Roy Keane has developed into not just the best Irish footballer in recent decades but the most interesting. As a young player he had little to say and not much confidence about saying it. These times when he expresses a thought it is usually frank, original and worth listening to.
He was among the last out of the Irish dressing-room on Saturday night and his words rhymed with comments he made earlier in the week. Having achieved everything there is to achieve at club level, Roy Keane is very interested in playing in another World Cup.
"We have to start giving ourselves more credit," he said. "We have good players, you get sick to death at that about the Irish will enjoy themselves anyway. We haven't qualified since 1994. You get into this rut. You know tonight with a two-two draw that the fans will be happy but we're professional, we need an end to this stuff of the Irish having a good time whatever happens. Sometimes the players even underestimate themselves. We played nice football at times tonight. We have to give credit to ourselves for that." What a strange and baffling week for Irish football. It began with the Babb/Kennedy twostep, a clownish disaster which seemed to herald an unfairly chaotic draw-down on the McCarthy era. It ended with Babb and Kennedy in exile and the best Irish away performance in years.
We won't give credit, of course. There will be attempts to run down the Dutch team which we played on Saturday night until they are represented as a buffoonish pub outfit whom Mick McCarthy couldn't manage to outwit.
It is worth noting a few things. The Dutch side had 391 caps between them, 88 more than the Irish; they had an average age of 29 (Ireland's was 25). Eight of the team were at the European championships, five of them played together at Barcelona under Louis Van Gaal last season, seven of them play or have played in the top levels of Italian or Spanish leagues.
This Dutch side knew what it was about. They were all together under van Gaal just two weeks ago for a three-day training session which included the 5-0 hammering of the local side. They were playing at home under a new and celebrated manager. They had a lot to prove to him and the Dutch public. He had a lot to prove.
Van Gaal noted afterwards that the Irish had toyed with his side in the first half. Toyed! Ronald Koeman, now a commentator, said that the Irish were the better side, that the Dutch had got lucky. By contrast Mick McCarthy began the week in court watching two of his players get bail after a night in the chokey. McCarthy began Saturday night with a debutante centre half, with Roy Keane less than 100 per cent fit, with two players from the English first division and a team whom we all confidently expected to get beaten handsomely.
Ireland ran themselves ragged on a pitch which became greasy and heavy as the game went on. When they could they played football more assuredly than their hosts. Ireland scored two well-created goals and could have scored on at least two other occasions when they manufactured good chances. They lost the chance of a win to a goal which took a wicked deflection.
McCarthy's late substitutions were necessary but unsuccessful. All three players withdrawn were exhausted and had begun making mistakes. None of the three introduced provided any spark. That's hindsight though. Looking back we found the true cost of Kennedy's stupidity. Available, he could have gone in on either wing or played a part in the hole behind a lone striker after Quinn's withdrawal. In the circumstances of last week, McCarthy performed excellently. He deserves credit. Roy Keane may yet get back to the World Cup.
Phil Babb won't be with him. We will presumably see no more of him. His entire decline has been sad to watch. He could have been so much more. This journalist used to ghost a newspaper column with Babb at the time when he was breaking through into the Irish team. The column ran through the 1994 world Cup and for a little while afterwards. He was genuinely considered to be a future international captain back then.
Babb was generous, conscientious and reflective, always easy to deal with. Initially we didn't get around to agreeing his fee for the column he did and by the time we got to discuss it, late in 1994, he was earning £8,500 a week at Liverpool and said he didn't need the money, thanks.
When I met him first he was team captain at Coventry, engaged to be married, excited about being picked for Ireland and looking forward to meeting his mother's relatives in Carlow.
The World Cup in 1994 in the US turned Babb, Jason McAteer and Gary Kelly into pop stars, an eventuality for which Babb was poorly prepared. Hard to blame him for going off track. On a couple of occasions while I was interviewing him women would interrupt to almost literally throw themselves at him. The last time we spoke at length, his engagement had finished and he had been up all night being wined and dined by the editors of Loaded magazine.
Jack Charlton treated him with tremendous indulgence and if the true story of the week the Irish team spent in Limerick before the Portugal clash in late 1995 is ever told it will make a fascinating exclamation mark at the end of that era. By then, of course, Phil Babb was in decline. I can't remember a decent game he has played since.
Kennedy is an even more pitiful case. Emotionally he needs football more than Phil Babb does, yet his screw-ups, his struggle to justify being given so much so young, are almost painful to watch. He failed at Liverpool, failed again at Wimbledon, but was, for many, player of the year last season at Manchester City.
In trouble on the US tour in 1996, in dispute with a tabloid which stitched him up with accusations of a drink problem, and in trouble again last week.
We need Kennedy to be all he can be. We need him to abandon drink altogether, foresake all messing, succeed in the Premiership and come back to us with a new maturity. Credit to Mick McCarthy, he has always given players second chances. On Saturday night McCarthy more than earned his own next chance.
