Roy Keane was at Brentford last weekend to scout the progress of striker Scott Hogan ahead of the European Championships. Hogan has been in fantastic form since returning from an eighteen-month injury lay-off, bagging seven goals in seven games since March, and netted a brace in front of an interested Keane:
The striker has yet to make an international appearance, and there were some doubts as to whether he would commit to playing for Ireland when he turned down an opportunity to represent the Under-21s in 2014, on the advice of his Rochdale manager Keith Hill, and only last week, he cast further doubt:
There are much more things I'm worried about than declaring what country I can play for. My grandma and granddad are Irish – my late grandfather was as well.
I'm eligible to play for them but I'm a Brentford player and the last thing I'm thinking of is who I'm going to represent internationally. It's getting ahead of myself a bit too much.
He appears to have had a think about the prospect of declaring for Ireland, as he told Mark Ogden of the Independent:
Since I came back, I have scored seven in seven appearances, but only started two games in that time.
Then there is the Ireland thing, which again is a surprise. Roy Keane was at Huddersfield on Saturday apparently and if Roy Keane rang me up, I couldn’t say no to Roy Keane. He is one of my heroes.
Hogan definitely has a chance of bolting into the squad ahead of the Euros, however, with Martin O'Neill set to announce his squad for the Netherland friendly tomorrow that will not feature players involved in the play-offs, and Hogan will fancy his chances of nicking a final striking spot of Darryl Murphy.
Elsewhere in that same interview, Hogan's intriguing past was borne out, and Ogden drew some comparisons with Jamie Vardy:
I just don’t want to go back to a 9-5 job. I have done it before and I don’t want to do it again. I worked in warehouses, order picking, in a chemical factory – it got to the stage where I would try to fit in two half-hour toilet breaks just to break the day up!
I never want to do it again, which is why I will always fight for everything I have got in football.
The Jamie Vardy thing gets mentioned quite a lot when I am back home in the north-west, but down here at Brentford, nobody really knows about my background, so it doesn’t come up much.
But I was at Stocksbridge and Halifax, two of Jamie’s former clubs, so I can see where it has come from. Jamie has had an unbelievable rise, though, and of course it is something that will inspire players like me.
It's a great interview, read it in full here.
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