The Times February 13, 2006
Keane takes firm grip of matters
By Matt Dickinson
WAYNE ROONEY WAS AT IBROX yesterday as a guest of Roy Keane and, if he went for a drink with his former Manchester United team-mate afterwards, he might not have known whether to congratulate or commiserate.
Celtic had won 1-0 on enemy soil to extend their impregnable lead at the top of the Bank of Scotland Premierleague and so celebrations were in order. And yet you sense that there would have been an embarrassed, awkward moment between the pair. A silence that acknowledged that, while he might be heading for a championship medal (which is more than Rooney will be clutching in May), Keane had done what so many greats of the game refuse to countenance and dropped down the leagues.
Yesterday’s tame meeting of the Old Firm was further evidence that the Irishman has found Scottish football at one of its lowest ebbs. Rangers, with their lame-duck manager, Alex McLeish, must be the worst team to have qualified for the last 16 of the European Cup. Heart of Midlothian are Celtic’s closest challengers and they have a chairman who hires a manager and then insists on picking the team.
Celtic will win the championship and yet, mindful that he has presided over defeats at home and abroad that rank among the most embarrassing in the club’s history, there is no chanting of Gordon Strachan’s name from the stands. “Keano, Keano” boomed out, of course, and he managed to be the game’s most authoritative, composed presence. Even his booking was for a premeditated trip. At his unveiling in January, he talked of “the challenge” in Scotland, but yesterday it was hard to know what that amounted to other than staying fit.
Rooney sat among the Celtic fans in the Broomloan Road end and, if anything impressed him, it can only have been the noise at kick-off. Even that could not be sustained. It was not much of a contest from the moment that Maciej Zurawski took advantage of woeful defending — and there was plenty of that from Rangers — to grab an eleventh-minute lead.
Sotirios Kyrgiakos was comically bad and Marvin Andrews not much better as Rangers tried, unsuccessfully, to grapple with John Hartson. It was more WWE than SPL, although Celtic can be excused. Organised and disciplined, they did what they had to do. It was just disappointing that it amounted to so little.
There had been a lot of debate as to how Strachan would accommodate Neil Lennon, Stilian Petrov and Keane. In the end he made the politically astute, and tactically justifiable, decision to play all three.
Keane talked afterwards of “respecting your manager and your team-mates if you are left out” — Carlos Queiroz might have chuckled at that one given the Irishman’s withering blast on his way out of Old Trafford — but there was nothing of the new boy about him aside from a willingness early on to let Lennon take charge.
As the game progressed, Keane became the more dominant member of the partnership and, by the second half, team-mates were feeling the lash of his tongue. “You wouldn’t want him to change the way he is,” Lennon said. “His shouting gets a reaction. It is up to you whether it is positive or not.”
Strachan also talked of a wider influence at the club. “When I left the training ground the other day, Dion Dublin and Roy Keane were sitting and talking to a group of 16 to 18-year-olds about the players they have come across, the games they have played,” the Celtic manager said. “The young lads were hanging off every word. That is what you don’t see.”
Keane is due to complete his Pro licence this summer, although he is expected to see out his 18-month playing contract before heading into management. By then, Rangers may have been transformed. Paul Le Guen, the man who built Lyons into a serious force in Europe, has been house hunting in Glasgow. There was a seat yesterday for Yves Colleu, his assistant.
The competitor in Keane will relish the threat of a resurgent Rangers as satisfying as victory must have been on his Old Firm debut.
