Pat Stacey: The reinvention of Roy Keane from football man to funny man comes as no surprise

Back in 2008, Keane — who at that point had made one uneasy appearance on Sky Sports — famously said he’d “rather go to the dentist” than become a TV pundit. He later said: “There are ex-players and ex-referees being given airtime who I wouldn’t listen to in a pub.” Oof!

Fast-forward to today and Keane is the most popular football pundit on television. Unsurprisingly, he’s been the star performer in ITV’s Euro 24 coverage.

Eamon Dunphy may not rate Keane’s skills as an analyst (“His knowledge of the game is thin,” Dunphy wrote in a column), but viewers love the man from Mayfield in Cork for his blunt honesty and often hilarious refusal to countenance bull.

Whenever Keane says something funny or controversial — which is pretty much every time he’s on TV — it’s reported in the newspapers and clips go viral on social media. ITV knows Keane is box-office gold. (Just last week his somewhat muted reaction to England’s last minute leveller against Slovakia went viral).

Some regard his U-turn into television punditry as a case of shameless hypocrisy. How could he become the very thing he once professed to despise?

But this is to forget that Keane has always been a man of complexity and contradictions. We’ve seen many Roy Keanes over the years.

There was Keane the ferocious Manchester United player, one of the greatest midfielders of all time. That’s not just me, the biased lifelong United fan, talking. In 2004, the incomparable Pelé named Keane in the FIFA 100 list of the greatest living footballers.

Without Keane, United probably wouldn’t have won the Treble in 1999. When they were 2-1 down against Juventus in the Champions League semi-final second-leg, it was Keane, the captain, who rallied the team to a 3-2 win.

And he did it knowing a yellow card he’d picked up earlier for a foul on Zinedine Zidane ruled him out of playing in the final.

‘Keane has always been a man of complexity and contradictions’

United manager Alex Ferguson wrote in his book Managing My Life: “It was the most emphatic display of selflessness I have seen on a football field. Pounding over every blade of grass, competing as if he would rather die of exhaustion than lose, he inspired all around him. I felt it was an honour to be associated with such a player.”

When, years later, an interviewer (if memory serves it was Pat Kenny on The Late Late Show) read out what Ferguson had written, Keane’s slightly vexed response, possibly coloured by the falling-out with Ferguson that led to him leaving United, was: “I was doing my job.”

This wasn’t a display of faux humility; this was Keane reiterating his unshakeable belief that when you’re a highly paid, highly privileged professional footballer, you should be giving 100pc all the time, every time.

Then there was the Keane who divided the country when he walked away from Saipan on principle after a row with manager Mick McCarthy, and away from the chance to shine at another World Cup.

There’s Keane the fiercely private family man, and Keane the dog-lover and unstinting ambassador for Irish Guide Dogs for the Blind, who was said to be “inconsolable” when his beloved golden Labrador Triggs died in 2012.

With all these different Keanes, what should be so surprising about Keane the pundit — or even Keane the entertainer? Punditry, after all, as much about entertaining an audience as about football, and he’s proved to be a natural whatever he might have said once.

Always witty and drily funny, he’s blossomed on the podcast-cum-live touring show The Overlap and its spin-off Stick to Football, which, for four Fridays during Euro 24, is being broadcast as a TV show on UTV, ITV1 and YouTube.

The line-up includes Gary Neville, Ian Wright and Jill Scott, and while there’s football talk, the best bits of last week’s first edition were Keane talking about why he’s fed up eating omelettes, giving out about dog owners who hang poo bags on trees, slagging Neville for topping up his pension, and offering Wright reasons why babies’ jeans have pockets: “You can put your dummy in there.”

It’s great fun. Don’t bet against Keane some day doing stand-up comedy at the Edinburgh Festival.