Emmet Malone charts the events that led to a mud-slinging contest between two Irish soccer legends.

It's hard to know what precisely is the most surprising aspect of this week's developments in the north east of England but the news that Niall Quinn and his long-time Republic of Ireland team-mate Roy Keane are contemplating the establishment of a close working relationship certainly comes close to topping the list.

The pair were, back in what might be referred to as "the good old days", friends who played and, well, played hard whenever they met up for international games. The nature of their relationship may have changed somewhat when Keane stopped drinking back in 1999 but there was not a hint of the slightest animosity between them prior to events in Saipan during the build-up to the 2002 World Cup. There, after Keane departed in the most acrimonious of circumstances, Quinn, along with Steve Staunton and Alan Kelly, made a fateful decision to stage a public show of support for Mick McCarthy. The Corkman was furious and one of football's great and, if observed from a safe distance, most entertaining feuds was born.

Quinn, predictably, was generally the much more conciliatory of the pair. While Keane repeatedly taunted the striker for his very public display of generosity in donating the proceeds of his testimonial game to charity. Quinn was more measured in his comments, hinting at a belief that the United skipper was an overly harsh and tortured soul who was his own worst enemy.

"He's sitting on TV pretending to wipe a tear from his eye," remarked Keane at one point. "He deserves an Oscar that fella, making out to be Mother Teresa. People don't know half of it." By way of reply, Quinn asked, "How do you measure professionalism? By how much pasta you eat? Bleep tests? Abstinence? The ability to get on with it no matter what the circumstances? Walking out on your team before the greatest games of their lives? We all take responsibility for ourselves. Roy left us in Saipan, not the other way round. And he punished himself more than any of us by not coming back."

When the Corkman subsequently recorded a DVD As I See It, that included his views on many football-related topics, he referred to Quinn and his former senior team-mates as "muppets" and seemed determined to deepen the divide that had opened up between the two sides.

Quinn, in contrast, compared Keane's 10-minute dismembering of McCarthy prior to his Saipan exit to Robert Emmet's speech from the dock when recalling the incident in his autobiography.

During the season that followed, Keane was sent off when Manchester United played at the Stadium of Light after being goaded about his own, then recently published, biography by Quinn's Sunderland team-mate, Jason McAteer. The Dubliner made an embarrassing attempt to publicly shake his opponent's hand as he left the pitch but was brushed away by Keane and angrily castigated by Alex Ferguson who appeared to get entirely the wrong end of the stick.

Keane's position on the stand-off did gradually seem to soften over the three years that followed and while still apparently angry with his former team-mates when asked about them in April there was reportedly a hint of nostalgia and regret in his voice as he recalled their previous friendship.

The Corkman, of course, had come up with bigger fish to fry in the meantime, having made an inglorious exit from Old Trafford after criticising many of the club's younger stars as sub-standard in an interview with the in-house television channel. Writing in the Guardian about the incident in the wake of a poor Champions League performance against Lille, Quinn now took his own opportunity to be scathing. "They (United) did not have the benefit of the best preparation due not least to the farcical and self-serving intervention by Roy Keane," he observed. "As far as I am aware, humiliating your colleagues in public is not the best way to foster team spirit. From his team-mates' point of view, do they really see that as a genuine attempt to get a positive reaction or was it a rant from someone supposedly so committed to United that he has let everybody know how much he loves the idea of a move to Celtic?"

It was surprisingly strong stuff from a man not known for the sharpness of his tongue and strongly suggested that Quinn, by now retired and working primarily for the British media, had given up on a rapprochement with his one-time friend.

Yet reconciled they were with Michael Kennedy the London-based solicitor, whom Quinn had introduced to Keane when the Corkman was trying to sort out his post Nottingham Forest future, engineering a meeting over the course of the summer just passed.

Quite how enthusiastic the pair were about making up is unclear. It is also uncertain if they envisaged at that stage that they might soon have to deal with other on a day-to-day basis. But then they do have rather complementary needs right now for, as Brian Kerr pointed out yesterday, "Roy has finished playing and he wants a job in management, I presume while Niall needs someone to come in and manage the club if he's going to be chairman so obviously (there had to be) a change of attitudes and so they're doing what needs to be done."