by Roy Keane
I brought in two of the lads from Sunderland, Carlos Edwards and Grant Leadbitter. They were good lads, but we paid too much for them. I thought about two million for the two of them would have been decent. But we paid just less than four.
I phoned Steve Bruce, who was managing Sunderland.
I said, ‘I can’t believe how much you’re getting for Grant and Carlos.’
Brucie went, ‘Ah, now, Roy – they’ve agreed a deal.’
It had nothing to do with him. He was never going to say, ‘No, no, you’re paying too much.’ The deal had been between Simon and Niall.
I liked the look of Jordan Rhodes. He scored at Brentford for us, pre-season, and he scored at home to Colchester. A couple of clubs rang me about him. Notts County and Huddersfield – it wasn’t Liverpool and Arsenal. I’d brought a few lads in, and I’d been told that some lads would have to go out. I still get criticised for selling Jordan, and I have to accept that. But it was also a club decision. We sold him to Huddersfield, down a division, for £350,000, and he started scoring loads of goals. I think I was the one who suggested a sell-on clause, and thank God we had it, because they sold him to Blackburn for eight million. The mistake myself and the staff made with Jordan was, we discussed what he couldn’t do, instead of what he could do.
I knew Lee Martin, a bit, from my playing days at United, but he didn’t work out. He was a decent player, but the Championship is about good, strong characters. I don’t think Lee had that quality for the Championship. Priskin, too – technically, he wasn’t bad, but I don’t think he worked hard enough.
My recruitment wasn’t good enough. I’ve no excuses.
Damien Delaney came in and did okay. I was a bit hard on him sometimes, probably because I knew him and he was from Cork. But I went over the top. I was the same with another lad, Colin Healy. He was from Cork, too, and I told him he was moving his feet like a League of Ireland player. It was wrong. Colin was new to the club; I should have been bending over backwards for him. At Ipswich, I sometimes said the wrong things. Maybe I was trying too hard.
When you’re a manager, people say you should never worry about the players liking you; it’s about them respecting you. But we all want to be liked. You don’t want the people you work with disliking you. Maybe, after the Paras experience and bringing a few lads in and letting the wrong lads go, I was trying to right a few wrongs.
We were playing away to Cardiff on 29 November, a Sunday. We’d beaten Derby and, since then, we’d had two more draws. I saw that there was a rugby match on in Cardiff the day before our game. Wales were playing Australia. And I like the rugby, so I thought, ‘Well, I fancy going. How can I justify going down to Cardiff a day earlier?’
I decided I’d bring everybody. I rented a box at the Millennium Stadium, and we had a great day. I paid for it. Staff, players – we all walked up to the stadium together. It was brilliant. There’s always a friendly atmosphere at rugby matches, so we weren’t having to tell the players to watch their backs. It wasn’t a football match we were going to, and it wasn’t Ireland against England. The food wasn’t ideal for the day before a match day – mashed potatoes, sausages – but we got stuck into it. They should have been having pasta. But I just thought, we’d been doing that for three months and we hadn’t been getting the results. We just had a really nice day.
Maybe if we’d lost the day after I’d have blamed all the mash and sausages. But we went out and we won. Did we win because of the rugby? Probably not. But the players appreciated it. I don’t think they saw it as me trying to ingratiate myself, or to win hearts and minds. There’d been photographs for the local paper and the match programme at the end of the Paras experience, and I remember thinking, ‘Maybe there shouldn’t be.’ But at the rugby there were no photographs, no fuss, no media stuff. It brings back good memories; they were a good group of lads.
We won, but I didn’t think of it as a turning point. I still knew it was going to be one of those seasons. When you don’t win for the first fourteen matches, it’s not all down to bad luck. There were just too many draws; we couldn’t finish the job off. But the signs were better after the Cardiff match. We started to win a few games. In December, we won two, drew two and lost one.
The two draws were both 0–0, one after the other. Away to Bristol City, at home to Peterborough. At Bristol, I played Pablo Couñago, a player I didn’t particularly like or get on with. He was a striker, very talented. He had a chance with about five minutes to go. We had a shot, the keeper parried it to Pablo. He was ten or eleven yards out. He took three touches, and the keeper blocked it. He could have hit it first time. There are games that sum up your spell at a club, and that was the game.
I remember people saying to me about Pablo, ‘He’s really no good to you away from home, and he doesn’t always fancy it at home.’ That wasn’t a good start, because half of your games are going to be away from home.
I had a dig at him after the match.
‘Fuckin’ hell, Pablo, you’ve got to do that first time.’
He was, ‘Oh’, this and that.
Missing a chance like that is a reflection of the attitude to training. The first day, pre-season, Pablo walked off the training pitch, feeling his groin, or something. It wasn’t from a tackle, because the players had just been running and stretching. After we’d finished, I spoke to him. He’d been at home in Spain for the last six or seven weeks, and he landed back in England at half eleven the night before. I didn’t think that was great.
The next day – the second day of pre-season – I was in my office, and I saw Pablo chatting to some of the players in the car park, at about ten past nine. He was due to have treatment, and the injured lads would have been in at about half eight or nine. So I called him in – I knocked on the window.
I said, ‘What are you doing? It’s ten past nine.’
And he went, ‘Oh yeah, but we just kind of do what we want.’
I said, ‘Well, them days are over.’
My days with Pablo were numbered – but he stayed at the club for another year because we couldn’t move him on. No club was interested in taking him – and I was happy to tell him that. I just found him dead lazy.
But he did get an important goal for me. We beat Coventry at home, 3–2, and Pablo scored the winner in injury time. But that, really, was the only time he produced. I’m not a big fan of judging players from DVDs, but I watched a few Ipswich matches on DVD before I took the job. There was one, Pablo came on as a sub. He walked on to the pitch – he was so lackadaisical. He looked like he was going down a coal pit for ten hours. Ipswich got a penalty, and he missed it. I thought, ‘That’s what you get for walking on. You’re supposed to run on to the pitch, like it means something.’
I didn’t like the attitude of two or three of the players, including Pablo, early on, which didn’t help the flow of my message. I don’t mind disagreements. I don’t have a problem with a player having a bad time, or playing badly. But the attitude to training, or the impression that the player is just there to pick up his wages – that’s what would get to me. Ben Thatcher, one of the senior players, seemed to have issues with me. I heard that Ben was commuting a good distance; he was coming to work from London.
I questioned him on that.
He was, like, ‘Ah, yeah, I stay the odd night.’
I could have accepted it if he and a few others had been coming in and training like madmen. I might have given them Mondays off, or some arrangement like that. Management is give and take. But I was looking and thinking, ‘You’re not really giving much.’
Ben came in three or four hours late one morning. There’d been a crash on the M25, or the M1, or something like that.
He was in my office. No apology.
It wasn’t as if they were important players to me; they weren’t. But it still created an atmosphere. The training ground is quite small, so there was a tension, even passing one of them in the corridor. You’re thinking, ‘You, yeh fucker’, and they’re
thinking the same thing.
To the argument ‘If the player isn’t good enough, get rid of him,’ the reply is often, ‘Where?’
‘I want to move on.’
‘Well, I’d love to move you on, but there’ve been no calls for you.’
I liked Connor Wickham. He didn’t score loads of goals, but he was only sixteen or seventeen. He got kicked out of his digs one night. We’d a game; I think we were up at Scunthorpe. And I got a call. Connor had been evicted because he’d left his phone charger plugged in all night, without the phone connected to it. I had to meet the Academy manager, Sammy Morgan, a couple of days later. We discussed phone chargers for a few hours.
I had a go at him once or twice. Sometimes I didn’t like his attitude to training. But he was a nice kid, although he was six foot three – a big, strong boy. He shook your hand properly. I’d shake hands with all the players as they went out to the pitch – ‘Good luck, good luck’ – the usual. Sometimes I’d wonder what they were putting in my hand. But Connor would grab my hand, and I knew he’d have a go for me. He played in the toughest position, if you’re learning your trade in the Championship. He was a striker, and most of the centre-halves are big, experienced men and they’re going to leave their mark on you. But Connor would take it all day, and he’d be knocking lads over. He did well for me in some important games, and I like to see him scoring at Sunderland, where he is now.
The crowds, always around 20,000, were good, for a team that was lingering near the bottom. There were 25,000 there when we beat QPR, 3–0. And the fans were decent to me. I could see the frustration, and understand it. But what helped, strangely, was the draws. It’s hard to hammer your team when they’re drawing all the time, not losing. We recovered quite well in the second part of the season. We won more games. We beat QPR, away, and Sheffield Wednesday, away. We beat Barnsley, we beat Reading. We won more games. We drew away to Newcastle.
The last game of the season, we lost 3–0 to Sheffield United, at Portman Road. There’s the tradition the players go back out on to the pitch and say goodbye and thanks to the fans. They often have their kids with them. Jon Walters was our captain, and he was organising it.
I made another mistake: I wouldn’t go out with them. We’d been beaten – we’d had a player sent off, which didn’t help. And we’d had a bad season. But I should have gone out. I should have stood with the players. If I’d been a player and the manager had said, ‘Ah, I’m too embarrassed to go out’, I think I’d have thought, ‘You cunt.’
I’m not that type of person – it’s not my form. But sometimes my actions are not what I would want. I should have gone, ‘I’ll go out with you, lads.’ I’d always been okay at facing the music.
I should have looked at the table at the end of the season – we finished fifteenth out of twenty-four – and said, ‘That’s not too bad.’ We were fourteen points from a play-off place, and nine from relegation.
I should have kept my head. I should have looked at the bigger picture.
I don’t think I’m a bad manager, but at Ipswich I managed badly. But all the people I’ve admired – they’ve all had difficult spells. So I probably learnt more at Ipswich than I did at Sunderland.
*
In the second season, ’10–’11, it was all about playing the younger players and getting the wages down. My job description had changed. It had been about promotion. Now it was about working within a much smaller budget.
During the summer I’d had the dreaded conversation with the owner, where I was sitting in my office discussing tactics with him. We had a tactics board with us. I should have known my days were numbered.
‘Well, why can’t he play there?’
‘Because he’s this and he’s not that.’
He said, ‘Let’s go with the young players.’
I said, ‘I don’t mind going with the young players but the Championship will eat them up.’
The Championship isn’t a league for young players. You need a mix of young players and experienced men. Every manager who’s been at Ipswich since – Paul Jewell, Mick McCarthy – they’ve gone for experienced players. The average age of a promoted team is twenty-eight or twenty-nine.
Kevin Kilbane came down for talks, and Shaun Derry – his contract was up at QPR.
Shaun said, ‘Roy, I’d love to be able to play for you.’
I said, ‘Shaun, I think I’ll only be able to give you a year, and the money wouldn’t be great.’
He said, ‘No, I’d like to come and play for you.’
This was at the end of the first season, and it would have been a great start to the new season, to have a good, experienced pro in the dressing room. But the club never offered him a deal.
I was on holiday with my family a week later, on safari in South Africa. I was looking at some elephants when I got a call from Shaun’s agent.
‘Your club’s not been in touch and offered a deal.’
I was embarrassed – I couldn’t believe it.
I rang Simon.
‘What’s happened with Shaun? He wants to sign. It’s only a one-year deal.’
He said, ‘No, we’re not going ahead with it.’
The warning signs were there.
Lee Carsley came, but the club wouldn’t offer him a contract. Kevin Kilbane, the same. These were good, experienced players, and good guys.
Kevin told me, ‘Roy, your club’s not even got back to me.’
I rang Simon, and he rang Kevin to apologise. This was a man who’d played more than a hundred times for his country, and they couldn’t even ring him to tell him they weren’t going to offer him a deal.
They would all have been free transfers.
So, I gave eight players from the academy their debut. Seven of them weren’t good enough. I got in one or two loan players.
We stayed local, pre-season. Our thinking was, we’d play weaker teams, win a few games, build up confidence, with a few harder games thrown in. So we played Histon, Great Yarmouth and Hadleigh United – and West Ham and PSV Eindhoven.
Charlie McParland had left, for family reasons; he’d been commuting from Nottingham. And I asked Gary Ablett to come in, as first-team coach. I’d played against Gary, and I’d met him when I was doing my Pro Licence. I liked him. He’d played at big clubs, Liverpool and Everton. He’d managed at Stockport, and he’d managed the younger players at Liverpool. He had the personality to go with the qualifications.
Gary arrived in time for the trip to PSV. We lost 1–0 – PSV were very good. I gave the lads a night out in Amsterdam. Two of them were late for the bus the next morning.
I’d warned them, ‘Lads, act like men tonight. If you’re having a few pints, make sure you can get up.’
But, of course, there were two stragglers. I fined them.
A club fine could be a few grand. But my fines would be smaller, three or four hundred quid, cash. And I explained to the players that the money was going into a kitty, for, say, the Christmas do or go-karting trips for the players or staff, or a few quid for the groundsmen. The lads were happy enough to pay the fines when they knew where the money was going.
The policy, staying local, except for the short trip to Holland, worked a treat. I went to watch our reserves play a Tottenham XI, at home. Pablo Couñago came on for ten minutes and he was fuckin’ awful. He should have passed the ball to a striker who was in a good position with about five minutes to go.
I went down to the dressing room after the game and had a go at him.
I said, ‘You should have fuckin’ passed it.’
And he went, ‘Well, how are we going to win anything with you as the manager?’
I nearly physically attacked him – but I didn’t.
Gary hadn’t felt well when we were in Holland, playing PSV.
I remember myself and the other staff getting into him.
‘Are you homesick for Liverpool, Gary? Are you missing all the burnt-out cars and shell suits?’
It was all friend
ly banter.
And Gary was, ‘Oh, I don’t feel too well.’
He didn’t come into work a few days. He got ill very, very quickly. He was staying in a hotel not far from where I lived, and we got the club doctor in to see him. Within a day or two, he was in the cancer ward, in the hospital in Cambridge. He had non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a form of blood cancer. He was fighting for his life. He never worked again.
Because he’d come in pre-season and there were still people on holiday, Gary’s contract hadn’t been finalised and signed, and although we’d agreed the package, the club wasn’t legally bound to do anything.
I rang the LMA – the League Managers’ Association – and said, ‘You’ll have to come and help one of my staff.’
But Gary wasn’t a member. But, still, they were brilliant. They made sure he got all his entitlements, and the club had to honour the deal.
I had a meeting with the staff, to explain how ill Gary was. I was very emotional. I remember thinking, ‘I’m not really ready for this.’ But who is? I don’t think I handled it very well, but I’m not sure that an older man would necessarily have handled it better.
Gary was in the process of writing a book – it’s very good – and he told me he was convinced that the pressures of football had taken their toll on him. He’d had a hard time at Stockport – financial problems, transfer embargoes. The stresses and strains had damaged him.
I’d drive down to Cambridge after training to see Gary. Eventually, he was moved up to Christie’s Hospital, in Manchester, so he could be nearer his family in Liverpool. I’d take my staff up to see him, or I’d see him at his house. He’d been planning to start giving talks, on his career and the pressures of the game. That was going to be his project, because getting back on the training pitch was going to be very difficult. But he never got the opportunity.
He died sixteen months after he’d been diagnosed. I was on holiday in Mauritius when I heard the news. I’d gone from Ipswich by then.