Going regularly through the digital churn is a story about Robbie Keane as told by Jamie O’Hara, his former Tottenham Hotspur team-mate. O’Hara tells colourfully of how Keane got into an argument with “The Pitbull” Edgar Davids during training at Spurs and allegedly ended up knocking him spark out with one punch. Keane’s or Davids’s version of this incident is not known. Perhaps Jonathan Hill, the FAI chief executive, has been reading the stories: for he does seem a little intimidated by Keane and treats him with kid gloves.
As we all know, the Ireland coach is still being paid €250,000 a year even though it is nearly two years since Stephen Kenny dropped him from the set-up. Keane’s four-year contract finishes in the summer, so it remains an outrageous state of affairs, particularly when you consider how the association is being propped up by public money to the tune of millions of Euros. Hill obviously thinks it’s okay to say nothing about it.
“Last time we spoke, I said I’d agreed with Robbie not to talk about that publicly,” Hill said recently.
Keane has been doing some punditry for Sky Sports, but there was a suggestion that he would perform some ambassadorial work for the FAI in its centenary year. Last July, the FAI said that Hill “has engaged in ongoing and very productive talks with Robbie”. That brought a swift rebuttal from Keane’s side, through an intermediary, and the subsequent deafening silence thereafter on both sides.
This is clearly a sensitive matter for Keane, but it should also raise hackles for the rest of us. FAI veterans have long become anaesthetised to such excesses, but one struck a chord when he suggested that Hill should show Keane who was boss and not the other way round, by calling him to Abbotstown to discuss his role. Tokenism perhaps, but at least it would send a message that the new FAI was serious about accountability and transparency instead of wrapping this affair in a cloak of silence.
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It’s long in the tooth to suggest that all these problems should be laid at the door of John Delaney, even if this was one of the former chief executive’s more spectacular misadventures of his wretched time in the job. FAI board minutes from late 2018 strongly suggest that in the wake of the sacking of the Martin O’Neill-Roy Keane management team — and even before it — Delaney had engineered the appointment of Mick McCarthy on a short-term basis. Furthermore, Delaney had anointed McCarthy’s successor, except that two men seemed to be earmarked for one job. Stephen Kenny managed to get a cast-iron contract that he would succeed McCarthy, while Keane seemed to be on a more vague promise that, someday, the job would be his.
Incredibly, Keane was given a four-year contract as an assistant — two years longer than the one given to McCarthy to lead the national team. Keane was also paid more than McCarthy’s main assistant, Terry Connor, which perhaps partly explains McCarthy’s “cheeky” remark when he was asked about how Keane’s appointment had come about.
There was some dissent at FAI board level about the appointment, but Delaney was able to bulldoze the deal through. The chief executive described himself as a “friend” of Keane, though he didn’t throw as much money his way as he did towards the other Keane, Roy, who under O’Neill was on a salary of between €500-600,000. Delaney told the board in December 2018: “Mick was not on anything like what Martin was on and Terry was on nothing like [what] Roy had been on.” And then there was Robbie.
It wasn’t long before this mess spilled all over the place. The notion that Keane was Delaney’s “friend” is clearly far-fetched. Keane didn’t appear over-enthused about Kenny either, and the antipathy towards his fellow Tallaght man was quickly reciprocated. In June 2019, during an event at Crumlin Children’s Hospital, Ireland’s all-time record international goalscorer told a group of journalists who asked him about his contract: “My contract is longer than the manager’s. They want me to hang on. I will be here. If they don’t want me, no problem.”
Kenny was the Ireland Under-21 manager at the time, waiting to step up. Regarding the succession plans, Keane remarked: “At some stage, there is going to have to be a conversation down the line.”
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There would be no conversation — with Kenny at least, who was able to bring in his own people when he took over in April 2020, by which time Delaney had departed under a cloud.
It was left to Niall Quinn, then the FAI deputy chief executive, to let Keane know that he was surplus to requirements — and so he has remained to this day. Even the departure of three Ireland assistant coaches in that time — Damien Duff, Ruaidhrí Higgins and Anthony Barry — hasn’t triggered any rapprochement. The situation left vacant by the most recent departure, that of Barry, will be filled elsewhere.
As this episode draws to a pathetic end, it is one which doesn’t reflect well on anybody concerned. Keane may still be a manager one day, but his stand-off with Kenny and the FAI won’t have helped his coaching career or perhaps his image, even if in the letter of the law he is perfectly within his rights.
