Locker Room: We arrive this morning throwing apologies into the air like bouquets at a wedding. We're sorry. We're sorry. We're sorry. Genuinely. Sincerely. Earnestly. Deeply. Sorry. You see, this is a Roy Keane column.
Don't write in. Don't call. Don't send snippy emails. We know. You've had Roy Keane up to your tonsils. You've read more words about Roy Keane then there are in words in War and Peace. No words can change your mind. In your bones, like dampness, you can already feel the chill
prospect of having to absorb another downpour of Keanology if Roy travels to Poland. Or of he doesn't. Or if he says he will but then says he can't.
Try to be upbeat about it if you can. No point in getting down. With Friends decamping and Frasier decouching and Sex and The City delaying, the never ending supply of Keane wordage is the one constant in a shifting media universe.
Maybe you don’t like it but it’s good to know it’s there.
We'll make a deal. For planning permission to be granted for any more
Keane columns in the neighbourhood there has to be at least the merit of originality visible in the blueprint stages. Cliché will be frowned upon. Mention of Triggs or dog walking in general will result in the entire project being shunted into an appeals process. Alf Inge Haaland is no longer to be produced as evidence by one side. Similarly, Guide Dogs for the Blind shall not be called upon to testify on Mr Keane's behalf.
What sets this column off as such a sparkling addition to the canon of Keanology is Liam Brady. Before reading yesterday’s Sunday Tribune we had no idea how Liam Brady felt about the entire Keano business. This might seem strange to you but this column happened to be away at the time of the Leaving Saipan business and, returning weeks later to find the nation laid to waste by brutal civil war, we had surprisingly little appetite for scanning through all the newspapers to see who had lined up on which side.
I’m sure since then that Liam has had reason to give open vent to his feelings about Roy Keane but somehow I’ve missed them. And then yesterday in the Tribune there they were. Staunch and unforgiving.
One of the most articulate anti-Keane cases I have seen. To be honest I’ve never really understood the intensity of the anti-Keane camp, the vitriol, the way so many people seemed to take one man’s troubles quite so personally.
In short, Liam felt, and still feels, that Roy Keane should have been banned from playing for Ireland from virtually the time he stepped on that plane out of Saipan.
The comeback business doesn’t wash. The reaction to it by the FAI in particular has been insulting to Mick McCarthy. The damage has been done. Liam is still pretty burned up about it.
Strange thing is we know Liam to be a forgiving man. He shares a studio with Eamon Dunphy, whose criticisms of Brady as a player were known to have occasionally drawn blood. He works now for Arsenal who once cashed him in like a prize bond.
We know him to be a decent man too.
Before everyone in this country had their own Keane story or their own Bono story, everyone had their own Liam Brady stories. I had several. The first of which takes us back to an underage hurling game many years ago in Whitehall. Suddenly those of us participating noticed that the lean young man standing on the sideline watching was Liam Brady. The intensity of the game increased tenfold. There were those who were trying to maim and those who were trying to distribute the ball in the thoughtful and wise manner of Chippy himself. To a man we felt that a good exhibition of hurling in front of Liam Brady could only be a good
thing.
Then Martin Scully had the outrageous good fortune to have his ear half sundered from his head. Blood everywhere. Roaring. Men required to be held back by other men. The pronouncement that getting the ear back to its own environment would require more than Blue Tac. It would require, ta-da, stitches.
There was the usual quotient of jealousy which we all felt for somebody picking up a scar, an anecdote and a number of stitches (said number to be played down with the Mother, exaggerated with the mates). And then Liam Brady stepped forward and offered to take both man and ear to hospital.
Clutching his white and blue jersey to the side of his head, Scully disappeared off into Liam Brady’s car and was whisked townwards.
Needless to say the air went out of the game completely after that, until with 10 minutes to go Brady returned, confabbed with the mentors as to what had happened in ERand resumed watching the game, which now involved more wanton bloodshed and ear-lopping than a bad night at the Van Gogh’s. Helmets were discarded.
Precautions were abandoned. Lads hit the deck and hoped to haemorrhage. The ref blew it up before we started slashing our wrists with the bands of our hurls. Never saw Liam Brady in the flesh again after that but in the ensuing years, once in Germany with some Italians and once in Los Angeles with a Romanian, the only words of English which could be mustered were Ireland, Leeeam Bray-Deeee, accompanied by much enthusiastic nodding and exchanging of thumbs-up signs.
He was a symbol of Ireland in the way very few sports people have ever been, apart from Roy Keane. There was a woman on the radio a few weeks ago speaking from Iran and she was noting that when ever discussion of Ireland arose in Tehran the locals were likely to smile and say the words Roy Keane. Roy Keane, Roy Keane. And all these years later Brady and Keane are curiously separated by virtually the same experience.
Brady’s international career was ended insensitively and somewhat crassly just as the big bandwagon years began to roll.
One always assumed that the things Keane railed against pre-Saipan and post Saipan were the very things Brady would have felt uncomfortable with in the late ’80s.
It’s hard to imagine Brady carousing.
Difficult to picture how he might have been during the Three Amigos business at US ’94. Hard to imagine him not reacting to Maurice Setters in Orlando that year in precisely the same way as Keane did.
He had a reputation for not liking friendlies, yet a look at the composition of his haul of 72 caps reveals that almost one in three games he played in green were friendlies. He was in Überlandia when we lost 7-0 to Brazil and scored our only goal in Port of Spain when we lost heroically by the odd goal in three to Trinidad and Tobago.
Yet there it is. The business of Saipan seems to have touched in a visceral and very real way the lives of our three greatest
midfielders. Keane, Giles and Brady. Our perceptions of each of them have been altered and possibly their perceptions of themselves have been altered too. In the end, though, can the outcome have been that different to that which Keane, Brady and Giles all spent their careers yearning for? We don't do things differently anymore. We do things right. We're not loveable but we're professional.
And Keane is on the cusp, ready (regardless of how you view his motivation) to take the catcalls and whistles and boos.
It’s a form of amends that requires a form of forgiveness and a matching willingness to just get on with things. Before reading Liam Brady yesterday we’d never realised how hard that was going to be.
