On The Premier League:One day they will make a film about Roy Keane - probably one of those dreadful made-for-TV biopics that clutter up the schedules of second-rate cable stations. Sleepless in Saipan: the Roy Keane Story would be manna from heaven for the Hallmark Channel.

Either way, when this masterpiece is committed to celluloid, the director would be well advised to shoot Keane's tantrums and triumphs in black and white.

The Sunderland manager may be a technicolour personality, but there is something resolutely old-fashioned in his attitude to life both in and outside the dug-out.

In case you missed it, Keane posted an early candidate for "rant of the season" last week, railing against the modern footballers' lily-livered habit of allowing their Prada-encrusted wives to dictate career moves. Determinedly unfashionable spots like Sunderland, he claimed, were missing out to the bars and boutiques offered by London, Manchester and Liverpool.

Keane was not wearing a cloth cap and walking a whippet when he embarked on this tirade, but he might as well have been. His words seemed to belong to another era, when top-flight clubs scooped up their brightest prospects from within a 10-mile radius and metrosexuals were weirdos who flashed at women on the tube.

Keane's old-school disdain for the metropolitan elite shouldn't be so surprising, given his managerial schooling. Brian Clough, who brought Keane to English football as a teenager, was an unofficial standard-bearer for the English provinces, having led Derby County and Nottingham Forest to the summit of the domestic and European games, feats that would be unimaginable today.

Clough's influence undoubtedly rubbed off on his impressionable young midfielder, though Keane's own urban angst was brewing long before he crossed the water.

In his autobiography, he admits trips with Cobh Ramblers to Dublin brought out the beast in him - a desire to "show those Dublin bastards I could ******* play" - while, much later, a dark moment at Manchester United prompted musings of a move to Juventus and the grim industrial backdrop of Turin rather than Milan's sweeping boulevards and swanky street cafes.

Now, post-retirement, he seems to have remodelled himself as a country gent. No sipping a skinny latte on some heated canal-side terrace for Keano; give him a long tramp over field and fen any day.

In fact, it hardly requires a giant leap of the imagination to picture him, in his wild-haired dotage, brandishing a shotgun at hapless hikers and yelling at them to "gerroff" his land.

Keane's cantankerousness is something of a modern-day anomaly. The new generation of football managers are supposed to smile sweetly into the television cameras, utter a few meaningless platitudes and meet every question that veers toward quirkiness with the kind of straight bat of which Don Bradman would have been proud. If their countless coaching courses and management diplomas have taught them nothing else, it is that the press spell trouble.

But Keane is different, and gloriously so. He can fend off uncomfortable enquiries with the best of them but when he wants to air a grievance then woe betide the overprotective press officer who gets in his way.

This, remember, is a man who made Manchester United's official television station - which makes Chelsea TV appear coldly objective - worth watching with a spectacularly furious analysis of his team-mates' limp surrender at Middlesbrough in 2005.

Keane knew his incendiary comments would almost certainly lead to his premature exit from Old Trafford but he simply did not care; the principle was worth the sacrifice.

A taste for vented spleen could also have been bequeathed on Keane from the notoriously cranky Clough, but the source is probably fresher. Alex Ferguson may have fallen out with his former captain before his departure from United, but not before teaching him the importance of making his barbed comments as pointed as possible.

Like Ferguson, Keane is not one to waste his words, and there is a cool, calculated air to his apparently scattergun diatribes. They can serve to jolt his contemporaries out of their complacency - as in his attack on United's prawn-sandwich-munching supporters or his Rolex-sporting team-mates - or remind his charges of their professional responsibilities.

For all that last week's Wag-attack was launched against a reliably soft target, Keane's real point was surely to emphasise the honour and privilege of playing for Sunderland, a grand old club, despite its lack of postcard potential.

Whatever happens to his team this season - and the crushing defeat at Wigan on Saturday suggested it could be a long old slog - Keane will always provide great copy and, some time soon, one hell of a movie.