New Roy so cool, calm and collected

Oct 19 2008 by Neil Farrington, Sunday Sun

WHETHER triumph or disaster await him next Saturday, Roy Keane should celebrate — and be celebrated — anyway . . .

For learning to treat both imposters just the same.

The only racing certainty about the 140th Tyne-Wear derby is that Sunderland’s manager will emerge from it cool, calm and collected — no matter how negative his collected thoughts may be.

While our world gets angrier, Keane grows ever further removed from its archetypal angry young man.

What set him apart from other hot-heads was an inability — or an unwillingness — to leave his anger on the pitch.

This is a player who thirsted four years for grisly revenge on Alf-Inge Haaland, then waited another 12 months to unapologetically admit as much in print.

And we’re hardly talking ancient history. It was only six years ago this week that Keane got clobbered by the FA with a record fine and five-week ban based on carefully considered comments about Haaland in his autobiography.

“My attitude was, f*** him,” wrote the Irishman. “What goes around comes around. He got his just rewards. He f****d me over and my attitude is an eye for an eye.”

It was written proof that the beast inside Keane the player lurked far deeper than his notoriously thin skin. Proof that his bark had nothing on his bite.

Can this be the same man who, barely half a decade on, is rated by Premier League referees as one of their two favourite managers in the division (the forever mild-mannered Gareth Southgate, the other)?

If you didn’t know better, you’d think the pod people had done away with that Roy Keane and replaced him with one of their own, a la Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The reason we know better being that (unlike the pod people) the new, quietly contemplative Keane so obviously still cares.

Just ask any of the Sunderland players (mostly now ex-Sunderland players) to have fallen foul of his exacting disciplinary standards.

Some may see hypocrisy in that. May see it as a case of “don’t do as I did, do as I say”.

I see it, along with his composed demeanour in the dug-out, as simple but significant proof that Keane has grown up.

With his new position has come a new perspective; a realisation that sober actions speak far louder than crossed words — and so achieve much more.

Having fought the law, he now is the law. Poacher turned gamekeeper, if you will.

Yet while his may now be a brooding menace, he is all the more intimidating for it.

Yes, it has been a remarkable transformation, bordering on metamorphosis, but achieved without need of “Respect” campaigns or repeated FA disciplinary hearings.

It’s the transformation of a man who has learned to take responsibility for himself.

If only a few dozen other people — players and managers — in the Premier League did the same, football would be all the better.