The better part of valour

As a player, Roy Keane was never one to shy away from a challenge.

As a manager, however, Keane today decided that discretion – or, at least, resignation - is the better part of valour – and left Sunderland.

The facts are these.

In August 2006, Keane took over a relegated side wallowing at the foot of the Championship and led them straight back to the Premier League.

He spent around £40m on an eclectic mix of players – some good, some poor, several over-priced – in keeping the club safe from relegation last season, albeit by just three points.

In total, he has spent in the region of £70m-£80m on 33 players in his 27 months in charge. But today, Sunderland has drifted into the bottom three, having lost six of their last seven games. Tellingly, Keane has selected more players this season than any other Premier League manager, and no one – not least, one suspects, the man himself – really knows who Sunderland’s best eleven are.

Regardless of the truth behind Keane’s departure – did he walk or was he nudged? – I have to wonder how much Keane is a victim of expectation.

After all, great players do not always make great managers. Cases in point: Bryan Robson, Paul Gascoigne, arguably also Kevin Keegan and Glenn Hoddle. And while it is too early to say that Keane cannot go on to become an excellent boss – after all, his managerial experience pre-Sunderland accounted to a grand total of zero games – it is clear that he has also made errors, not least his apparently scattergun approach to transfers and team selection.

For sure, the team itself must be held at least partly responsible. And yet these are unquestionably Keane’s players, selected, organised and motivated by Keane.

Equally, the financial landscape in football has changed dramatically even in Keane’s brief tenure. Splashing out £30m-plus a year on new players is no longer the domain of just the so-called ‘big four’ – Aston Villa, Tottenham and Manchester City also rank among Europe’s top spenders, and City managed to spend more than that on Robinho alone this summer. (It’s a measure of how much the playing field has been re-drawn that the rumours of what is almost certainly an apocryphal £129m bid by City for Iker Casillas have even seen the light of day.)

And, as Keane himself has pointed out, it’s difficult to recruit top talent to Sunderland, which is not the most attractive locale for the players’ wives and girlfriends. And, equally relevantly, it is a club where the prospect of playing in either the Champions League (why does that epithet not have an apostrophe somewhere?) or even the UEFA Cup (soon to be renamed, nonsensically, the Europa League) is, at best, remote.

However, all that is by the by. Ultimately, the buck stops with the manager. Those are the rules of the game; Keane knows it, and as one of the game’s fiercest competitors he probably wouldn’t have it any other way. However high the expectations of the club and its fans were, I can’t help but feel that, in his own eyes, Keane’s worst crime is that he has failed to live up to the highest expectations of all: his own.

Despite his mistakes, I have always warmed to Keane the manager in a way I never did to Keane the midfielder. As a player, of course I respected his intensity, his energy and his overwhelming desire to win, but there was also a nasty, dark side to him that was never far from the surface – just ask Alf-Inge Haland. As a manager, however, he has been calm, thoughtful, honest and humanly vulnerable: Doctor Jekyll to Mister Hyde.

I never thought I’d say this, but I’ll miss Roy Keane, and I genuinely hope he returns to top-level management soon, better and wiser for his Sunderland experience. Only then will we really know whether resignation is indeed the better part of valour.