IF IT IS STILL TRUE that it is players who get managers dismissed, not tabloid newspapers (except at Southampton, obviously), then there have been times during 12 dispiriting months at Manchester City when it seemed that some of Kevin Keegan’s supposed star performers have been ganging up to get rid of him, one waiting to hand-deliver his P45 while another organises the whip-round and a third orders a taxi to the nearest Jobcentre. On Saturday, though, a team for once more focused on present dangers than past glories earned Keegan a stay of execution. It must have been a coincidence that none of Steve McManaman, Robbie Fowler or Trevor Sinclair was in the side.
Keegan, as he admitted, was probably one defeat from the sack and, at 53, likely retirement; now, after being “buried alive” by press criticism, then dug out of a hole by a City performance that reeked of commitment, he hopes that he may be only 90 minutes from hero status — and he does not mean by beating Barnsley in the Carling Cup tomorrow night, either. Ending Arsenal’s record-breaking Premiership streak next weekend is the target and by the time he had finished a typically engaging and upbeat address, you almost began to believe him.
“I’ve never been sacked and I don’t want to start now,” Keegan, who nonetheless confirmed that he did not intend to stay at City beyond the two years left on his contract, said. “I had a good chat with the players and they were saying, ‘what happens if we lose to Palace and Barnsley?’ but I said: ‘What happens if we beat Palace, beat Barnsley and end Arsenal’s run?’ that’s me. It’s like when I went from Scunthorpe to Liverpool and Bill Shankly told me I would play for England. I said: ‘I know’. That’s me.”
It is also pure Keegan to smile and talk politely to some of those journalists who, he claimed, had been “writing lies and should apologise” about his relationship with his players, particularly Danny Mills, and his employers. “If there were any cracks in our team they would have shown today,” he said, and he had a point. His team had three and, as Mills and Richard Dunne were eager to explain, this win was for their manager. “It is more our fault (than Keegan’s) what happens on the pitch,” Dunne said. “We took a lot of criticism in the week so we had to show what this club means to us. We tried our hearts out and that was important.”
So, City for the title and a knighthood for Keegan, then? Hardly. They may have crept into the top half of the table — they may even be the leading club in Manchester this morning — but City have won only six out of 22 league games at their splendid new home and this was only their third away win in 19 attempts. Neither does Keegan’s record (81 Premiership games before this one, with 25 wins, 35 defeats and final positions of ninth and sixteenth) compare favourably with Sir Bobby Robson’s 34 victories and 22 defeats in the same period at Newcastle, with final positions of third and fifth. And look what happened to him.
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Keegan, though, survives and City should gain plenty of confidence from this victory. Had Jon Macken not run over a black cat on the way to the ground — Fowler’s replacement somehow managed to block two goal-bound efforts from Antoine Sibierski, his team-mate, as well as fluffing three decent chances of his own — they would have won by the comfortable margin their superiority deserved. As it was, a 2-0 lead established by Nicolas Anelka, the second goal coming from the spot after Danny Granville’s shove on Shaun Wright-Phillips, was halved when Sylvain Distin was adjudged to have brought down Nicola Ventola inside rather than just outside the box, as replays suggested, and Andy Johnson converted the second penalty of the match.
Keegan hopes that the media sacking circus will now leave Manchester, but it is unlikely to pull in next at Selhurst Park, where Iain Dowie is acknowledged to have an impossible task. If the other promoted clubs are also struggling, nobody in their right mind would expect the play-off winners, who finished 21 points behind Norwich City and 13 behind West Bromwich Albion, to do any different. Willing, honest battlers but terribly inexperienced and patently outclassed, they will do well not to be relegated by Christmas.