Roy Keane failed to bend a little. Mick McCarthy will regret calling a team meeting at all. Tom Humphries looks back on the week's events in Saipan and identifies where it all went wrong for both men.This time, Mick McCarthy seemed determined to get a straight answer for once and for all. He did.
Regardless of what happens - or happened - this morning in Niigata, there is room for all the emotions which exist between wistfulness and regret. To have taken the field without the services of Roy Keane, it all seems so silly and so avoidable.
The blame comes down on both sides. In the end Keane didn't have to swallow all his pride, just a little of it. The player was offered a formula which would have enabled him to travel the short distance to Manchester Airport and get on a plane without having diminished his principles by way of an apology.
Keane has earned the lion's share of sympathy and certainly the desire to see him play here would lead most people to overlook his foibles, but in several respects the player has done himself no favours. Whatever his thoughts on Mick McCarthy calling the original meeting in Saipan, his rant appears to have been unforgivable.
Keane is correct when he says most players were distressed by the state of the training pitch in Saipan, but the vehemence of his attack on McCarthy lost him a lot of support. The players were further alienated from Keane when news broke that he appeared to have sold his story to the Daily Mail.
The thought, however true, that Keane might have been profiting from the whole affair appalled many players. Keane's sense of the squad turning away from him late that afternoon may also be a slight misjudgment on his part. He believes, and certain advocates of his case have been very vocal in pushing this, that three senior players, namely Steve Staunton, Niall Quinn and Alan Kelly, met in the late afternoon either to call for the team meeting which was called at around 6.30 p.m. for 7.30 p.m., or to plan their strategy for the said meeting.
This is nonsense, and Keane's accusations against the players here have done him no favours. This journalist was interviewing Quinn in the lobby of the team hotel all afternoon until about 6.30 p.m., at which point Quinn had neither seen The Irish Times article in question or become aware of any team meeting.
Quinn went up to his room then for a shower and was informed a little later of the meeting. He washed and came down for something to eat. At that same time, Kelly and Staunton were still sitting down to eat in the hotel restaurant in the company of others. They remained there until 7.30 p.m., when they headed towards the room adjacent to the restaurant for what they assumed would be a routine team meeting.
The first they knew of the content of The Irish Times article was when they came upon Jason McAteer reading out the outlined passages in the photocopy of the piece.
The meeting started late. In one of those ironic quirks which come back to people afterwards, there was a little band playing in the team meeting room when the players took their seats and waited for McCarthy to arrive. They were playing, of all things, Stand By Me and most of the players, including Keane, joined in on the choruses.
The meeting as we know was short and spectacular. McCarthy's main bone of contention was that in two meetings with Keane earlier in the week he had pushed and pushed the player to tell him precisely what was wrong. "Is it me? Is it the training ground? Is it the staff?", and each time Keane, who by his own account was trying to avoid a bust-up, said that no, it was just him, his head wasn't quite right.
The management and most of the players were aware that while they went golfing at the Ocean Point club on the Wednesday afternoon of the week in Saipan, Keane was remaining behind and doing a couple of interviews. What is clear is that Keane felt in the interviews he was putting the issue to bed and moving on.
This journalist bumped into Keane at around lunchtime on the day of publication and asked him in so many words if there had been any fuss about the interview piece in that day's Irish Times. He was genuinely surprised. "No, sure there won't be," he said. He was in fine form at that point and it was only in the couple of hours after the team got back from golf and another journalist had handed McCarthy a copy of the interview with various passages underlined that Keane began to sense there was something amiss.
This time, though, McCarthy seemed determined to get a straight answer once and for all. In a way he did.
For McCarthy as much as for Keane there is ample food for thought in the events of the past week. In time to come, if he is honest with himself, McCarthy will concede that perhaps one small mis-step by him or his management staff led to a spiral of events which culminated in the team shooting itself in the foot.
1. In his more tormented moments McCarthy will regret calling a meeting at all. It was Thursday and the team were leaving for Izumo the next morning. There, facilities would be excellent, the buzz of the World Cup would be palpable and there was a friendly match awaiting on the Saturday. All these would have been a tonic for Keane's raging soul.
Keane had done his walk-out routine and then honoured a couple of interview requests he'd agreed to back when all seemed quiet. Naturally he used the interviews to present his case and if one read through the text of The Irish Times interview carefully he spoke about looking forward to the following week, to members of his family coming out to Japan, to just getting his head down and doing his best. There were criticisms aplenty but in hindsight it would have been best to either swallow them or ask Keane about them in private.
What ultimately could have been achieved by confronting Keane in front of other players and the management staff?
2. The meeting seems to have been an unmitigated disaster. Keane decided straight off that he sensed an ambush and not surprisingly, as team captain and best player he wasn't going to sit still for it. He and McCarthy have never been close but the terms of the détente they achieved over the years were clearly being broken. Keane reared up. McCarthy found himself raising the issue of Keane's commitment to Ireland. That came late in the tirade, not early as has been reported, but it exacerbated matters and has given Keane a stick with which to beat McCarthy ever since.
3. For a man who has stated repeatedly that he is not in the business of conducting his affairs through the media, the calling of a press conference within 20 minutes of the meeting having broken up seems an extraordinary move on McCarthy's part. The meeting ended. Gary Kelly asked was that it. Dean Kiely broke the tension and offered his services as a midfielder. Quinn asked if he should go after Keane. There was no clapping. Just shell-shock. Quinn, Staunton and Kelly felt they had little choice but to offer to go with the manager to the press conference.
4. In the day or two after the meeting, calm heads were few and far between. The team left Saipan on Friday morning without one player dropping into Keane's room. Keane himself wouldn't normally be the busiest of bees when it comes to giving out goodbye hugs, but this was different and it's not hard to imagine Keane's resentment growing by the minute as the team went about their business in the corridor outside.
5. Keane went home alone and if there was a possibility for reconciliation it was made more unlikely by McCarthy setting the bar for reconciliation so high. If McCarthy had put word out privately that Keane need just call him in a positive frame of mind and everything thereafter would be the business of the two men, perhaps something might have been achieved. In the end, over a week later, the bar had been brought down to that level anyway, but asking Keane to apologise publicly was stags butting in the glen stuff.
6. Judging Keane on the basis of a black and white printed transcript of what he said toTommie Gorman was a mistake. Take an example. Last weekend Paul Kimmage's interview with Keane was carried in the Sunday Independent. In it, Keane was asked about his tattoos, one of which consists of the names of his four children high on his right arm. Jokingly, when asked why his wife's name was not included, Keane said that he'd told her the kids would always be his kids but she mightn't always be his wife. Kimmage took ample care to convey the light-hearted jokey nature of this exchange, but some wiseass in the Sunday Independent office took the quote and ran it in 72 point across the front of the paper without reference to it being a joke. It looked as if the paper was carrying an insight into a marriage gone bad. It was a crass and disgusting thing to do. Stripped of the context the words took on a different meaning. So too does the Tommie Gorman interview.
7. The Accidental Release of the Players' Statement! McCarthy planned at the end of Wednesday to put an end to the Keane affair if no progress had been made. Things looked quite hopeful, however, and intense pressure was being applied to the player in Manchester. McCarthy decided to postpone his morning press conference. In the meantime, he read the transcript of the Gorman interview and became incensed that it contained none of the contrition he had hoped to see. He called a players' meeting and told the players that he would be putting an end to the process if there wasn't an answer by the evening. He was clearly annoyed.
Again the players felt that if everything had failed they had best be seen to publicly support their manager. They composed a statement on the way to training which they intended to release as an appendix to McCarthy's press conference. Instead it got handed out that morning and some crucial time was lost.
The aftermath this week has been chaotic and comedic, at once riveting and distracting. Since Dave Connolly (not Damien Duff as reported elsewhere) came to his room and wondered if it could be done, Quinn (while knowing that Keane despises him) has expended his energy on a marathon series of phone calls negotiating to get Keane back.
At times, Quinn's efforts exhausted the patience of his manager, at other times they came to the verge of producing a result. Keane, though, will watch the World Cup with the knowledge that his manager and teammates were willing to swallow a lot more than he was in the interests of Irish soccer.
Keane will surely see his inability to bend just a little bit as his greatest regret. For his part McCarthy will see his failure to get his greatest player onto the pitch at the World Cup as his greatest failure. Both men have their enmity to nourish them. The rest of us are left with a hatful of regrets.
