Excerpt from Chapter One... The Arrival Of Roy Keane

Here's an excerpt from the first chapter of The Irish Uprising, looking at the arrival at SAFC of the (latest) managerial messiah, Roy Keane...

The expression on the face of Sky Sports' assured but disturbingly hairy-pawed anchorman Richard Keys shifted from the matter in hand. For now, all talk of the playful first-half mauling that Manchester United had just dealt out to a spineless Charlton Athletic side was to be momentarily forgotten. This was breaking news, something else from somewhere else, maybe a world-changing event. Famously, back in 1980, it was a sports presenter who told the American viewing public the shocking news of John Lennon's assassination, and now it looked as though Keys was on the brink of delivering a similarly earth-shattering thunderbolt. Had the Queen abdicated from the throne? Was the war on terror finally over? Perhaps Alan Shearer had choked to death on a cashew nut?

No, this was more, something in an entirely different stratosphere. The viewing audience, consisting mostly of fans of Manchester United and Charlton Athletic with the addition of those who had nothing better to do on a Wednesday evening in late August, closed their eyes with a mixture of fear and anticipation. And thus, Richard Keys did speak. And as he spoke a smile spread across his lips as he revealed that 'The new Sunderland manager is… it's Roy Keane.'

Eh? Keane? What the hell…?

In the subsequent hours the mobile phone network in and around Wearside practically buckled under the weight of thousands of text messages and garbled, gibbering phone calls as fans spread the incredible news; incredible for two reasons. Firstly, the idea that someone as synonymous with success as Roy Keane was prepared to launch his managerial career with a club in such a state of punch-drunk upheaval as Sunderland was at the very least bizarre. It certainly proved that the man hadn't lost his lust for a good battle (or he had a hitherto-unseen pitch-black sense of humour.) What was additionally incredible about the news was that it came less than twenty-four hours after Sunderland's temporary manager Niall Quinn had announced he'd sacked himself (which as club chairman he was perfectly entitled to do), and proclaimed that he would be bringing in a 'world class manager'. At that point in time the term 'world class' applied to men like Fabio Capello or Frank Rijkaard – but it was now emerging that Sunderland's new world-class manager would be someone who… well, someone who hadn't actually managed at any level. At all.

There was no doubting that Keane had been a world-class player and a dominant personality in a Manchester United dressing room where he hoovered up winners' medals, but managing at the very top of the game was very much not on his CV. Lifting trophies, excelling in the dispensing of on-field punishment, causing outrage in Irish society, those boxes had all been well and truly ticked, but not the one that boasted world class managerial achievements.

But after all, it must be remembered that this is Sunderland Association Football Club, a club with an unerringly loyal support and enormous untapped potential. But also a club which has an uncanny knack of finding a cack-handed way of snatching catastrophe from the jaws of victory whenever possible and providing non-SAFC fans with countless moments of high comedy. This was the club who in the space of three years set the unwanted record of registering the lowest ever points total in the Premiership (a feeble, lily-livered nineteen) only to fecklessly smash that record at the very next attempt (an eye-watering and scarcely-believable fifteen). A club with a nearly-new stadium capable of holding almost fifty-thousand fans that had driven away most of its fan base through a series of unambitious and often downright clueless policy decisions. In fact, the only good thing about visiting the Stadium Of Light by the spring of 2006 was that you didn't have to queue all that long for your half-time pint.