Martin is right.
Thank you very much Mr Delaney
3 Likes
Wasnât there a young lad with a mother from Clare who got a few minutes in pre season friendlies for Inter Milan?
Ryan Nolan.
september 18 2018, 12:01am, the times
Roy Keane has lots to offer but he needs to cool the fire
henry winter, chief football writer
Share
Save
Shortly before Roy Keane finished his Uefa Pro Licence at Warwick University in 2008, he chatted to tutors marvelling at his coursework, considered some of the most innovative they had witnessed. Here, surely, was a heavyweight manager in waiting. So the coaches, senior League Managers Association types, asked their star pupil, the former Manchester United captain, about his managerial ambitions. âItâs about testing yourself against the likes of Sir Alex [Ferguson],ââ he replied. The past, pockmarked decade has sadly shown that Keane has yet to learn the difference between a hairdryer and a flamethrower.
Ferguson was a master of man-management, knowing when to deliver the sharp blast of withering, wakening criticism designed to freeze the blood briefly and quicken the heart and mind permanently for the good of the player and the team. Keane, inhibited by his dysfunctional character, is hopeless at man-management, the most important quality for a leader of a dressing room, along with recruitment and ability to react during matches, and tends to lash out verbally.
At his peak Keane was one of the best midfielders in the world with a special hunger to be successfulNEWS GROUP NEWSPAPERS LTD
Keane, the Ireland assistant manager, initially a great success at Sunderland but then a failure and toxic figure at Ipswich Town, fails to grasp what Ferguson swiftly did, that players are humans with differing trigger points. There was a lightness to Fergusonâs touch with players, whereas Keane seems to storm out of the darkness.
He has previously spoken of his issues with heavy drinking, impressively coming to grips with those demons within, but it cannot be the easiest life on the road as a coach, living in hotels, with the minibar lurking in the corner of the room. Keane has not yet found an avenue in his post-playing life to channel his ferocious competitive spirit.
He needs help but so does football. Simply demonising the 47-year-old is naive and limiting, overlooking the opportunity to understand one of the most important footballing figures of the past three decades. Taking a flamethrower to Keaneâs reputation is as unsophisticated as his own approach to players.
It is a modern sadness that a player developed and managed by two of the greats, Brian Clough at Nottingham Forest and Ferguson at United, who went into coaching with such promise, has imploded as a manager, failing to build on all that buzz that followed him out of Warwick.
At the time Keane would say, and then write in his second autobiography, that he would love to combine âCloughâs warmth and Fergusonâs ruthlessnessâ in ascending the managerial ladder. Clough had warmth whereas Keane owns only a flamethrower.
He also spoke to his tutors about his respect for other Ferguson protĂ©gĂ©s, Mark Hughes and Steve Bruce, as they built their careers as managers and voiced his belief that Ryan Giggs and Gary Neville would develop into significant coaches and managers. âThese lads could be putting their feet up on a beach but thatâs not what lifeâs all about,ââ Keane told his Warwick audience.
He is driven and he wants all players to match that ambition. So as we endure all these critics carping about Keane, and he has undeniably embarrassed himself and the Ireland manager Martin OâNeill with his rant about Harry Arter, we should also appreciate the complexities of the situation.
I spent the weekend at a friendâs birthday celebrations in Ireland, listening to some wonderful singers in Galway and also hearing at closer hand a debate that is dividing football followers in Ireland. Some argue that Keane is a bully, cowardly berating players like Arter but not the tougher Jonathan Walters, and standing accused as a hypocrite with his railing against pampered players, having himself got in a spectacular huff over Irelandâs facilities in Saipan in 2002. Precious, moi? Yes, you Roy.
Others, though, passionately contend that he has a point, players do inhabit a bubble, retreating to the treatment room at the first niggle. âMan upâ, chant the pro-Keane choir, many from Cork, where he comes from. Others actually see the shades between the black and white. âRoy Keaneâs a cock,â began one Irishman encountered in a bar. âBut I agree with him on this. He comes from GAA, hurling, where they donât stand for any nonsense on or off the pitch. Youâre injured? So what? You fking play. Youâre writing about Keane, are you? Fking stick it to the players.â
Polarising the debate helps nobody. Keane needs to learn, appreciating that more subtlety is required in man-management. Football also needs to learn. The game has gone softer, but Keane picked the wrong targets. Arter has experienced much in his home life, with the loss of his baby daughter, to ensure that he would never lose sight of the real world. Walters, one of the most balanced, soulful individuals you could meet, has powerfully articulated in the past his heartbreak at his mother passing away from cancer.
Keane has a general good point about some footballers, just not these two, Arter and Walters. He needs to target his ire more. When I was at another newspaper, I would marvel at the insight Keane poured out on to their pages, no holds barred, no reputations sacrosanct, but there was always the fear on the desk that Keane would tire of his fiery approach. Scorched earth is not fertile soil for nurturing relationships in the game. He pulled out of the column after a few enlightening, inflammatory weeks.
This is Keane. This is also football, home to competitive individuals, warriors who struggle in retirement. All this decrying Keane ignores one of the saddest narratives of football, coming to terms with life on the sidelines. It is this anger from a flawed individual that needs to be scrutinised by a sport concerned about the welfare of its practitioners, past and present, not simply dismissed as the ramblings of a madman. And those who patronise Keane as of limited intellect have clearly never met him.
But he needs to cool his heated approach. On Keaneâs appointment as manager of courteous, civilised Ipswich Town in 2009, an exercise akin to entering a pitbull to Crufts, I attended his first press conference and endured his wrath over a harmless question about why that â94 Double-winning side of Fergusonâs was producing decent managers, at the time Hughes and Bruce. Keane lost it, launching into a diatribe about what makes good managers, and within 24 hours he was ringing Bruce to apologise. He is permanently on edge, looking to settle scores, whereas Ferguson was cannier, picking his fights and his moments.
Keaneâs behaviour provides a warning, perhaps a lesson for those on coaching courses, of avoiding the mistakes he makes, most immediately being disarmed of the flamethrower. Yet talented former players on those same courses also need to understand how to deal with lesser players, how to deal with modern, monied players.
Those who disdain Keane, forgetting his stellar playing career, also do the game a disservice in that modern football is crying out for all-round midfield players of his calibre. Those who watched Keane play, who saw his self-belief, his hunger, his tactical intelligence and prodigious technical gifts, know that he was special.
Keane would walk into any midfield now, not just the Premier League but any continental club, including Barcelona, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich.
He was that good. Keane could defend and attack, always leading, never hiding, just incinerating opponents with pass and stare. He just needs to put the flamethrower away now.
Does this chap get paid extra every time he uses the word flamethrower or what?
2 Likes
Heâs trying to get a subliminal message to Roy
Fucks sake.
And there we have it.
The Bohemians revival: âWeâre like a GAA club, except we play soccer - thatâs no bad thingâ
Bohemians are rising from the ashes, but they remain as determined as ever to maintain their community ethos
Garry Doyle
September 19 2018, 12:01am, The Times
Bohemians supporters once again have something to shout about following seven victories on the trotRYAN BYRNE/INPHO
Share
Save
It reads more like a morality tale than a football story, a chronicle of excess, then redemption. In many ways Bohemians were a metaphor for the Celtic Tiger, living through what seemed like a golden time, winning leagues and cups, travelling across Europe for five seasons in a row.
Yet while everything appeared perfect, it wasnât. The club, like so many others in the League of Ireland before them, were living beyond their means, caught up in a complicated property sale, âŹ7million in debt by the time the fantasies stopped and reality bit.
They were nearing their darkest hour when they saw the light, their board voting to slash their annual wage bill from âŹ1million to âŹ140,000. In so doing, their successful manager was lost, as was the entire first team and hopes of winning anything significant.
Or so we thought. âWhat is success?â Dan Lambert, a member of the current board, asks. âIs it measured by trophies when you canât afford to pay for the team winning those cups? Or is it improving the club and passing it on to the next generation in a better state than we found it?
âWhen we ran into severe financial trouble, we had to ask what Bohemians was all about. When you are spending a lot of money, people get a sense of entitlement, and think the team has to win, week after week after week. In those years, whenever the team drew or lost, people went home unhappy.
âNow, our attitude is to make ourselves relevant to the area and the community, to insulate ourselves from results, to make people come here because they love the club and not just because they want to see a team win.â
Nice words, and some would say overly idealistic ones, too. Yet as Lambert offered his persuasive reasons why old-fashioned attitudes are the future, the clang-clang-clang of a metal container could be heard being rolled down the tunnel by a couple of volunteers, who had spent the remainder of their Friday evening washing and drying the first-team kit in the clubâs washroom.
âOur board of management is made up of guys like that [volunteers],â Lambert said. âMembers own the club. Itâs theirs not some investment bankers or some benefactors.
âFor about 50 of us, Bohemians is like a second job and for another 100 or so, itâs something they put a lot of time and money into. People love the club because the club stands against a lot of what modern football has become. We are like a GAA club in terms of our organisation, except we play soccer. And that is not a bad thing.â
Bohemians manager Long said that his club like the idea of being the underdogTOMMY DICKSON/INPHO
In fact, it helps. Had the sale of Dalymount Park gone through, the ground would have become just another shopping centre, or row of houses. Over a century of tradition would have disappeared and a community would have been deprived of the place that brings them together. There would not have been the drive to invest time into homeless charities or to work with gardaĂ to help vulnerable children steer a path away from criminality. Their work with prisoners in Mountjoy, asylum seekers, with an amputee team, the St Vincent de Paul, Special Olympics teams, just would not have happened.
âWhat we are doing isnât marketing,â Lambert says, âit is happening because it is the right thing to do and we want to make ourselves distinct. We donât just want to be one-dimensional club obsessed solely with winning. Thereâs more to us than that.â
Lately, though, they have been winning. Seven wins on the trot, including a thrilling 4-2 defeat of champions Cork City last Friday, have lifted them to sixth in the table, as well as bringing them to this eveningâs FAI Cup quarter-final against Derry City. Tellingly, the board has forked out on an overnight stay in advance of the match, professionalising their approach.
âWell, to be fair, weâre professional in everything we do,â Keith Long, their manager, said. âWeâre full-time in attitude and in terms of the hours we put into it. It just so happens we have day jobs as well.â
It is something that Long would like to change. This is his fourth year in charge, and he has grown from the aspirational figure whose only previous managerial experience was with Athlone Town. Year after year, he has defied the odds, building and then rebuilding, the habitual loss of key players to bigger-spending clubs becoming a source of frustration. âI donât just want to become a recruitment officer for someone else,â Long said. âNor do I want this to sound like poor-me. But there will come a point where Iâd love to manage this club in a full-time capacity because I believe my skill sets will make us better. We donât live in a football bubble at Bohemians, we live in a real world. Players need encouragement, an arm around the shoulder, need talking to, and when you do that and you see them grow as players and people, itâs an unbelievable feeling.
And it ties in with the overall ethos. âBohemians is a special club, with a rich tradition and history. They fell on lean times but I have no doubt we will rise again because the custodians of the club are good people, hard workers. The people who come here do so because they want to see their club do well, because itâs a bit of an event; they get to watch good football.â
Two ball boys enjoy the moment during Bohemiansâ fine victory over CorkJAMES CROMBIE/INPHO
The frustration is that they would be watching even better football if the stars they brought through their system had hung around. But in football, money talks and players walk. Since 2012, more than a dozen first-teamers have been headhunted; Fuad Sule, Warren OâHora and Izzy Akinade leaving last year, Dylan Watts this term. Chris Forrester, an earlier graduate from their underage structure, is at Aberdeen now, Kevin Feely at Kildare GAA, after a stint with Charlton Athletic.
âWe like the tag of being the underdog but there does become a time when you want to challenge,â Long said. âOf course I know you canât put the health of the club at risk. You have to live within your means. We donât have a benefactor but there are lots of Foreign Direct Investment companies with CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) funding out there, who would love to identify with a club like this â a club that has worked hard to develop its culture and value system.â
In an earlier era, when the culture was different, the Bohemians board had a reputation for being trigger-happy, sacking Roddy Collins and Stephen Kenny shortly after they had each won a league title. Pertinently, Long mentions how football is a fickle business, yet the fact the board looked at the bigger picture when the team was struggling for results earlier this season is indicative of their new ethos.
âThe thing we have tried to communicate to our members is that the league, as a whole, is operating in a false market,â Lambert said. âThere is money being put into other clubs by benefactors. We can never operate in that marketplace again. We have no fixed assets, therefore if we were to run into financial difficulty now, the clubâs existence would be at stake and no one would be willing to do that.
âWhat you get in Bohs â indeed the League of Ireland â is something real. Look at the Premier League, and you get the total sterilisation of the football experience where you go into a ground and are told exactly where to sit. There is no sense of excitement.â
It was present at Dalymount last Friday, the flares and the songs, the banners and the graffiti, the fans moving joyously from the stand to the bars. It isnât possible to bottle and sell a supporterâs passion. If it were, this clubâs financial worries would be instantly solved.
1 Like
He will be seething.
A proper club . Roots in the community .
eh, their coach was sexually abusing the players and was whoring his wife to the players. They had a rapist playing for them last season.
@Ashman has an odd view of what makes a proper club but the heading is apt
2 Likes
On a side note- Ireland destroyed Turkey 3-0 last night in the u17s
We had 5 SRFC academy players starring
3 Likes
Is there a club anywhere more in love with itself that Bohs
Pats will batter them on Saturday
1 Like
Kev told us all we needed to know about the worth of these coaching badges
Kev knew
Thank you john delaney.
Eire football is in a very healthy state.
A lad like @Little_Lord_Fauntleroy who commended Chelsea Football club for a 40 year cover up of a rapist/paedophile employee and who thinks its cool to attempt to buy the silence of a victim with a ÂŁ50,000 pay off has no moral authority.
Big win for the under 19s today