Spectator Sport

Wednesday, 29th April 2009

Roy of the Tractor Boys

I first came across Simon Clegg several years ago when he was head of the British Olympic Committee and trying to drum up media backing for an initial bid for the 2012 Games. This was in 2002-03, and the rest, as they say, is oodles of work for Zaha Hadid and one heck of a lot of JCBs in the Lea Valley. Last year he popped up in Beijing with the Beau Geste-ish title of chef de mission to the British team. He’s always struck me as an amiable and able cove, but if he were to pitch up in Suffolk, you would expect it to be as captain of the local golf club, or some such.

Far from it — it was Clegg, as chief executive of Ipswich Town, who helped to launch an exocet into the maelstrom of British football with the appointment of the ultimate footballing hard man, Roy Keane, as manager of the usually placid Championship side. What a shaft of belligerent light that is. With his thousand-yard stare, arteries pulsing with pure testosterone, and an extraordinary capacity to talk sense, only good can come of this. I hope. Anyway, he’s moving his family down to Suffolk, along with Triggs, the ever faithful golden labrador. As he (Keane, not the lab) said himself, ‘I will be going home to my family and not back to a flat. Particularly (helpful) will be spending less time in the car travelling by myself, because me and myself is not good company.’

That’s authentic Keane: funny, truthful and self-deprecating. He was like that at Sunderland too: of all the Premiership managers, it was Keane who spoke most openly and frankly before and after matches. He left there because he felt he was being buggered about by his owners, just as he had walked out on Ireland at the 1998 World Cup because he couldn’t stand the amateurism and flakiness of the Irish FA. Keane speaks for that innate desire in all of us to stick one to our bosses, to tell them to shove it where the sun don’t shine.

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