ROY KEANE'S EXCLUSION: Tom Humphries reports from Saipan on the uneasy relationship between Republic of Ireland manager Mick McCarthy and team captain Roy Keane that finally broke down as matters came to a head yesterday.

The long and fractious relationship between Roy Keane and Mick McCarthy came to an end yesterday in the unlikeliest of settings and the World Cup will unravel without one of its greatest stars. A deserted restaurant in a plush hotel on the pacific island of Saipan, with a string quartet jangling in the lobby, was the venue as 10 minutes or so of vitriol was delivered by the player towards the Irish manager.

At the end there was nothing left to be said. Just goodbye.

The incident which occurred in the presence of the entire Irish squad and staff drew an emphatic line under a relationship which has been symbiotic but without respect from the start. Players who attended the meeting said they had never seen anything quite like what they witnessed.

"He questioned Mick as a manager and a person," said one. "I've never seen anyone abused in that way. He was white with rage." When Keane finished he left the room.

"Is that it then?" asked Gary Kelly. "Is it over?" It was. The team spoke among themselves for a while, but each contribution hinged on the shared knowledge that Roy Keane wouldn't be playing in this World Cup. The Irish squad moves on to Izumo on the Japanese mainland this morning and they do so hoping that they are about to begin a fresh chapter in their World Cup preparations. One suspects, however, that the ghost of Roy Keane will follow them from now until the moment they arrive home.

As the player remained cossetted in his room last night, waiting for the second of just two flights off the island of Saipan today, the implications of one of the biggest stories ever to have broken across Irish sport were hitting home.

First, there was the almost poignant thought of Keane completely stripped of the armour of his team and being left abandoned to make his way home. When travelling with the Irish squad Keane is seldom seen in public without either team physio Mick Byrne or security man Tony Hickey, acting as wingman to protect him from intrusion.

Through the years his value to the squad has been such that allowances have been made for him, as they were for other great players of the past like Keane's close friend Paul McGrath. They have closed ranks around him, celebrated with him in his greatest moments, and suffered the lash of his tongue on the darker days. This morning they head off to the World Cup (a competition he dragged the team to by sheer force of will) without him, leaving him alone on a Pacific island which he despises, leaving him to face a gruelling journey home and a summer of tabloid inquisition. In the end, the team and manager decided that the price for accommodating Keane had become too high.

In a debate which will divide Irish sporting opinion for years, it is possible to have sympathy for both men. McCarthy's virtues are well advertised, and he has played his hand well and patiently this week, moving with a quiet serenity through a series of events which even a few months ago would have derailed him.

For his part, Roy Keane has considerable qualities which, in keeping with his intense desire for privacy, he keeps to himself. He admits that in terms of his public image, he has created something of a monster, yet he is capable of immense warmth and loyalty, flashes of high good humour and private generosity. He has an interest in the world around him which he somehow accommodates along with his lifestyle as a family man and a footballing obsessive.

There is a darker side to him, too, an aspect of him that can be almost frightening in its intensity, yet he burns off that black energy quickly and is willing to get on with things again. He is a loner and a passionate man and those qualities rarely find a good home in the raucous universe of football teams. He has been fortunate in that he met Alex Ferguson comparatively early in his career and found a kindred spirit who matched his obsession with excellence every step of the way.

This past week Keane has been unhappy certainly, but not consistently so. He has been quietly critical of McCarthy, but that in itself was no revelation, the pair appeared to have hammered out a working relationship in the past year or so.

Keane mixed sporadically with team-mates, especially senior players, and with his old friend Mick Byrne. The journey to Saipan was marked, however, by Keane's display of unhappiness with the communications structure within the FAI which he felt left him hanging over the issue of his non-attendance at Niall Quinn's testimonial game. He expressed his displeasure to several journalists on the way across, telling one that all media were scumbags.

Yet even in the height of the controversy which broke mid-week with the initial news that Keane had left the squad but had changed his mind and returned, he was approachable and talkative. He spent his days joining in what he considered to be the inadequate amount of training done by the team and then either walking alone or resting in his room til early evening when the air cooled and he would go to the gym.

He had several discussions with McCarthy before yesterday's fatal derailment. On Monday evening he sat down with the manager to express his dissatisfaction with the non-arrival of the team's training gear and other aspects of the preparations. On Tuesday, after his training-ground row with Alan Kelly, more talks followed.

McCarthy stressed to the player that if there were things wrong with the training set-up on the island, the week was to be regarded as rest and recreation anyway, and that serious work would begin when the team pitched camp at Izumo.

The facilities there have been tailor-made for World Cup preparations. Keane, however, wanted McCarthy to accept more responsibility for what was wrong and said repeatedly that enough was enough and that he was going home.

Next morning, however, he took counsel from his friend and mentor Alex Ferguson and opted to stay. He subsequently fulfilled an agreement to this newspaper to provide an interview during which he publicly aired some of his grievances concerning the squad preparations and training.

Publication gave rise to more questions and seeking to end the cycle wherein team and media spoke of nothing else but Keane, McCarthy called yesterday's team meeting. It was a high-risk strategy, which brought an end to a relationship which had never quite flourished.

Older members of the Irish travelling party last night recalled the incident which marked the beginning of the enmity between the two men. It was 1992 and the US Cup, Roy Keane's first trip away with an Irish squad. The teams visit to the US wound up in Boston. On the final day, with an evening flight awaiting and with Jack Charlton off on one of his famous earners, several members of the squad decided to go playing golf. On their way they called into the south Boston bar of Frank Gillespie, an old friend of the team. There Keane and a couple of other players were already holding court. The golf was abandoned. The drinking embraced.

Time passed. In Charlton's absence, it was an unwritten rule that McCarthy took control of the squad. The big defender's natural sense of authority made that a logical choice. McCarthy, waiting impatiently at the team hotel, took matters into his own hands. He knew where to look for the missing players, so he asked Mick Byrne to pack the bags of all the players and load them on the bus. They'd pick up the drinkers on the way to the airport.

Duly the players were dragged from the pub in a state of high merriment. It had been a long season and they had begun the summer holidays in convivial style. Keane, the shy emerging young star, was last on to the bus. He was wearing a Kiss-Me-Quick hat and a sloppy smile. McCarthy, irritated at how long the evacuations from the pub had taken, began to berate Keane.

"Look at you, look at the state of you," he growled. "You call yourself a footballer?"

Keane's rejoinder was quick and, to use the vernacular, came with studs up. "And you call what you have a first touch?"

It was the sort of joke which might be made among footballing peers, but one which sat uneasily in the developing relationship between young tyro and World Cup captain. Still it never seemed like anything more than a swift one-liner which got thrown in whenever Roy Keane anecdotes were swapped. By US '94, McCarthy had retired and Keane had become the star of the show.

When McCarthy's barrack-square bark no longer drove Irish players on, it was Keane's incessant demands for more effort and better effort.

Players, right through to this week, have resented and appreciated his presence in about equal measure. In his autobiography, Jaap Stam, the former Manchester United defender, mused as to whether it was better to be picked to play with Keane or against Keane in the morning five-a-sides at United. Playing against him exposed you to the ferocious tackles; playing with him left your ears vulnerable to the blow-torch exhortations of a man who couldn't stand to see anything less than excellence.

And Keane's voice is generally unchallenged. He is tough and demanding, but what he extracts from himself has always made his presence, until yesterday, indispensable. It was that quality in Keane, that obsessive drive, which led McCarthy to appoint him team captain back in 1996 in an attempt to integrate him in to the heart of the squad. The fracture at the heart of their relationship never healed, however. Keane got sent off in his first game under McCarthy and then, using the intermediary system which served as a substitute for communication between the two men, somehow failed to inform McCarthy that he would not be travelling to America for the US Cup in '96. McCarthy suffered the humiliation of taking a hoax call which he was convinced was Keane.

Both men appreciated that they would never have a relationship which involved in Keane's words "going on holiday together, or even sending cards", but the hope was that the friction could be minimal. and that the desire for the same thing. As results improved, the differences between the two men seemed to matter less.

This week, in close quarters in Saipan, has been different, though. Keane brought troubles with him and brooding in his room for long stretches of the day never freed himself of them.

For a man who is eternally hard on himself, the imperfections he saw in Saipan were hard to bear. He channelled his frustrations at McCarthy with whom he felt the buck should stop.

In the end McCarthy was left with little room for manoeuvre. Being abused in front of the entire squad was an unprecedented challenge to his authority. The nature and vehemence of the abuse seems to have been choice and novel taking aback everyone who saw it.

When the storm abated, McCarthy had just three options. To quit. To play out the World Cup as a private laughing stock among his players, or thirdly to send home his greatest star.

In the end, the relationship between two of the countries most distinguished football men came down to a game of Call My Bluff. Would McCarthy surrender all authority in order to accommodate his best player, or would he risk being remembered as the man who sent home Roy Keane and who then struggled at the World Cup?

McCarthy did the brave thing, and yet for Keane and his troubles there can only be sympathy.