LOCKER ROOM/Tom Humphries: So here we are. Brian Kerr, week one, game one. Already I miss Brian Kerr. I can't remember a manager anywhere being given such a Mexican wave of welcome to his job. Not by the media anyway.

The ovation was genuine and well-deserved, but there is one significant downside to Brian Kerr's arrival at the summit. No more Brian Kerr. No more Mr Accessible Guy.

You can't ring him up any more and just quiz him about the 16-year-old with the Irish name who you have just seen mentioned on the internet. You're not going to be able to smile to yourself as Brian says that, yeah, he's a little middley fella with a grandad from Leitrim and he saw him play two weeks ago on a Tuesday afternoon at Macclesfield and the kid had a few nice little tricks alright.

He has been the A-Z of that sort of stuff, the Encyclopedia Footanica. We're the poorer.

Like a lot of us, I think Kerr always took more pleasure in spotting young fellas coming through rather than in appreciating guys who actually made it. It's a trainspotting tendency which some people have, and as a football person or a sports hack it can provide you with a decent source of income or a decent way of filling newspaper space.

When I was a kid we used to wonder who was the next Johnny Giles. Then the next Liam Brady. Now, as his time in the game dwindles and we wait to see if he'll dignify his boycott by resuming in the green jersey, we start to wonder who the next Roy Keane will be.

There are many reasons for wanting Roy back in the Irish squad, not least being that this has been one very long story which cries out for a proper ending. Roy could also do something which he hasn't been invited to do before. He could tutor. He could mentor. I know that he is one of the few people in the world whose bark is actually almost as bad as his bite, but I know too that he is decent and helpful to young players. When we play the game as to who the next Roy Keane will be it would be nice to think that the candidates would actually have the experience of playing and training alongside him.

We know now that the next great Irish midfielder will be in the Keane mould and not in the style of Giles, Brady or young Stephen McPhail, whose curse it is to have the elegance of a ballet dancer in a moshpit full of pogoing endurance freaks.

Sadly, the great modern midfielder doesn't get the chance to stroke the ball around to the outside of his foot and look up with narrowed eyes like a farmer who has spotted rustlers on the horizon before delivering a thoughtful, 40-yard pass into the stride of the centre forward.

I bet that Kerr knows who the next Roy Keane will be. He knows, too, when exactly we'll need to be unveiling him. For my money at the moment the shortlist comprises Steven Reid, Colin Healy and Sean Thornton. The last is coming up the fastest.

Thornton has just broken into a Sunderland side who look like they will be breaking into the first division soon. Have you seen him play? Bleached-blond. White boots. Engine runs forever.

Sunderland knew what they were doing last spring when they went looking for him from Tranmere. Promisingly, Thornton knew what he was doing too. Either that or he has a fool's luck. Tranmere had played him less than a dozen times and his contract was up in June. Perhaps somebody at Tranmere was having reassuring daily chats with Thornton about his future. Perhaps they had a plan for him. Thornton didn't seem to think so. He went to Sunderland and trained for a week. The first Tranmere heard of it was when he spoke about how excited he was about the whole thing in a Liverpool local newspaper.

He signed after a tribunal sorted out a fee between the clubs. Tranmere made all sorts of noises about the young lad letting down the club and its fans to go and join a Premiership outfit. With the history which English clubs have of using up and spitting out young talent, with the chances of the kid getting an injury and disappearing back to obscurity or Drogheda where he came from, they should have been applauding his initiative.

And his guts. He arrived for pre-season at Sunderland. The old coach Bobby Saxton was there on the first day. Young Thornton paraded past with the bottle of peroxide in his hair, the white boots, the little swagger. Saxton shook his head slowly. "You'd better be good lad," he said, "you had better be very good."

HE WAS. They did bleep tests to start. Thornton was the fittest of the bunch, fitter than the old pros with seasons of conditioning in their legs, fitter than the kids.

He had come to Sunderland as an investment for the future. Peter Reid was planning a year or two ahead. The sky fell in though. Injuries ravaged his squad. Form was abysmal. As Thornton suspected, football is a game where loyalty is for suckers. All he had done for Sunderland didn't give Peter Reid the right to stay and fix things. Howard Wilkinson was ushered in.

You can see Reid liking a kid with a blond thatch and fancy boots. You can imagine Howard Wilkinson feeling nauseous. No surprise then when Thornton disappeared off on loan to Blackpool.

Maybe he has a fool's luck. Sunderland, apparently looking to free themselves of the encumbrance of a FA Cup run, picked virtually a second-string side for the cup replay with Bolton a little while ago. Thornton was thrown in. He shone. Picked up a niggle though. He was in again for the cup tie against Blackburn last week. Sunderland won again. On Saturday at Spurs they put him in for a full league game. It was miserable, a 4-1 hammering, but again he impressed. Next week Sunderland play Watford in the cup. Who knows?

He turns 20 in May. Those who have seen a lot of him say he has the engine of Keane and the will of Keane, a little more skill than Keane but not the brain of Keane. Not yet anyway. Roy at 19 hadn't got much more than his engine and his voracious will. He grew himself into greatness.

It will be interesting to hear what the reaction of Wilkinson will be when Gerry Smith, the new Irish under-20 manager, puts in the call saying he needs Thornton for the World Cup this spring. Wilkinson is bright enough to know the value of these underage proving grounds but desperate enough to want to keep Thornton on Wearside under any pretext.

Club tugging against country already. Tricky. A most Keanelike dilemma for the quiet man.