He stares across the concourse at the milling journalists. Everyone pretends not to have been watching him. Ain't nobody here, but us chickens, Roy, ain't nobody here at all. He knows, though. He's got those dark serial killer eyes and that gaunt look. Black sheep in lone wolf's clothing. He's happy that way. Frightening in his self-containment. Frightening. Full stop.

That's right. Ain't nobody here at all.

It's Lisbon in October. Time to dawdle. The Irish soccer squad stand gossiping and laughing at the trundling airport carousel. When the time comes each player fishes his kitbag up into his fist and moves off towards the bus. Except one.

Roy Keane stands apart. Silent and serene. With a cartoon villain's swathe of dark stubble running from his chin right up his bony cheeks and over the crown of his scalp, he could be anyone's bad guy. In the shadows it's hard to tell whether he is scowling to himself or smiling to himself. Whatever. He is in a world that is entirely his own. From under the crook of his arm peeps a book. Hard Cases, by Gene Kerrigan. One good photo-opportunity missed.

"How's the book, Roy?"

He looks startled at the trespass. Glances at his book guiltily.

"Don't know yet," he says. "I just started it. Then somebody sat beside me on the plane."

Pause.

"I had to talk to them."

And he gives a rueful, razor-thin smile. More fodder perhaps.

KEANE'S SMALL TALK NIGHTMARE! - NEVER AGAIN, SAYS UNITED STAR.

He's in the thick of the large-point headlines again this morning and he doesn't need it. His mother is sick in Cork and his leg is troubling him slightly, and his decision to stay in Manchester an extra day at the start of the week opened in the heavens above a hole in the team's ozone layer. There's a new downpour of rumours about a feud to the death between himself and Mick McCarthy.

It all seemed so reasonable. He's stayed in Manchester because they have more equipment there, machines, a pool, and the physio he always works with. He knows that the physios will want to speak to each other, so he mentioned that if the physio is ringing anyway, well, do us a favour and tell the FAI what's up.

But the message has vanished and it's silly time. The papers have gotten hold of the fact that since Denis Irwin retired, Roy has been rooming by himself on Irish trips. This is a big deal, evidence of the brooding disaffection of Ireland's greatest footballer, evidence which will be used to adjudicate in the great feud.

Of course, he rooms alone at Manchester United as well, but nobody asks him about this and he's not going out of his way to tell them about how he just likes to read, likes to lie there and read a book and not have a mindless foreign TV programme blasting away in the background. He likes being able to ring Theresa and the kids and speak privately. He likes not having to talk just for the sake of it. He likes knowing that all he has to do for company is walk out the door and all he has to do for privacy is walk back in. He likes privacy. If that's a crime, so shoot him.

So at the airport in Lisbon, even though it's a bad time, you tell him that you want to ask him about what's it like being Roy Keane, captain of Ireland and Manchester United, maybe the most influential footballer on the planet, the man whose wage packet has become the standard by which all other wage packets are judged? What's it like always being in the centre when every cell of your genetic programming makes you an outsider?

And he agrees happily. Maybe it needs explaining.

What's it like? Well, this morning perhaps he half feels as if he should be in the midst of things with his team-mates, joshing and gossiping and putting on a show for the press who are watching just in case.

KEANE SLAYS McCARTHY in CAROUSEL BLOODBATH! - Onlookers heard `Big Nose' taunt.

But something inside him resists. He can't stand the raging idiocy of fame, so he sticks with his own thoughts and his own company regardless. You can think what you like of that.

He enjoys being here, but Irish trips have always been different for him. He began in Jack Charlton's old and settled team and plays now with Mick McCarthy's babies. He never had a three amigos period or a Brian Kerr apprenticeship.

"That's typical. I'm always the oddball in between. I'm not complaining about that. It's other people who go on about it."

Other people approach him when he's with his wife and kids on a family day out. They want photos taken with their hammy arms hanging around Roy's neck. When he says "sorry, look I'm with my family", other people get snippy, then stroppy and abuse him about his wage packet. Other people think that will make him change his mind.

He never gets to explain that he wants his two daughters and his little son to see him just as Dad. He's noticed it recently, he's noticed that they notice. He's putting the girls to bed and they start asking him questions about football.

"Tactics, Roy?"

"No," he breaks into his grin, "they're settled on 4-4-2 really, but they ask questions about other players. They have their little favourites already. They know there's something different going on. I try to protect them from all that, from other people, and from the whole Manchester United thing. In fairness, they go to the local Catholic school and the nuns there are good about it, too. It's other people that make the trouble."

All this fame stuff. His problem is he can't bring himself to fake sincerity. The other week he was talking to Jesper Blomqvist. Jesper has done his cruciate.

"I said to him, `Jesper, how is it?', and he said, `It's fine, thanks,' and I could see in his face he was annoyed because everyone asks the same thing, and I said, `Jesper, when I had it and somebody asked, I said it was bloody agony, I was in trouble, that I was icing it every day and exercising and it was a slow process and the mental stress was just as bad and I didn't know if I'd get through it all. Other people stop asking you pretty soon if you tell them the truth'."

Other people. They live in Ireland, too. Once, at the behest of a Sunday newspaper hack, he was booed for the course of a game playing for Ireland. He shrugs and shakes his head at the memory.

"In Ireland I think that's a way of life to be honest, people knocking you. I've found that hard at home. There's always somebody having a go. That's worse at home than it is here." Home. Here. Quick scene change. Here is this afternoon, a few weeks after Lisbon, the captain of Manchester United has just walked into a hotel on the outskirts of Manchester. It's a couple of days after the infamous prawn sandwich remark which turned the humble crustacean between two buttery slices into a term of abuse in football. Fair to say that a number of people in the lobby today must have been wondering if Roy was abusing them. Nevertheless, his presence freezes every face. If the Queen thinks the world smells of fresh paint, Roy Keane must reckon that it looks like Pompeii, people frozen with their mouths open.

He says it himself, without vanity, that he has to go pretty far to find a place these days where he might not be recognised. In the next week or so, he's taking the kids to Lapland for a pre-Christmas treat. He tells you this and his eyes cloud a little, worrying about . . .

£52,000-A-WEEK KEANE IN SANTA CLAUS BUST-UP - Rudolph Shaken By `Venison' jibe.

Quickly he shifts away from the details and into the sort of general talk that the tabloids can't pilfer ammunition from. Don't get me wrong, he says, and patiently elucidates yet another point less a damaging inference be drawn from it. Dwight Yorke had a party for players' families and Roy didn't go - don't get him wrong, he couldn't go. Being captain brings responsibilities, but don't get him wrong, the other lads are great. Etc, etc. He has been taken up wrong again and again. The back-page caricature of Keane as psychotic thicko with hair-trigger temper misses the point entirely. There's scarcely a more interesting footballer in the game today. Lots to say and humour as sharp as a fish hook.

Still you goad him a bit.

"What newspaper do you read?"

"This will look stupid, but I read the Times mainly." He rolls his eyes.

UNITED'S KEANE IN BROADSHEET ORGY! PLAYER CONSUMED `BIG' WORDS.

"Perhaps you should just put The People."

"No, The Times is interesting. Who does the soccer there?"

Withering look.

"Ah now, to be honest I don't buy papers to find out about soccer."

Keane 1 Journalism 0

This is his prime. Twenty-nine-years old and indispensable. He'll never be at this altitude again. The bookshops are currently flogging two Roy Keane biographies while Michael Kennedy, his solicitor and agent, is conducting the auction among five other publishers for the rights to the official version. That's just the quieter part of his life.