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.
There’s a dismal trend among top managers these days to slag each other off — an unexpected consequence of the fact that players themselves now don’t speak to journalists except in the most absurdly controlled circumstances. Keane’s not like that: he says it like he sees it. So when he pointed out that his teammates at Manchester United from the 1990s, like Paul Ince, Bryan Robson, Steve Bruce and even Mark Hughes, hadn’t actually achieved all that much as managers, he was simply being truthful by his own remorseless standards. But this is why we should love him. He says of himself: ‘I know I’m hard work, I know I’m strange, I know that, but I think in a nice way.’ And of his former boss at Old Trafford: ‘Alex Ferguson comes out and says, “You never know what he is going to do next.” What did he think I was going to do? Go backpacking round Mexico?’ It’s great to have you back, Roy.
Speaking of lovable characters, it’s a joy to see KP in such fine fettle in his motherland. Not with the bat, mind — at the time of writing, he’s notched up 80 runs in five Indian Premier League innings, including a duck and a golden duck. And all for just $1.55 million. His response: ‘You learn a lot more when you lose. Things are hunky dory when you win, you just ride the wave. But in defeat you learn a lot more about your game and certain individuals. These two weeks have been incredible for me as a player.’ I’m thrilled — but let’s hope it’s not quite the same in the Ashes.
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