EXIT GHOST. When Sunderland take the field at Old Trafford this evening, the shadow of Roy Keane will, not for first time, stalk the famous Manchester football ground. Keane's quitting of the Black Cats has been characteristically violent in its suddenness.
Sunderland fans now find themselves in much the same state as did Irish fans following Keane's enforced departure from Saipan and United fans following his stormy and poignant farewell from Manchester United. The whole appeal of supporting any team is surely based on the primal sense of shouting for the same cause, of sharing a belief system.
So when the key figure, the man who has been worthy of worship and identified as the leader of that cause - be it the football fortunes of United, Ireland or Sunderland - removes himself from it with such breathtaking totality, it is bound to cause reactions of extreme confusion and anger and disappointment. That Keane lasted precisely 100 games and two years at Sunderland and that he left on the eve of his anticipated return to the club where he remains a folk hero provides a neat ending to the latest - and perhaps last - chapter of the Cork man's life in football. And it was noticeable that in all the comments flying about over the last 48 hours, those offered by Alex Ferguson were singular in their tone of genuine regret and bafflement.
God knows what stokes the internal fires that keep Ferguson hot for the mid-winter bread-and-butter games against the yeomanry teams of the Premier League. Perhaps he was quietly looking forward to meeting again with his former captain, one of the few men of whom he has been extravagant in his praise.
As Ferguson noted this week, Keane always had something interesting to say. It isn't hard to imagine Ferguson got a chuckle out of Keane's ever-entertaining press conferences in Sunderland, in which he could not help himself from becoming the voice of conscience for the increasingly manufactured world of the Premier League, views which Ferguson may well have endorsed but is too crafty to ever share with the public.
Was Keane wrong to walk on Sunderland? He certainly leaves the people who sought him out and backed him - Niall Quinn and the Irish consortium - in a fairly hellish position going into the Christmas season. He has certainly given meat to those who always found his on-field aggression unpalatable and those who have never forgiven his starkly uncompromising stance in Saipan. And he has added to the popular perception that he is contrary and a loner and just not suited to the bloke-ish camaraderie of English football culture. The comical fact is that in the "top ten sporting walk-outs" that are periodically compiled in the sports pages, the Boy Roy may well hold positions one, two and three.
Ten years ago, when Morrissey was singing Roy's Keenon Top of the Pops, Keane was a marauding, suedehead midfielder who was at the epicentre of Ferguson's empire and he was regularly portrayed as a half-wild Irishman in the British red tops - a character one step removed from the excesses of Punchmagazine. In later years, they allowed that he might just be a smart lad after all but they could never fully come to terms with the fact he spoke and behaved in a way footballers never did before nor will do again.
Who can ever forget the snooty, baffled tone of Jeremy Paxman when Newsnightstooped to cover the Saipan affair?
But whatever about England, the reaction to Keane's departure here in Ireland has provoked a predictable volley of shots from the significant numbers for whom Keane represents treachery and all the rest. Many of the anonymous texts and comments sent to the radio shows were predictably bitter. But old allies got in on the act too. The Irishman has been at the heart of some of the most spectacular rows among RTÉ's beloved soccer trio of Eamon Dunphy, John Giles and Liam Brady. Not any more. Keano has lost his most ardent admirer.
"Love is now the stardust of yesterday, the music of the years gone by",Eamon Dunphy crooned one night on RTÉ last summer, when the world was slightly tipsy and had yet to fall. Remember that? Eamon and John Giles and Chippy Brady the stars of a squiffy love-in on the Miriam O'Callaghan show and Eamo fluttering the eyelashes as he did justice to the old Hoagy Carmichael classic. Back then, the world economy had yet to plummet into its black hole and Roy Keane had steered Sunderland through a bumpy Premier League season. Dunphy was at his most entertaining that night. And brilliant though his radio work can be, that's what he has become: an entertainer.
Therefore, he had no qualms when it came to socking it to Keane during the past few days when the Irish man was agonising over his future at Sunderland. The man Dunphy had championed so fiercely six years ago had now "lost the plot" and was "rambling." Back in the days of Saipan, Dunphy saw in Keane the qualities that reflected his idealised self: unflinching, principled to the last, ambitious, truthful, passionate, Irish to the core, true to his own conscience; the lone fighter against the establishment. The thing is, you cannot earn your shekels from the state broadcaster or serenade to the delight of the grandmothers of Ireland on prime time Saturday night television and still be a maverick.
And if you are going to sit down and ghost-write a man's autobiography - if you are going to profit off his story - the least you can do is show some loyalty in a week when that man is clearly in a vulnerable place. The most dispiriting part of it all was Dunphy was just taking care of business: that he was just shooting Keane down because he had become a legitimate target in Dunphy's sightlines.
It is, after all, only a game.
Who knows why Keane left Sunderland? In his first two seasons, he had delivered and then some. Perhaps it was because he felt he was no longer up to it. Perhaps it was because he couldn't bear the thought of standing on the sideline at Old Trafford while Alex's superstars thumped his team by four or five or even six. Perhaps Keane, the fearless one did, in the end, "bottle it", as they say in the English game. Or perhaps he one day realised as he stood in the cold, masked by that lush beard, that he simply hadn't the heart for watching mostly poor football week in, week out. The truth is no one really has a clue why he quit Sunderland except for Keane himself.
Was he wrong? Probably. The conventional thing to do would have been to tough it out, get the results and turn the grim fight for survival into another minor triumph - the stuff of resilience and fortitude that has been the speciality of managers like Big Sam Allardyce. But Keane is not Big Sam. He is not Harry Redknapp. If these are Premier League managers, then perhaps the sceptics were right all along: perhaps Keane is simply not suited to the job.
And in a way, wrong or right does not come into Keane's exit. It is like asking if Daniel Day-Lewis was wrong to walk off stage at the National Theatre in the middle of performing Hamlet - because he believed he had seen the ghost of his father. To most of us, the explanation might seem outlandish or childish or indulgent. But for the man caught in the moment, he was doing what he felt he had to.
Wrong or right, it is disappointing Roy Keane has left Sunderland - for the very simple reason that he was one of the few interesting people left in the world of sport, let alone football. They say he will be back. My own hope is that this is it for Keane and football. That he disappears now and turns his back on it. Tonight, the man who will not be there will be the talk of Old Trafford.
Perhaps his last two years in football have taught Roy Keane the old truth: you can't go home again. So Keane has walked. Here is hoping he does not look back.
"Was Keane wrong to walk on Sunderland? He certainly leaves the people who sought him out and backed him - Niall Quinn and the Irish consortium - in a fairly hellish position going into the Christmas season.
