The McCarthy-Keane debate revisited

It was April 1987 when Sugar Ray Leonard and Marvelous Marvin Hagler finally touched gloves in Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas.

In ways, they were opposites – Leonard, propelled to stardom at 20 when he claimed an Olympic gold medal, had a dazzling smile and charm that stood in contrast to Hagler’s cerebral personality and relentless, no-frills pressure style, honed by coming up tough in the pro ranks, fighting in small halls as a promotional after-thought.

When they finally met, it was billed simply as ‘The Super Fight’. Leonard got the verdict on a split decision, which remains controversial to this day.

In his masterful book Four Kings, the late wordsmith and boxing sage George Kimball expertly summed up just how controversial it was.

“Twenty years after the fight,” Kimball wrote, “an incautious man could walk into the wrong Boston saloon and with just two words – ‘Leonard won’ – almost guarantee himself an invitation to step outside.”

It dawned on me over Christmas, when watching the movie Saipan, that Mick McCarthy v Roy Keane was the closest we had come to 1987’s ‘The Super Fight’ in this country. The recriminations were bitter and lasting. It brings to mind a line from Michael Hartnett’s elegy to his grandmother and old Ireland – “She was a card game where a nose was broken”.

Did anyone ever get their nose broken over what happened on that island in the Pacific 24 years ago?

The film, I found very enjoyable. Éanna Hardwicke, as Keane, is fantastic and Steve Coogan, in my opinion as a devotee of Alan Partridge, is brushed by genius. But it is, remember, a feature film, not a documentary and the story it weaves is so far removed from actual events as to render the project fatally flawed.

They say you grow more right wing as you age, which I think is true. You also, in my experience, lean more towards the McCarthy camp, too.

I was 18 that summer, when my generation’s JFK moment came to pass. I recall clearly where I was - on the top deck of a bus in Dublin, somewhere around Merrion Square. I had heard, like everyone else, that Keane was coming home from the World Cup after a row with McCarthy – and then I had heard that he wasn’t. I was a fan of Keane’s, I should confirm, but having heard he was leaving, and then that all was okay again, I wasn’t alarmed when I eavesdropped on two girls’ conversation.

It was only when one pointed out that this a new development – she had heard it on the radio in a shop, I think – and that things had moved on since the initial falling-out that the realisation dawned. Sometimes, it can be impossible to gauge how big a story is when it first breaks; it can be like standing at the foot of a mountain, trying to appreciate its scale. Who knows what height it reaches?

But my memory of Saipan is that everyone knew almost instantly that this was massive. For my generation, only the September 11 attacks – “the 9-11 debacle” as Partridge calls it – top Saipan in terms of magnitude. I’m aware how ridiculous that sounds – and is – but there you go; it’s no less true for that.

In the same way that celebrity economists and the like often, ludicrously, list Italia ’90 as the spark that lit the Celtic Tiger, it could be argued that, while Saipan didn’t happen at the zenith of the boom, it was the first major signpost on the road to Notionsville.

Vast swathes of the population were on Keane’s side at the time; our self-aggrandised image of ourselves was such that many saw Keane’s actions as reflective of a new, confident Ireland where we no longer doff the cap, where we refuse to place any limit on what we can be, what we can achieve or – and here is the logical conclusion, a cynic might argue – how many apartments we might buy off the plans in Bulgaria.

Journalist Fintan O’Toole wrote at the time that “Mick McCarthy's relatively relaxed approach, with its emphasis on having fun and building team spirit, is the right one for a mediocre side with no realistic expectations of ultimate victory. Keane's implacable demand for absolute excellence in every detail is the only possible attitude for a player temperamentally incapable of anticipating defeat.”

That was a commonly held view; clearly, it is absurd but that was how we saw ourselves back then. It goes without saying that viewed at this remove, it’s clear Keane was completely wrong. Entrenched in his own ego, he chose to abandon his teammates when his disruptive carry-on was called out.

Keane was 30 at the time he walked out of the World Cup. He would win another Premier League title but his best days as a player were well behind him. Time was closing in and it’s clear he didn’t deal with it well.

Alex Ferguson, his one-time mentor and later nemesis, was the first to publicly recognise the change in Keane’s personality as his on-field powers waned.

“I believe – and [Ferguson's assistant] Carlos Queiroz was at one with me on this – that Roy Keane’s behaviour pattern changed when he realised he was no longer the Roy Keane of old,” the Scot once wrote.

Within three years, unable to re-invent himself as a player, he was gone from Old Trafford, heading north for a victory lap with Celtic. His fall-out with Ferguson was so bitter that, even last week, Keane was spitting vitriol at his old boss, suggesting on television that the 84-year-old was hanging around Manchester United “like a bad smell”.

The movie doesn’t get into any of what happened afterwards, which is fair enough. It is brilliantly edited and the acting, for the most part, is very good. Where it falls down is in its relationship with actual events – Kevin Kilbane wrote in the Irish Times last week that the movie was “cartoonish” and that he spent much of it blurting out “That didn’t happen” to his wife.

Is it worth watching? Absolutely. But don’t ask me to step outside when I state the obvious, even if the film doesn’t: McCarthy won.