Keane is to be pitied

Daddy was the passport to playground bragging rights. Daddy knows the manager, Daddy knows the team, Daddy almost remembers when some of them were as old as his eldest son.

The beginning of the quest was easy. Mick McCarthy, Niall Quinn, Alan Kelly. Pictures and autographs. Gentlemen all.

Then we rolled through the kids, Duffer, Robbie, Richard Dunne, Steven Reid. Players young enough to remember their own World Cup sticker album collections. Within 10 minutes we were up to 22 players, all signed, sealed and delivered into the album that was now the ticket to any birthday party.

The coffee and the Danish pastry were still warm and just one name remained.

Roy Keane. There, I said it.

Daddy had some swerving to do on this one. Daddy was once so close to Roy he drove him down to the AIB in Manchester to open the bank account that now houses his medals.

Daddy was close enough to Roy to lift him out of his own vomit in a Cheshire hotel one night and get him off to bed before the press guys drinking with him realised what was going on.

But that was then and this was now. Six years ago, when the Arsenal fan was but a nipper, Daddy got nasty with his old mate. Accused Roy of reneging on his country every time he did a Ryan Giggs and missed a Wednesday friendly.

Daddy told the Lansdowne Road crowd to let Roy know what they thought of him when he eventually returned to the fold for a World Cup qualifier against Iceland. They booed and Daddy took the blame.

Roy and Daddy haven't spoken since, so son would have to approach Roy on his own. It seemed simple enough as I stood on those eggshells but I knew that Roy had been watching all morning. He would know the father of the son.

I waited anxiously as the little fellow made his approach. Roy snarled the Roy snarl and then signed on the dotted line.

Allah be praised. He was human after all. He was forgiving and considerate and wonderful, just like he used to be. We can have a great World Cup together and Ireland will be the better for it.

Oh yeah! By the time we got to Amsterdam, 80 minutes later, Keane was back to his old ways.

He harangued two journalists who suggested he had snubbed the Niall Quinn testimonial, argued with another on the plane to Tokyo and went back for a second pop at one of the first crew when we landed at Narita Airport.

This was more like it. By Monday, Keano was moaning about the kit and the training pitch. By Tuesday, he was out of the World Cup and out of international football forever.

On Wednesday morning, after a chat with Sir Alex Ferguson, he was back in.

By Wednesday afternoon, he was assassinating Daddy and a cast of thousands in two newspaper interviews followed by a radio and TV special on Thursday morning.

Then, that afternoon, the eggshells were well and truly broken. Roy had slaughtered everyone from Daddy to David Connolly to Mick McCarthy in the Irish Times and it was time to be held accountable.

Mick had had enough. He called a meeting to clear the air, to offer Roy the chance to explain his opinions to those in the firing line.

He declined the invite. Keano opted, instead, to withdraw from the frontline. He did it with a string of foul-mouthed abuse that landed on Mick McCarthy's Yorkshire chin.

His vocabulary ranged from F to W, with very little in between. Yet he forgot two important words from that range as he signed his World Cup death warrant.

Those words are waste and failure.

Roy Keane has wasted his World Cup chance. He has wasted the opportunity to show the world why he is the greatest Irish footballer of his generation. He has spurned the chance that Mark Kennedy, brave enough to own up to injury last week, or Curtis Fleming, the perpetual last-minute replacement in the qualifiers, would give their right arm for.

And he has failed several people with his petulance in the Pacific.

He has failed McCarthy and Ferguson. He has failed his family, most of whom had already booked their tickets from Cork to Tokyo. Most importantly of all, he has failed himself.

His face will never appear in another international match programme, never mind a World Cup sticker album. That is his loss, not ours. He is the one to be pitied.

Keane had the world in his hands when he left Dublin Airport last Friday and he blew it.