Keano leaves Sunderland

Originally Posted by antonin jablonsky

The idea that all NBA franchises start the season thinking they can win the Championship is utter shite too. The LA Clippers never have. There are about 5 or 6 of 30 odd teams that start any one season thinking they can win. A good half spend the 2nd half of the season tanking games to get a better draft pick.

Oh and in the last 30 years only 8 teams have woin NBA championships, same number as have won the English Title.

they do actually. cleveland just 3 years before were no-hopers. now they are one of the strongest teams.

Originally Posted by keano's love

they do actually. cleveland just 3 years before were no-hopers. now they are one of the strongest teams.

Like Villa?

Originally Posted by antonin jablonsky

Oh and in the last 30 years only 8 teams have woin NBA championships, same number as have won the English Title.

thats because my team has dominated it for long periods of time. every player wants to play for us.

that and those bastard celtics have lot of luck/.

Originally Posted by antonin jablonsky

Like Villa?

do you see them winning anything? I don't. Neither do I see them finishing in the top4.

Originally Posted by keano's love

thats because my team has dominated it for long periods of time. every player wants to play for us.

that and those bastard celtics have lot of luck/.

what, you mean you support the most successful and dominant team in the nba, with the most star players and media attention? wow.

Originally Posted by borsuk

what, you mean you support the most successful and dominant team in the nba, with the most star players and media attention? wow.

only difference being I supported them since I was a child.

tbf it's not the worst point in the world to say that much of the premiership is built on hype, and that just as much of it is £#%&!ing £#%&!; half full of teams whose only hope and greatest ambition is to avoid relegation - how much money do these clubs throw at the game that would be far far better used at actually building a football club from the bottom up, you know, actually investing big-time in their local communities instead of paying it lip service. the Sunderland situation is a case in point; in all honesty has all that money they've spent really given their supporters anything much to dream about? anything much to inspire them?

worse, over the past few seasons we've seen teams actually admit that they've written off some of their games even before the season started - WBA at Chelsea being a prime example

at least the parachute payments are going to end, but even that is a mistake on its own imo., and they'd be better off keeping a form of genuine percentage handouts to the lower division teams with the caveat that it is used to improve standards rather than just wages, and reducing the number of teams in the top flight.

Originally Posted by keano's love

only difference being I supported them since I was a child.

last month?

Originally Posted by Tumescent Throb

tbf it's not the worst point in the world to say that much of the premiership is built on hype, and that just as much of it is £#%&!ing £#%&!; half full of teams whose only hope and greatest ambition is to avoid relegation - how much money do these clubs throw at the game that would be far far better used at actually building a football club from the bottom up, you know, actually investing big-time in their local communities instead of paying it lip service. the Sunderland situation is a case in point; in all honesty has all that money they've spent really given their supporters anything much to dream about? anything much to inspire them?

worse, over the past few seasons we've seen teams actually admit that they've written off some of their games even before the season started - WBA at Chelsea being a prime example.

Yep. Another example was Bolton in the UEFA Cup, openly not even trying to win it despite good results. With a bit of application they could have made the semis or even the final - Rangers did and they were garbage. Instead they wrote it off, when as a fan, what do you go for if not to experience things like good runs in Europe? What's the point in even qualifying for it if you're going to declare it an irritant, as Smegson practically did?

Originally Posted by keano's love

do you see them winning anything? I don't. Neither do I see them finishing in the top4.

Just like Cleveland will, if they are lucky. What point are you failing to make?

Originally Posted by keano's love

thats because my team has dominated it for long periods of time. every player wants to play for us.

that and those bastard celtics have lot of luck/.

So you now agree that the NBA system hasn't produced different results to the PL system and that as usual your original point was shit. Good.

Tom Humphries in The Guardian

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Roy Keane left Sunderland on his own terms, a fact which will only contribute to his legend. Photograph: Matthew Lewis/Getty Images

If there was a stock exchange dealing in units of public interest, Sunderland football club went through their own Black Thursday yesterday. The big top left town. Just the tumbleweeds and some of Roy Keane's lesser signings are blowing along the Wear now.

Keane's departure was unnecessary but contributes hugely to his legend. The debate and hysteria which he is capable of sparking wherever he goes gains a new dimension with each successive piece of evidence that he can walk away at the drop of a lower lip or a few home points.

Keane often speaks wistfully about how he just wants a quiet life. Every chapter of his unfolding existence makes bliss less likely. In a world where everything is inflated and distorted by way of routine Keane, who despises the hoopla, manages to be the biggest draw there is.

Perhaps it all started about eight years ago with the prawn sandwich observation, that watershed moment in manufactured controversy which somehow cemented Roy Keane's reputation as the font of most things interesting in football.

Roy's moderately astute observation about the occasionally serene atmosphere in Old Trafford was instantly afforded such standing in the treasury of football wisdom that the term "prawn sandwich brigade" has its own Wikipedia entry and needs no explanation when included in headlines and copy on the sports pages.

In a word association test most of us would blurt out the words Roy Keane when asked what prawn sandwiches remind us of. Somewhere along the way, as Keane would be the first to agree, the world got all out of kilter and the values of football became as distorted as the price of footballers.

Keane will always be box office but yesterday's events at the Stadium of Light tell us more about football and the way we have come to view it than they do about one of its most compelling protagonists. When the dust settles and Keane's dogs have been walked and duly photographed while being walked, we will marvel at how a short run of bad results at Sunderland somehow became a crisis.

Think. Sunderland were until yesterday a well–run club with a young manager whose first season and a half of governance had brought an extraordinary basement to penthouse promotion campaign followed by consolidation on the top floor while more attractive swashbucklers like Reading went down.

Now Sunderland find themselves without a manager after a brief crisis scarcely worthy of the name. Keane's departure comes after a run of poor results but nothing which suggested a terminal ailment.

Football is football, though, and the game has become so obsessed with itself that context and perspective have vanished entirely as concepts. Football now gets itself into such a dizzying state of agitation over some inane piece of trivia that all the known pyrotechnics of controversy and outrage will no longer be adequate. Somebody will have to press the button, causing a big bang and a blinding white light and leaving nothing but the echo of an irradiated commentator: "It is now…"

Football has altered our entire concept of time. Everything is accelerated. You can become a crisis club in less time than it takes to spell the words crisis club.

For Keane, of course, the end always comes with fireworks and flashbulbs and he leaves behind him, as usual, the distinct whiff of cordite. This exit, though, is a little different from the others. Sunderland for all their good intentions are picking up the tab for football's failings and its tendency towards hysteria.

Roy Keane knew that Niall Quinn was never going to push him over the precipice. There was no need to. Quinn is smart enough an operator to know that the gamble he took on Keane had paid an unexpectedly earlier dividend but the real benefits would be down the line. Keeping a man who has served as both friend and foe happy was the main priority.

Money was a concern but not a pressing one. Keane has spent Drumaville's money generously at Sunderland and sometimes foolishly, sometimes making the mistake of signing the mediocrity he knew rather then the potential he did not. For his money he got not a lot of quality but he got enough to gain promotion in romantically unlikely circumstances and he got enough to stay up, which in the current market is no mean feat.

Signing players for Sunderland is a little more difficult than it is in Fantasy Football, however. There are, as Keane has lamented bitterly, those players whose wives would rather shop in London or Manchester (if not Milan or Barcelona) than by the Wear. If you were young and could get two or three times as much money at Fulham or West Ham, you would do the same. Roy himself went from Nottingham to Manchester as a young man.

Keane, though, increasingly gave the impression of being disenchanted more with modern footballers and modern football than with Sunderland itself. In interviews in recent years Keane has been wont to return to the particular hurt which the manner of his exit from Old Trafford caused him. Saipan was a clash of personalities and an issue he felt worth fighting over. Old Trafford he sees as an institutional betrayal.

Despite the entertainingly Hamlet like soliloquy, which became a feature of his Friday press conferences, he has enough belief in himself to have looked in the mirror tomorrow and told himself that he was the man to bring Sunderland all the way. One suspects, though, that his heart was just no longer in it. He left because he could, because he does not need to put up with the hysteria and the mania and because he does not believe any more that there is such a thing as loyalty in professional football.

The cumulative effect of messy exits from Saipan, Old Trafford and Parkhead has been to induce a slight melancholy in Keane which prompts him to talk often about the old days playing with Rockmount FC. He went to play for Rockmount when he was eight years old and stayed until he was 16. The friends from that all-conquering team of boys are the friends he has today, the guys who come to stay in his house, the guys he sees when he travels home.

Rockmount never let him down or disappointed him. Forest tried to short change him when he left. Celtic was a mistake he feels now. Saipan is still freighted with much regret but United's treatment of him probablychanged him irrevocably. Talking earlier this year in the context of loyalty, he remembered realising that on the day of his departure United had statements prepared which did not even get his years of service to the club right.

"I lost the love of the game that Friday morning. I thought football is cruel, life is cruel. It takes two to tango also. I am fully responsible for my own actions but some things are wrong. I left on a Friday and they told me certain things before I left that day. I was told the following week I couldn't sign for another club. I had been led to believe I could. There were certain things I was told at certain meetings that were basic lies.

"That was part of the exit plan, I am convinced. Especially with my pride, I wasn't going to accept that. They had a statement prepared and they were thanking me for 11½ years of service. I had to remind the manager and [Manchester United chief executive] David Gill I had been there 12½ years.

"I think that might have been part of the plan. Then financial stuff was mentioned. I was thinking, 'My God, I am happy to leave. I won't go down that road.' A week later they announced £70m or £80m profit after telling me I hadn't played for six weeks and so they weren't prepared to do this and that. I told David Gill I had broken my foot playing for Manchester United against Liverpool. Pretty sad."

Pretty sad. And Sunderland, a club who have attempted to transfuse the body of the Premier League with a little of the colossal decency of their chairman, are the ones who will lose out. Keane was not going to wait around to see if Niall Quinn's face would become increasingly more anguished. He was not going to spend too many more Saturdays being abused from the sidelines as he was at last Saturday's defeat by Bolton.

Roy Keane will master management. The struggles he was experiencing at Sunderland were a mere blip and January's clear-out of long faces and redundant mediocrities would in all likelihood have energised him. Keane does not need the hysteria or the abuse any more, however. Standing on the sideline watching his team play does not consume him or energise him as playing did.

He has his money, his wife, his children, his dogs and home. Walking away is an act of sanity and self-preservation and a curiously dignified thing to do in an era when managers creased and bent with worrying cling white-knuckled to their desks until dragged away by security.

He is too edgy a character to retire to golf or punditry. He will be back and the knowledge among chairmen of what he is capable of in terms of his successes with Sunderland and in terms of his departure will ensure that he is instant box office gold again. The fact that he is capable of walking away at any time makes him such a compulsive figure. When the circus opens at a new club the show will begin again and we will all be ringside stoking the madness.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog...ane-sunderland

Originally Posted by antonin jablonsky

So you now agree that the NBA system hasn't produced different results to the PL system and that as usual your original point was shit. Good.

as usual you are just being a #@&%!.

if you can't see that NBA is more competetive with salary caps, transfer caps, draft system and an enclosed league, then I there is no point in convincing you.

Originally Posted by keano's love

as usual you are just being a #@&%!.

if you can't see that NBA is more competetive with salary caps, transfer caps, draft system and an enclosed league, then I there is no point in convincing you.

It isn't, the same number of teams have won in the last 30 odd years as have won in England. The Lakers have dominated much of that time and are likely to win again. it's done nothing to affect the competition in the game. Cleveland are gonna be back in the bottom of the league after LeBron goes in 2 years and they'll still not have a Championship with him at that time.


You should've used MLB or the NFL as your example, you might've had more of a point.

Then again, nobody gives a shit about you wanting to turn British football into some Yank copycat league so go £#%&! yourself.

Originally Posted by keano's love

as usual you are just being a #@&%!.

if you can't see that NBA is more competetive with salary caps, transfer caps, draft system and an enclosed league, then I there is no point in convincing you.

he's just throwing facts around again, isn't he. what a #@&%!, eh.

Interesting piece from th Grauniad on Keane there that brings out quite nicely the effect of leaving United had on Keane.

It's a bit too sympathetic to the man for my liking though. I don't think he ever thought himself expendable and it came as a great shock that he could be.Some of his recent comment indicate a bitterness that he's still not got over.

The truth is that almost since the day he left performances and results have improved significantly. I sometimes wonder if he can reconcile that.

Originally Posted by borsuk

he's just throwing facts around again, isn't he. what a #@&%!, eh.