by Roy Keane
After the first meeting with Marcus Evans, I asked Tony Loughlan to go and watch an Ipswich game. They were playing in Bristol on a bank holiday Monday. I wanted to have some idea about them, in case I was offered the job. Tony went down to Bristol, bought a ticket like a normal punter, and watched them. He thought they were very average.
I’d got the impression, after the second meeting with Marcus Evans, that the job could happen, as long as we could agree terms. Nine times out of ten, when a manager is out of work he’ll agree terms.
A few days later, I was down there in the blue training kit, and I was looking at it, going, ‘Fuckin’ hell.’
I didn’t feel the excitement I’d felt going up to Sunderland. I’m not sure why not, but I didn’t. I feel bad even admitting that. Tony Loughlan was with me again, but it didn’t have that innocence – ‘Oh, it’s exciting.’ Maybe, after the Sunderland experience, I was a bit wary. There seemed to be a bit of everything about it that wasn’t quite right – the set-up, my mindset, the location. But if things had gone better, I probably wouldn’t be thinking that.
Tony’s job description was never ‘assistant’; he was always ‘first-team coach’. But he was working alongside me. But you’re working with twenty-odd players, so you need two coaches, at least – more voices, more support. At the time, I just had Tony. I didn’t bring other people in quickly enough – straightaway. Chris Kiwomya was there, and Bryan Klug, and Steve McCall was the chief scout. They’d all played for Ipswich. It had the feel of a family club that didn’t need breaking up. But that was exactly what it needed.
You need to bring in three or four people with you. Make your mark. And, if you want to be cynical about it, if the manager’s having a hard time, the club will stick with him longer, because it costs a lot more money to get rid of four or five people.
‘We’ll give him another few weeks; he might get that result.’
But I was the same at Sunderland on my first day. It was just me and Tony. But my eyes weren’t lying to me; some of the staff at Ipswich weren’t up to it. There were two members of the medical staff that I disliked straightaway – what they were doing, the way they worked. I didn’t like the way they allowed players to behave in front of them. I didn’t think they were professional or authoritative enough. But I kept them. To be fair to the owner, he’d told me that if I wanted to make changes I should do it quickly. But I thought I’d wait till the summer, wait till pre-season. But maybe I’m just making loads and loads of excuses. That’s management – deal with all that.
Eventually, into the season, in November, I brought in Ian McParland – or Charlie as he’s known. I met Charlie when I was doing my Pro Licence. He had managed at Notts County, and he’d coached at Forest. I liked Charlie, but he could argue. He made me look like a saint. Tony and some of the other lads were fairly quiet, but Charlie made up for them, and me. Eventually, I brought in Antonio Gómez, the fitness coach, from Sunderland. All these men are survivors.
I hadn’t been to the training ground before I took the job. There were stories later that, when I took over, fans weren’t allowed in, and that I’d changed the locks. Our first session was open to the fans. But nobody came. My first day – you’d have thought a couple of school kids would have been dragged in by a dad or granddad. But there wasn’t one person watching. I didn’t mind, but it seemed to say something. That warmth wasn’t there.
Then there was the blue training kit. I don’t like fuckin’ blue. City were blue, Rangers were blue. My biggest rivals were blue. Is that childish? That first day, myself and Tony went back to my office for a cup of tea. It was a cabin, like a school prefab. I’m not knocking that, but I just thought it all needed freshening up, a lick of paint. There were money difficulties at the club – I appreciate that. But myself and Tony sat down and looked at one another.
‘I’m not sure about this one.’
I couldn’t feel it – the chemistry. Me and the club. I get annoyed now, thinking that. I should have been able to accept it: I was there to do a job.
The biggest problem was, we won our first two games – the last two games of the ’08–’09 season. I started on the Wednesday or Thursday, and we’d a game in Cardiff on the Saturday – 29 April. We were awful, but we won 3–0. Cardiff missed a penalty to go 1–0 up. They could have beaten us 10–0. I wish they had. Then I’d have thought, ‘This is a rebuilding job, this.’
We had Giovani dos Santos on loan, from Spurs – he played for Mexico in the World Cup in Brazil. What he was doing at Ipswich I do not know. He was brilliant. He got us up the pitch, and scored one of the goals. We won – ‘The Messiah has arrived.’
The last game of the season was at home, to Coventry. Marcus Evans told me during the week that they’d already covered my contract with season ticket sales for the next season. It was a dead rubber game – there was nothing at stake – but there were 20,000 people there. We won again, and we deserved to. I was thinking, ‘We don’t have to do too much here. I’ll focus on the dressing rooms – get them decorated.’
When I went up to Sunderland they’d been relegated and they’d just lost their first five games of the season. The transfer deadline was in three days. I had to do things quickly – get people in who I knew and trusted. This time I started at the end of the season, the club was mid-table, and I won my first two games. So the urgency wasn’t there; I wasn’t walking into a crisis. If we’d lost the two games, I think I’d have been saying, ‘Listen, I’m going to be busy all summer.’
When the players came back pre-season, they found great dressing rooms. But I hadn’t done enough with the team or the staff.
I dropped my standards. After Sunderland I thought that maybe I should step back a bit. ‘I shouldn’t be so intense.’ But at Ipswich I fell into that trap of thinking, ‘This’ll do us.’ The staff – ‘They’ll do us.’ I should have been saying, ‘They definitely won’t do us.’
I should have brought in more people, from the start. ‘This is us – things are changing.’
When I left Sunderland, it was my gig. When I left United, it was my gig. I fought my own little wars. At Ipswich, I fought other people’s battles. I went with other people’s standards. That was my biggest crime.
The club’s new chief executive, Simon Clegg, was an ex-Para. And we had the idea that we’d have one or two days with the forces, in Colchester, pre-season. It was my idea, but Simon had the contacts.
I was trying something a bit different; I thought it would break the monotony of pre-season training. Colchester is just down the road from Ipswich, so the players wouldn’t be on a bus for six hours.
We decided to surprise the players. We told them to be ready to go away for one or two nights. Typical footballers, I think some of them thought they were on their way to some five-star hotel.
We got to Colchester and experienced the training regime of the 7th Parachute Regiment Royal Horse Artillery. The plan was, we’d stay in tents that night, out in some woods – after a series of marches.
The intense part was in the evening. The Paras are trained to live off the land, so we saw them slaughtering a pig – we had to watch. It wasn’t nice. They cooked it, and we ate it. But the lads were cold – you’re out of your environment and you just want to sleep.
I asked one of the officers to organise something for the morning, to get the lads up and out quickly. So, at five or six in the morning, they woke us with stun grenades, thrown to the sides of the tents. That woke us up. Every time I saw a face sticking out of a tent, the expression told me, ‘If you think we’re getting promoted on this, you’re in fuckin’ trouble.’
They were running around and climbing things – and it wasn’t like the local park. The staff joined in. I had an accident on one of the bars. I went to grab it, fell back and banged my head. I got no sympathy.
Marches, and breaks, and setting up the tents. I don’t think anyone was keen to share a tent with me, so I ended up with one of the Paras. I slept with my Celtic top on
! There was no sitting around the fire, the banjo out, and a sing-song. Anyway, it wasn’t the place to start singing rebel songs.
It was hard. It was enjoyable but the hotel might have been better. A lot of the lads ended up with blisters, from the army boots. We’d a friendly against Real Valladolid the following Friday, and one or two had to miss it because of the blisters. So the timing hadn’t been great – although we won.
There was good banter, but the lads were shattered. I don’t think it created the bond or the spirit that I was hoping it would. Actually, you get that by winning football matches. And it wasn’t as if I’d been there a few years and had a feel for the group of players. I was guessing at what they might enjoy, and I think I guessed wrong. The medical staff weren’t happy. But I thought, ‘Fuck yis, you’d better get used to living off the land anyway.’
Our first game of the new season was away to Coventry. We lost, 2–1. Giovani dos Santos had gone back to Spurs by then. Our keeper, Richard Wright, had been very good for my first two games at the end of the last season, but he cost us one of the goals – and a few more to come. It’s so important to get off to a good start, and we’d played quite well. But we gave away two soft goals. Jon Walters scored for us.
Teams can recover from a bad start, but a sluggish start often tells you what sort of season you’re going to have. I really went overboard on the players after West Brom beat us, 2–0 – the fourth game of the season. It was over the top. West Brom had just been relegated, so they were going to be strong. I was playing a lot of young players. I was ranting and raving.
‘You’re all losers!’
It really wasn’t my style. We’d lost to a better team and, normally, I’d have accepted that. And it wasn’t just because we were losing. We’d done that at Sunderland, too. But things had taken off so quickly at Sunderland. I think I lacked a bit of patience with myself at Ipswich. I suppose I thought I could relive the Sunderland experience. But I couldn’t get that momentum. I didn’t feel I was bedding in. It was 31 October before we won a match, our fifteenth game of the season.
Shane Supple was a goalkeeper, and he’d been involved in the first team. He was a really nice lad. He came to see me one morning in my office and told me he was retiring. He was only twenty-two.
The first thing I’d always suggest in a situation like that is for the player to have a break, and come back in a week or so. The player might be a bit low, or he might have had an injury, or it’s a family issue. I’d had my moments when I’d felt I’d had enough. But I could just tell by Shane’s eyes that he’d made his mind up. He was cool about it; he wasn’t upset.
I remember saying to him, ‘You’re not changing your mind, are you?’
He went, ‘No, no. I’ve thought about it.’
He didn’t love the game any more. And he said he didn’t want to work with people who didn’t care if they won or lost. I think it was the whole industry that he disliked.
I admired him for it. People often end up in jobs that they don’t want, in places where they don’t want to be. And I think, too, that the pull of Ireland was there; he wanted to go home to Dublin.
I gave him the option of coming back but I knew I was wasting my time. I think he was going back to Ireland to become a Garda – a policeman – so I thought to myself, ‘I’d better keep onside with Shane.’
So, that was one of our goalkeepers gone.
Of the fourteen games before we beat Derby on 31 October, eight were draws. They were all bad draws, but the 3–3 draw at Doncaster, in mid-September, was a disaster. We were winning – we’re 3–2 up going into injury time. And Quinton Fortune, ex-United, cuts in. I played with Quinton, and I never saw him use his right foot. But he hits it with his right, and scores – top corner. We’d been 1–0 up, and 2–1 up, and 3–2 up.
Ten days later, we drew 3–3 with Sheffield United. The same story – they scored in injury time.
Six goals, two points. At that stage of the season, the four points we dropped would have sent us up ten places in the table.
Twenty draws in one season – it’s still mind-boggling. And we had been winning so many of those games. I should have used the substitutions better – ‘Get an extra defender on.’ But I thought, ‘It’s only Doncaster’, and they equalised. We’d have been better off losing ten of those draws, and winning ten. We’d have had ten more points.
Those ten days between Doncaster and Sheffield, we were nearly there. But we never really had the exhilaration of two wins in a row – a run of results. We didn’t get the momentum, or the self-belief that comes with it.
Newcastle came to Portman Road. They hammered us, 4–0. It shouldn’t have hurt so much. They had Andy Carroll; they’d Nolan, they’d Nicky Butt. A blind man would have got Newcastle promoted that year. But I was ex-Sunderland, the Newcastle fans travelled in numbers, there was the tribute to Bobby Robson, it was on TV.
But Newcastle weren’t coming to town every day. You wouldn’t have looked at us and said, ‘They’re not even trying.’ There wasn’t chaos. We didn’t play particularly well when we beat Derby. We played Watford one night. We had twenty-six chances, but we drew 1–1. They scored in injury time – another bad draw. We were nearly a decent team.
The family had moved down with me, and we rented a house. I liked it; I liked the sea air. But we moved house three times in the first year. It was unsettling, but we were trying to find the right village, and villages can be funny old places. We couldn’t find a Catholic school, like St Bede’s in Manchester, for the kids. The school we eventually found was different; it was more conventionally English, very middle class – cricket and rugby, tea and scones.
We went to a charity function for the school a few months after the kids had started there. It was a tuxedo job, and I ended up sitting beside a man I didn’t know. I wondered how the conversation was going to flow.
He said, ‘What do you think of this new coalition government?’
I thought, ‘For fuck’s sake—’ I nearly went ‘Is there a new coalition government? Did you watch Barcelona last night?’
I thought the New Coalition was a team playing in the Suffolk League. I think I missed St Bede’s more than the kids did.
And the blue kit!
It always felt a bit wrong.
Simon Clegg, the new chief executive, came on board the same day I started. Chemistry again – it wasn’t there. He’d been the chief executive of the British Olympic Association, but he wasn’t a footballing man. But I think it had more to do with the differences in our backgrounds. As well as being an ex-Para, he was public-school educated. I was from Mayfield, in Cork. But I had to grow up. I couldn’t expect to be working with Irish people.
But the conversation has to flow.
I’d say, ‘I’m interested in that player.’
He’d say, ‘Well, what do I do?’
He’d never been involved in football before. I think he was all about being answerable to Marcus, not helping the manager. Everything was hard work.
Most Championship clubs lose money. Simon suggested a restructuring of the player and staff bonuses. Even as a player I’d always thought that you should only really get a bonus if you’d earned it. The idea was that the bonuses would be delivered with promotion or on reaching the play-offs. Normally a player would get a bonus for a win or a draw. The average player at Ipswich would have been on eight or nine grand a week, so holding the bonuses – three or four hundred quid a game – till the end of the season was a big incentive; one big sum, instead of small amounts.
The players were okay with the bonus restructuring; they were already sitting on eight or nine grand a week. But the staff were also affected, and they wouldn’t have been on the same kind of money. The bonuses were a bigger thing for them.
I now realise that the staff bonuses are vital for morale. I didn’t comprehend that at the time, but people need incentives. It’s human nature – everyone loves a bonus. When a club has a win at the weekend, the training gr
ound is a much happier place the following week. And a big reason for that is because the staff are all getting their bonuses. But that was gone, a bit. And we could tell quite early in the season that we weren’t going to be promoted – so there’d be no bonuses. I should have left the staff alone – a couple of hundred quid a win. That money was a night out with their wives, or a treat for their families. Success – and the bonuses – affected the families, made them part of the club. But I was taking something away, and they were obviously going to think less of me. It was stupid. I must have lost some of them, before the season had even started.
Some of the players – they were very quiet. We didn’t have a Dwight Yorke; we didn’t have the characters. I needed some new players. I’d talk to the owner over the phone, give him a ballpark figure. Tamás Priskin was at Watford, and available. The scouts were keen, and I watched him once, pre-season. He scored, played well – but it was a friendly. His contract was up in a year, and I thought he might be worth a punt. I think I mentioned a figure of £400,000 to the owner. I rang Malky Mackay, who was managing Watford.
‘Listen, Malky, I’m just giving you a heads-up. We’re interested in a player.’
I never spoke to other managers about a fee for a player; I never got involved.
Malky goes, ‘Roy, I appreciate the call.’
I said, ‘I’m leaving it to the chief executive.’
I couldn’t believe it when I heard what we paid for him. I think it was £1,750,000. Watford couldn’t believe their luck. That was our lack of communication, the fact that the three of us never spoke together. Priskin wasn’t worth that money, but nobody had got back to me, to get my opinion.