Roy Keane appeared on the Beyond the Pitch podcast on ESPN this evening. A lovely twenty minutes. Keane became especially animated when asked whether he played in something of a golden era in professional football.
He agreed that there 'seemed to be a few more characters around the place' to whom the game meant that much more.
He then gave a brief lecture on the changing face of coolness in football.
In Keano's estimation, what it is to be cool in football has changed since he was a player. And it has changed for the worse.
However, Keano's authority as a historian of cool might be called into question following his dubious claim that punctuality was cool back in his day.
In truth, we're struggling to think of any icons of cool who valued punctuality to the extent Roy often seems to. Turning up late for the stretches was the height of naffness in Roy's time, apparently.
In my career, the cool players were the lads who came in and trained properly, won medals, played games, didn't sit on the treatment table all year. Weren't worried about cars or houses.
I think the modern player now, to be cool now is being late for training, how many tattoos have you got? What girl are you seeing? What car are you driving? And all that was irrelevant when we were playing.
He got borderline wistful when talking about the card school era, a much more romantic time than the Ipad era.
... As much of these were good players (lads he played with), and these are lads that won trophies... but on top of all that, good people, people you'd like spending time with. When you're on bus journeys, flights, card schools, pubs, wherever you spend time with these lads. And that's what I miss as much as anything.
When you hear stories about lads on busses now, they're all on ipads, all on their headphones. When we were on busses, we'd be having a game of cards, we'd be having a bit of craic. But maybe those days are gone.
Earlier, he was asked about the difficulties facing young Irish players trying to break into the English game in the era of global scouting networks.
During the heyday of Irish football, continental players were a scarcity in English football. Now they're competing with the world. Keane has no remedy or advice beyond telling lads to pull their socks up.
From our point of view, we've got to look at the short-term. It's almost no good to us, people saying 'well, we've sixteen or seventeen year olds coming through' and we say the future for us is coming up in the summer. But there is always a concern. We've looked at the '21s and the '19s and the youths and we're looking at who is coming through in the next few years.
I think it's always been a challenge to Irish players coming through. If you want to make it, if you want to get into the first team of any club in England or make it with the Irish senior team, then you have to get over these hurdles. I didn't go to an academy, I played in the League of Ireland. We see that with other players in Ireland, Wardy, Seamus Coleman. Players will find different pathways to the Irish senior team.
Listen to the podcast here.
H-T: Daniel McDonnell
