On a June night in 2001, Peter Reid, then the Sunderland manager, found himself in Lillie’s Bordello in Dublin along with many of the Ireland team which, earlier that day, had drawn with Portugal at Lansdowne Road. Among the party was Roy Keane who, at one point in the night, stood up and sang Bob Dylan’s ‘Positively 4th Street’. Reid turned to Niall Quinn and said, “Isn’t Roy Keane a great guy?’

At that moment, it seemed obvious and straightforward: here in this nightclub on an endless night that followed a memorable afternoon when Ireland’s captain had dominated the game as few Irish players in history ever had, Roy Keane was indeed a great guy.

Reid may have assumed that this was routine, but for some among the Ireland squad, they had never had a night out with Roy Keane before. They were looking at this Roy Keane on a night out and wondering why they didn’t see him more often.

*****

A year after that night out at Lillie’s, Fintan O’Toole would write a piece explaining for readers of the Guardian why Ireland was convulsed by events taking place on a Pacific island called Saipan.

“What makes this an epic drama rather than just another football tantrum is that the row that prompted Keane’s departure crystalises a cultural shift that is still in progress,” O’Toole wrote, having referenced Keane’s response when Ireland had surrendered a two-goal lead in Amsterdam during the qualification campaign as an earlier demonstration of this culture clash.

“[Keane}is the perfect exemplar of the new Celtic Tiger Ireland that has taken off since the 1994 World Cup. Like the new Ireland, he is rich, upwardly mobile and driven by a ruthless work ethic. He doesn’t recognise the concept of heroic failure. He despises mediocrity and laziness. He believes that nothing less than excellence is good enough, whether in a Champions League final or a five-a-side kickabout after training.

“This Ireland, however, is a recent and still rather raw phenomenon. Around it there is the lingering legacy of a relatively poor society in which it made sense to be grateful for small mercies. The attitude that Keane attacked that night in Amsterdam might have served as a national motto for the last two centuries: have a good time whatever the result.”

O’Toole wrote that “the battle of Saipan is thus a classical tragedy: the inevitable clash of two inexorable forces, each of which has right on its side”.

He didn’t use the term ‘civil war’ though many others did. Today we would call it a culture war.

“Keane was the Celtic Tiger,“ a New York Times columnist would explain a few years later. “He was ruthless and aggressive. He was the twenty-first century Irishman – iron-willed and contemptuous of mediocrity.”

As the New York Times writer pointed out, Keane’s career in the 21st century would track Ireland’s economic arc. His story too would incorporate an idea that now seems fantastical, namely that a group of property developers could become Irish folk heroes by buying an English football club and taking it to the Premier League. 20 years on, we may feel more ambivalent about the Celtic Tiger representing shiny modernity. 20 years on, it seems Keane, too, was a throwback in many ways. The modernity glimpsed then was not sustained. He is the same age as Pep Guardiola but long ago he calcified into a football man, a believer in old fashioned values in the game.

The roots of Saipan were not, in any case, to be found in an explosion of the tension between old Ireland and new. They were not to be found even in the decades-long incompetence of the FAI finally being exposed to the world. Those ideas seem grandiose and simplistic from the vantage point of 2022. But there is one story of Ireland that is timeless and continues to need addressing whether it is 1975, 2002 or 2022.

The roots of Saipan, if there were any at all, could more conceivably be traced to a police cell in Manchester where Alex Ferguson went to collect the captain of Manchester United in 1999.

*****

In 1975, the great Wexford hurler Nickey Rackard wrote a series of articles for The Sunday Press about his life and times. “Heavy drinking and ‘holding it’ seems to be regarded as a manly virtue by most people, and the wildest escapades are excused on the grounds of ‘a few jars’,” he wrote.

Rackard had, by this stage of his life, been sober for five years. He would die tragically early but his story became an inspiration for many, but also an example of how slowly things change. “In Ireland, while the alcoholic carries a stigma, unjustly, the drunk is treated with a sort of amused tolerance,” he wrote 47 years ago.

His daughter, in a recent interview with Denis Walsh in The Sunday Times, talked of her own experiences with her father and of the organisation she was a founder of which hoped to change Irish societal attitudes to drink.

*****

Keane did not break any club curfew laws. He was taking a day off after lifting United’s fifth Premiership trophy 24 hours earlier at Old Trafford.
United’s skipper had joined the rest of the squad for a Sunday night party at the plush Marriott Hotel in Worsley, Manchester, after the Spurs game.
Then the following afternoon and evening, Keane and other members of the squad continued the party in a city centre bar where the trouble is alleged to have flared up.”
– The Daily Mirror, May 19, 1999.

Nickey Rackard’s story is not Roy Keane’s story but they were two great sportsmen where drink became a central part of their story and then the absence of it shaped the next stage of their lives.

“Someone once said to me, an ex-player, and it’s going back to my drinking days,” Roy Keane would write in 2014. “He said that going out with me was like going out with a time-bomb. The reputation probably keeps people away from me, and that often suits me – although I’m not saying that’s a good thing.”

Keane’s second autobiography, written with Roddy Doyle, was called The Second Half. “We have two lives,” Bernard Malamud wrote. “The life we learn with and the life we live with after that.” The Second Half was Keane’s story of the life following his first autobiography which ended with Saipan. The second book begins, with some symbolism, with Keane’s FA hearing where his responsibility for the words in that first autobiography are discussed. It was also an attempt to explain himself in terms beyond the caricature.

He launched it at the Aviva on a Thursday before an Ireland game, a launch which began with Keane criticising those who had told lies about him. Alex Ferguson had released his own book the previous year which detailed the end of his working relationship with Keane but it went beyond that.

“It doesn’t help when people were constantly saying stories about me over the years, saying he was this, he was that,” Keane said. “When he was out and about, this is the way he used to behave. He used to speak to people in such a way. It was absolute nonsense.

“I don’t just mean from Alex Ferguson. I mean from ex-team-mates. Blatant lies. There comes a point where you say enough is enough. And I am not going to go into great detail about who said what. It was blatant lies. If you were looking at it from the outside, you’d say, ‘I wouldn’t touch him’.”

This was Keane trying to make a case for his management career. At the time, he was assistant to Martin O’Neill at Ireland and Paul Lambert at Aston Villa. A month later, he left Aston Villa after five months in the job. He hasn’t worked in management since leaving the Ireland job with O’Neill in 2018.

In his first book, Keane had written that at first at United he had developed a routine “that revolved around drink”. During his year out with injury, he developed an intensity about fitness but he was also “drinking too much”. Ferguson banned him from the Manchester United Christmas party after he had attended the reserves’ party and argued with a barman. Ferguson also threatened to fine any Manchester United player seen drinking with Keane on the night of the party.

But, after this serious cruciate injury, he decided to “bury Roy the Playboy…the carousing days were – more or less – over.”

Keane returned to the Manchester United side, a leaner, more intense athlete, determined to waste no time.

“When you talk about regrets, maybe I could have been more professional when I was younger,” he said in 2014. ”Some of that is nothing to do with being a professional footballer, that’s just being young. What are you going to do? Go home and watch Downton Abbey? You’re going to go out.”

O’Connell Street in 2002. Photo: Damien Eagers/Sportsfile

Keane went out and there was still trouble like on that night in May 1999 and then he went out less and less. By the time Ireland headed for Saipan, he was a man on a different rhythm to many of the others on the trip.

*****

“We’re getting ready for a World Cup. We’re going to be travelling for over 20 hours. And I’ve got two bloody leprechauns telling me to ‘Cheer up Keano.’ I thought ‘I’ll fucking knock you out, you stupid c**t.”

Roy Keane, May 22, 2002.

Six months after that night in Lillie’s following the Portugal game, Roy Keane would wake up on a Sunday morning in a Dublin hotel and quietly check out of his room before returning to Manchester. The night before, he had been part of an Ireland side that had beaten Iran 2-0 in the first leg of a World Cup play-off. Keane would return to Manchester as he managed a creaking body, certain that the result in Dublin would be enough.

On this Sunday morning, Keane’s team-mates discovered that Keane had gone home. There had been no goodbyes. “I can’t remember what happened,” Keane would tell Paul Kimmage as he prepared for the Cup six months later. “It was a Sunday morning and I booked the flight and I think they might have gone training or gone out for a loosener. Obviously I spoke to Mick and Mick Byrne, and, in between, obviously I spoke to the manager who rang me on my mobile. But I felt the job was done.”

When Keane said “the manager” he meant Alex Ferguson, not Mick McCarthy. “Of all the people I’ve been around in football there are none I would regard as a personal friend. Maybe the closest would be Alex Ferguson,” Keane would tell Kimmage.

Six months later, Ferguson would be one of those outside his family he would consult in Saipan as he decided to leave the Ireland camp, change his mind, and returned for 48 hours before a team meeting in the ballroom of the Hyatt Hotel in Saipan became a part of Irish folklore.

“At dinner I didn’t take my phone along with me, but Martin had taken his, and as we left, it rang,” Alex Ferguson wrote, recalling that week. “It was Michael Kennedy [Keane’s solicitor] saying he had been trying to contact me. Michael made it clear there had been an eruption in Saipan, where the Republic of Ireland team had arrived to prepare for the World Cup. ‘You need to talk to him. You’re the only man he’ll listen to,’ Michael said.”

The confrontation was preceded by days that have been dissected and analysed, days without kit and bumpy pitches, days and nights of golf and a barbecue with the media, which Keane attended for a while, before most of the squad got down to serious business.

“Roy hasn’t been drinking for some time now so we keep it low key about what we have planned for the rest of the evening,” Niall Quinn wrote in his autobiography. “There is a quick break for the bar. The player circulate dutifully for a little bit, Roy slips off into the night and then some of the lads make a fairly theatrical show of yawning and stretching and pretending to be heading off to bed.”

Instead they head out into the night, becoming, in Quinn’s words, “leglessly bonded”. They end up in the Beefeater Bar with the Irish journalists where a pact was made that nothing that was said or done in the bar that night could be reported as they drank until the dawn.

With that taken care of, one player with a drink in each hand and a cigarette in his mouth asked the press why they gave him such a hard time about his lifestyle.

If there was an old and an new Ireland heading for a collision, this may have been it, although nobody would be making a case that the new Ireland was that much different than the old. Maybe instead, it was just the old and the new Roy Keane colliding.

In the years that followed, he has always framed his decision to stop drinking as a lifestyle choice. When he was asked about this at his book launch in 2014, he said there was no need to look beyond that.

“I don’t want to get too heavily involved in it, because people have asked me over the years , so I just gave it up. I had had enough of it, particularly after I had done my cruciate, I was coming back and
thinking ‘I want to play a bit longer’. But ironically the hip held me back, the hip finished me more than the cruciate. But I want to give a lot of credit to the foreign players. I’d be looking at them and
thinking ‘they have got it pretty switched on, looking after their bodies’.”

It has always been framed as if it was a decision to steam your vegetables or eat less red meat rather something more fundamental. 

Whatever the reason, there was a time when Keane would have been in the Beefeater Bar with the rest of the squad but now while they made their way home, he was up early walking on the beach. “There’s only so much walking you can do,” he said.

He gave two interviews to Tom Humphries and Paul Kimmage and when the first was published in The Irish Times, everything came to a head in the ballroom of the Hyatt Hotel.

“When I’m backed into a corner, when I get into situations, professional or personal, I know, deep down, that when I lose my rag, and I might be in the right – it doesn’t matter – I know I’m going to be the loser,” Keane wrote in The Second Half.

“I will lose out. Saipan and the World Cup – ultimately I lost. Or when I left United, when I could have stayed a bit longer if it had been handled differently. I was the one who lost; I know that. That’s the madness of me. When I’m going off on one, even when I might be right, there’s a voice in my head going, ‘You’ll pay for this’.”

The day after the meeting in the Hyatt ballroom, Keane stayed in his room and heard the team leaving for the World Cup in Japan. They left him alone.

*****

“Which side are you on?,” one columnist asked in The Irish Times in May, 2002. “Are you for hard-working professionalism, individual brilliance and a magic that shines on all of us? For bluff, straight-talking honesty and a Greta Garbo-like shyness? For someone who’d rather be at home than in the pub or at a barbecue with a slew of sports journalists?”

Sides were picked and reports commissioned. The Genesis Report made recommendations for the FAI, many of them were implemented, some were not and despite claims of increased professionalism, the worst was still to come.

“Are you for slithery mediocrity and an “ah, sure, ’twill do” attitude to preparation,” the same columnist wrote. “For larks in the tropics and “mine’s a pina colada”? For “we’ll show him who’s boss” because we can…We are presented with a stark choice between a second-rate past and a potentially world-class future. Between the old sloppiness of decisions made in secrecy or in smoke-filled bars, and the promise of a new way of doing things, based on merit and the pursuit of excellence.”

Saipan was not a choice between two Irelands but how one man could react to situations and make them worse for everyone including himself. The drama concealed that at the time and it may be that we preferred the giddiness and the debate about pitches and new Ireland vs old Ireland over something more profound.

*****

The words of ‘Positively 4th Street’ became an access point for journalists who wanted to understand Keane but the wisest words may have come from Keane in The Second Half. “I’ve never regretted what I’d stood for; I just regretted that it had happened. I’ve never felt guilty about my part in it.”

That it happened was the issue, not what it was about. Keane missed out on a World Cup and others missed out on what they had hoped would be the World Cup experience.

But why Keane did what he did has always been clouded by the MacGuffins of pitches, missing training bibs and balls, as well as the idea that he was fighting for all of us who wanted to win rather than just take part.

Keane, the time bomb, Keane the great guy on a night out, was always easier to understand than the man who, at the peak of his powers, decided to change his lifestyle. And that failure to understand may be something that connects the old Ireland to the new.

As a consequence that World Cup was altered and Ireland are still searching for a way back.

“This is the World Cup, it’s supposed to be a great experience, but it just hasn’t felt that way yet. We have to forget about all the bad stuff now and start concentrating on football,” Damien Duff said at that end of that week in Saipan, the first of many attempts to “draw a line under it”. The first of many failed attempts.

Keane today is a loveable meme, a Groundskeeper Willie of controllable viral anger who has become what he once beheld, a television personality. He is long estranged from Alex Ferguson, the person he once was closest to in football.

In 2002 Roy Keane was credited with the power to change a nation, to drag Ireland somewhere as a nation rather than a football team. The truth was both more simple and more profound. It was more complicated and more compelling. It was a story of a man who at the peak of his powers, while captain of Manchester United and Ireland, changed himself and while making that fundamental change, had no control of the consequences.