Sideline Cut: English football would make for duller theatre without its pair of Irish mavericks, Roy Keane and Niall Quinn. In an era when every remark seems rehearsed and every move predictable, the news that the former Irish team-mates turned public enemies are to bury their feud and form an alliance at ailing Sunderland has brought a smile to everybody's face. When word of an impending contract, still at the negotiation stage yesterday, broke earlier this week, it sounded like a half-daft wind-up.

Certainly, Mark Lawrenson seemed to suspect he was victim of a hoax when word of Keane's probable reunion with Quinn at the Stadium of Light was announced on Match of the Day.

Lawrenson is not a man given to extreme shows of emotion, but his face betrayed absolute bafflement and astonishment as he pondered the implications of big affable Quinny standing shoulder to shoulder beside the chiselled, tailored figure of Roy Keane.

Lawro kept his composure but it would hardly have been a surprise had he voiced the sentiment that has occurred to many football people this week: what a pair of lunatics.

If Keane is handed the managerial keys at Sunderland, it will be a development so left field as to be considered mad. And it just might work. Keane and Quinn are very different men but they do share an eccentric streak, a restless nature and a habit of doing whatever nobody expects them to.

Way back in his Arsenal days, Quinn quickly emerged as one of the more engaging and thoughtful characters in English football and even then seemed bound for a cosy post-football careers on the old-pro's casting couch at ITV, BBC or Sky. And he has dipped in and out of television analysis, at which he proved informative and smooth and naturally polished. But dispensing bon mots or broadcasting from places like the Madejski Stadium off the ring road on arctic Monday nights in Reading was never likely to appeal to the charismatic Irishman in the long term.

Although Quinn has often been parodied for his generally agreeable nature and commendable altruistic streak and was witheringly likened by Keane to a Mother Teresa-type figure, he has never been a safe, count-the-pennies type of sportsman.

Back in the rare old times of Irish soccer, the gangly striker was an enthusiastic participant in whatever merriment was going under Jack Charlton's often-indulgent watch.

Quinn has never hidden his like for a good drink and a good punt. He was talented and although suffering his fair share of injuries his playing career took him through a good decade of the cash-crazy Premiership and although his very public charity testimonial was not to the taste of a private individual like Keane, there was always the sense with Quinn that he felt genuinely uneasy at the vast sums of money being thrown at him and other Premiership stars.

Quinn's recent acquisition of Sunderland, as the public figure in an Irish-based consortium, could be regarded as a typically flamboyant, gambling departure on his part. Quinn is a great front man, persuasive in front of the camera, handsome in the Saville Row winter coats that big-time football men wear and a bright and energetic operator.

Taking over Sunderland, where he was a popular striker in the twilight of his career, was a hugely ambitious and risky move and his decision to act as management for the first part of the Championship season was indicative of a man who has never really doubted that he can be all things to all people.

It was always hard to imagine Quinn as a manager, however. Not that he wouldn't have the smarts or the willingness to learn, but mostly because he is simply too warm-natured to place the necessary distance between himself and the players. Quinn would have been tough and ruthless enough, you can be sure, for the management game but it is debatable as to whether he would have enjoyed it.

I remember going over to talk to some Irish apprentices at Sunderland and watching Quinn spending a good hour playing headers over a volleyball net with the young hopefuls on a grey afternoon after training, having fun and killing time with kids who must have admired him hugely but who were perfectly relaxed in his company.

Like most men who made it through the brutally lonely apprenticeship system of English football, Quinn is a tough character, a trait which again came to the fore during his public row with Keane.

But he did not come across as flinty or vindictive enough to enjoy the trials of kick-starting a labouring team like Sunderland and so, five games into a disastrous managerial career, he simply called time on himself, seemingly at no emotional cost and brightly predicted the acquisition of a world-class figure.

That the man was Keane seemed as much a tribute to Big Niall's sense of humour as anything else.

Keane, of course, will have no trouble establishing a suitable sense of distance between himself and the troubled band of journeymen footballers he will be expected to transform into a team capable of seeking promotion back to the Premiership big time. There doesn't seem much to say about the notion of Keane as manager except that it was always destined to happen and that, at the age of 35, he has the time and intelligence, the formidable aura of the belligerent, brilliant Brian Clough and the blazing, clear-minded ambition of the young Ferguson to become one of most influential managers of the coming football age.

It may seem odd that he has chosen to initiate that career at Sunderland where his bitter adversary, Mick McCarthy, rose and fell and where Quinn, the man he once branded "a muppet", will become his employer.

But nobody will enjoy the peculiarity of the situation more than Keane and, in Quinn, he has the comfort of dealing with someone he knows well, someone he has drunk with back in the good old days and someone whom, deep down, he probably likes.

Commenting on Keane's relentless professionalism after the famous victory over The Netherlands at Lansdowne Road which marked the high point of the McCarthy years, Quinn, half in awe, said Keane "is a machine". But he said the Manchester United man's singular drive unsettled some of the other lads in the dressingroom. "I wouldn't say he frightens me but he intimidates one or two."

Quinn backed the wrong horse during the unholy row in Saipan but, afterwards, he never showed signs of distress at Keane's more pointed outbursts and he never showed signs of being frightened of the Cork man. He simply waited until it all blew over, always being Quinny, moving on to the next thing, sometimes lightly chiding Roy, as he called him, and often praising him. Through it all, Quinn was unflappable as Keane was combustible.

It would be fascinating to know when Quinn first thought of Keane as managerial material. Chances are it was years ago. He bided his time and talked the talk and while the rest of us slept, he has made Roy Keane an offer that was so much like a dare that the Cork man could hardly turn it down.

They may be a pair of lunatics but they are smart men addicted to the rare thrill and adrenaline of the football life and they have a habit of landing on their feet. And if they stand waving at the masses from the centre point of the Stadium of Light over the coming days, they will have provided the unfashionable first division championship with a fascination to match anything on offer in the Premiership.