SOCCER: Yesterday was window dressing, an act of kneejerk hypocrisy flavoured with the same spite Keane delivered in his infamous tackle, argues Tom Humphries.
Roy Keane won't have been taken by surprise. He's always been more aware than most that those who live by the sword die by the sword, and that knowledge has never dulled his competitive edge or tempted him into the body armour that comes with a blazer and a correct attitude.
When he comes back his career should move into one of its less turbulent phases. Soon yesterday's business and all that led to it will be forgotten. Keane's virtues as a player will ensure that.
Yesterday's verdict and sentence in Bolton illustrated nothing more than the gulf between a sporting administration which wishes to whore itself while wearing the cloying scent of public relations puffery and the game itself, still hard, tough and unreconstructed at heart. Yesterday was the revenge of the prawn sandwich eaters.
First things first. Roy Keane's tackle on Alf Inge Haaland was appalling. No more appalling this morning than it was when we first saw it on Match of the Day, but apalling. There are a few things worth noting, however: Alfie Haaland played on, finished the game. The injury which has plagued Haaland's career since is to his other knee. The FA had their chance first to swoon and then to punish Keane back then. They took it.
Yesterday was window dressing, an act of kneejerk hypocrisy flavoured with the same sort of spite which Keane himself delivered in his infamous tackle. Just as pre-meditated too.
We know nothing more now than we did when the final whistle blew on that Manchester derby. Nobody ever doubted that Keane's foul was intentional. Nobody could have been surprised that one of the devices he used to get himself through a lonely year of rehabilititation that preceded the foul was to blame Haaland, if not for his cruciate injury then for the Norwegian's reaction to it, rebuking Keane for faking it on the Elland Road turf.
Nobody should have been surprised that Keane was startlingly frank about the incident in his recent book. In a world of disemblers he's always that way. Eamon Dunphy's argument that the words used were his is well-meant, but not relevant. Ghosts always leave footprints, but when your name goes on the book you carry the responsibility for what is in it. Keane has done that.
The problem Keane and Dunphy faced was the nature of the relationship the modern game has with the mass media. The authors couldn't control the serialisation. They couldn't control the FA's reaction to it. They couldn't avoid The Machine.
About six weeks ago, while being interviewed by this paper, Keane was asked, by the by, why he had chosen the News of the World for the serialisation of his book. Not a tabloid reader and not an admirer of that screeching brand of journalistic hyperbole, it seemed an odd choice for Keane. He acknowledged some unease concerning the deal but said that at the end of the day he felt the News of the World would have had their day with him anyway, and selling them the serialisation rights defused that threat somewhat.
Not that the decision to sell was entirely Keane's. Just something he might have influenced early in the proceedings had he desperately wanted to injunct his publishers from making a deal with certain papers. His resignation about the issue reflects, though, the realities of the football publishing business, an oddly surreal bubble which is both inflated and sustained by the tabloid culture next door.
With the odd exception, the only thing which tempts footballers into spending time collaborating on books is large, swanky advances. Generally only two things cover those advances: sensation and what tabloids will pay to serialise sensation.
Keane, knowing that the News of the World could either be with him or against him but could not be silent when his book appeared, decided not to place any roadblocks in the way of their involvement. He co-opted them.
Keane's publishers took the money to cover a portion of the advance. The News of the World were delivered galley proofs and allowed cherry pick whatever interested them. That's the business. That's the minefield. Had the Haaland paragraph never been lifted as part of this process, had it never been stripped of its context, it's doubtful that the FA would have taken the slightest interest.
The News of the World knows its market though. It went big on Alfie. Within days The Machine was in action. Respectable journalists who had never even seen the book were almost united in their condemnation of its wretchedness. Keane, whose latest sin was merely the absence of hypocrisy and crocodile tears, was painted now only with horns, a tail and cloven feet.
The FA, the same people who force-fed the soul of football to The Machine years ago, had to act. That is their part in the soap opera they have helped create.
The FA have always embraced this process which sees a sport evolving into an entertainment and a soap opera. The same fingers which pull the strings at Sky Sport also pull the strings at the News of the World. The FA have dealt the Premiership to Sky and had it repackaged and refurbished as an entertainment. The tabloids are the trade press for this business. The relationship of mass media to the football world is not as many in football like to think, that of parasite to host. It is wholly symbiotic.
And for now everybody is happy with that. Even if most of what was once the Football League withers and dies. Even if somewhere down the road Sky Sports, being the only bidder left at the auctions, decide to cut everybody's wage.
For now, though, football knows which side its bread is buttered on. The sponsorship, the high wages, the new stadiums, the gloss and the PR men, they all come courtesy of the extraordinary exposure football gets. League tables, statistics and the repetitive choreography of 4-4-2 don't justify that exposure, it's a function of the creative department. Gladiators are created. Grudges. Bad boys. Saints and sinners. Football is sold through the character of its participants.
Football not only needs its sensations, it has connived in making the world which allows them to exist. This cartoonish world imprisons players behind image. Beckham, a poor fit for the bad boy outfit placed on him after the 1998 World Cup, can never be permitted to slip out of the halo since installed over his head. No matter how poor his World Cup or how banal his observations or how comical his claims to a central midfield position at Old Trafford. Keane, by contrast, is an ogre and seldom gets credit for the astonishing number of successful passes and tackles he makes or for his ability to make teams work.
Football will have benefited greatly from the success of Roy Keane's book. Football has benefited greatly from his mere presence. It's a cliché, but applicable none the less, that if football hadn't got a Roy Keane it would have had to invent one. All that's happened in his life this summer is grist to The Machine, part of what keeps the whole business turning, and yesterday the FA cranked it up a little more. The comparative lenience of the sentence suggests some half-heartedness, a recognition perhaps of their own hypocrisy in coming back for another bite at the cherry.
No recognition on their part, however, of the frailties of the individual on whom sentence was pronounced. Roy Keane is a tough man, but the more you see of him the more you see a guy frazzled by conflict. He loves the game he plays. He can't cope with The Machine and he can't make the modifications necessary to do so. He can't do that and be himself.
The story of modern football is about that gulf. The Machine. The Game. Roy Keane fought The Machine and The Machine won. So what. Flawed and occasionally malevolent as he is, Keane stands out as someone authentic and genuinely interesting in a world of spin and artifice. The last to give the paying customer 100 per cent. Come December and his return, the turnstiles will whirr a little quicker, the blazers will smile thinly and the season will start in earnest.
Now how many players can cause that to happen?
