Rainy Dayz

This isn't strictly speaking a post that belongs here, but it is slightly fitting. It is about Roy Keane.
Paul Ince recently suggested that people were out to get him and Keane because they used to play for Manchester United, “They look at Keane and I in our Manchester United days and see us as snarling old people, but we are not like that". Which seemed an odd thing to say, coming from ex-Liverpool Ince. In the case of Keane though there may well be an element of truth to it. Looking through the many words printed since he left Sunderland there seems very much to be a sense of "told you so", journalists who have been waiting for a long time for Keane to fail finally having their moment. Of course we have the usual lip serivce to what a great player he was, like this, from Hugh McIlvanney, "Roy Keane is a figure of undoubted greatness in British football and the devoutest admirers of his achievements (among whom I would always wish to be numbered)", before the criticisms, but between the lines is pleasure in his "failure".
Of course it being considered a failure at all is a sign that the writers are against him in the first place. This article from The Sunday Times, which was a lot longer in the physical paper and some of the stuff I'll quote from it isn't in this internet version, contains the interesting fact that Roy Keane, despite being advised to sign his lucrative new contract while it was still on offer, refused to sign because he didn't think he'd done enough to merit it. He could have signed the contract and waited around to be sacked and looked forward to a pay off, but he didn't. The article also makes the point about how Keane didn't get on with the "modern footballer":

he railed against the sense of entitlement of the modern professional. Some of his players wore gloves, bobble hats and even scarves at training, another would walk onto the training ground with ear-phones in place and Keane wondered what football was coming to.

The bigger version of the article makes more of a point of players being concerned more with money than with winning and it is this that was presumably most hurtful to Keane. Simon Barnes suggests that, "The errors Keane made as Sunderland manager can be reduced to an inability to appreciate the biodiversity of footballing types". It seems to be less a case of this than that he refused to accept that anyone else could accept second best.

He left Sunderland before the crisis got too bad. He left before signing a new contract. This shouldn't be seen as a failure but as a refusal to accept second best. When I was thinking about this I remembered the image of Steve Mclaren under his umbrella, isolated on the touchline against Croatia, and I thought is that Roy Keane? Isolated and alone? And maybe it was but from the opposite perspective. Isolated because he refused failure, unlike Mclaren, isolated in his embracing of failure, of a willingness to accept an England that wasn't going to a major final.