have brought the nation to its feet in praise of captain, manager and team. But Roy Keane's statement appeared to have killed off any hope.
Tom Savage, a director of Carr Communications, wrote the negotiation skills textbook, How to Get What you Want