Where were the principles and honesty in his dealings with Dalglish andBlackburn Rovers, asks Vincent Browne.
Roy Keane might know Pat Kinevane. They are about the same age and both are from Cobh, Co Cork. Pat Kinevane is an actor and for a few weeks until Saturday night last, he played the part of Orestes in the play, Electra, by Sophocles, at the Project Theatre in Dublin. It seems Roy Keane didn't make it to the play, which is a pity.
As with almost all Greek plays of the 5th century BC, Electra is based on a story from Greek mythology. Electra was one of the daughters of Agamemnon, who went to Troy with his brother, Menelaus, to rescue Helen, wife of Menelaus. While he was away, Agamemnon's wife, Clytaemnestra, took up with another bloke, Aegisthus, and when Agamemnon returned from the Trojan war, the wife and her new fella did him in.
Electra managed to snatch her baby brother, Orestes, from the arms of the dying Agamemnon and put him in safe keeping. She stayed on in the homestead, railing against the foul deed done to her father and the infamy of her mother sharing a bed with her father's murderer. Electra's sole hope was that a grown-up Orestes would return and wreak revenge on Clytaemnestra and Aegisthus. The play tells the story of how this transpired.
Roy Keane might have been fascinated by some of the play's dialogue.
Early on the chorus says to Electra: "Remember/The harm done to yourself/Do you not see?/The mischief is in your own self-torture, /Hoarder of grief, your sullen soul/breeds strife unending".
Later on Electra's sister, Chrysothemis, a more compliant person (a muppet?), says to her: "Have you not learnt/After all this time to restrain your useless anger,/Not make a vain parade of it?"
When Electra's mother, Clytaemnestra, enters, we hear a different account of the background to Agamemnon's murder. It emerges that before Agamemnon left he scarified to the god, Artemis, his and Clytaemnestra's daughter, Iphigeneia, to secure a fair wind for the boats sailing to Troy. Clytaemnestra claims she acted out of justice, a factor which Electra had ignored entirely and continues to ignore throughout the play.
Roy might have mused that heroic conflicts are not always clear-cut.
There is much protestation in the Keane "autobiography" about honesty and principle (one cannot be sure how much is "auto" and how much is "artistic licence", especially in this terrain, as "honesty" and "principle" are the stock in trade of the ghost writer). For instance, on page 256 there is the reflection, after watching the Muhammad Ali movie and his stance against the Vietnam War: "You don't compromise on principles . . . Don't compromise on the things you believe in" (the latter bit is printed in italics for added emphasis, which is touching).
But where were the principles and the honesty in his dealings with Kenny Dalglish and Blackburn Rovers? On page 79 he writes: "After some bargaining, I accepted [Blackburn Rovers'] offer of £400,000 a year. A deal [to join Blackburn Rovers] was agreed on Friday afternoon".
But when Alex Ferguson of Manchester United phones the following Sunday our hero, the man of principles, the honest bloke who says it as it is, reneges on the deal. He thinks the plea "I've got my future to think about" is enough excuse for the abandonment of principle! And this is followed by a nauseating self-justification - everyone screws everyone else in football, so that's OK. (By the way, a clear case, based on the book, for breach of contract.)
Aside from the gratuitous repetition of expletives and the accounts of endless drinking binges, what is most remarkable about the book is its myopia, the most obvious instances being everyone else being blamed for blaming everyone else. And nowhere an acknowledgment that perhaps he was partly - just partly - to blame for the debacle at Saipan.
Of course Mick McCarthy mishandled things - he was in part to blame for the appalling facilities, he communicated almost indifference when his best player said he was going home and then made a retreat from that position almost a humiliation; he grossly mishandled, at best, the confrontation in front of the players and deplorably accused Keane of faking injuries; and he later lost all control of the situation when the prospect of Keane returning arose.
But Roy Keane, the captain, was walking out on his team, his colleagues, his country because the FAI had (again) cocked things up. He told McCarthy in front of the team, not just that he had no respect for him as a player and a manager but as a person. Was there no culpability there?
And aside from all that, was/is there not culpability for reckless self-indulgent behaviour that has compromised the success of Manchester United? But worst of all the self-indulgences is this dreadful book, full of the excuses and delusions that he purports to despise in others.
But not even this book leaves Roy Keane a bad person. He should talk to Pat Kinevane about what Greek playwrights had to say about heroism 2,500 years ago. Not much has changed since.