James Lawton: Keane stands idle as mob rule shrouds stadium of darkness

So the beast has broken cover again. The stench of yob anarchy is back on the terraces and the field. It is a time, you might think, for every football man of any genuine stature to take his hands from his eyes and exert some of the influence gained in all the years of growing reputation and wealth.

Someone like Roy Keane, certainly, someone to show that for all his own offences against discipline and decent order in his playing career, he knows now he cannot afford to pussyfoot on such a vital issue, not as the manager of a club whose fans had just spilt on to the pitch spitting their hatred.

Here, surely, was the chance for Keane to confirm his new status as a man of the future, fit to hold the highest office, perhaps at Old Trafford, and maybe even to atone for some of the atrocities of his past, and not least the cold-blooded assertion that he had attempted to ruin the career of an opponent against whom he held a grudge.

But then what did we hear from the scourge of prawn sandwich-munching in the corporate box? Did we get an urgent call to turn back another dark age of football, when the idea of taking your children to a stadium amounts to shocking irresponsibility? No, what we had was a statement so feeble, so self-serving, it made a mockery of what Keane, the man of hard and ferociously fashioned beliefs on how the game should be played and run, is supposed to represent.

Keane's reaction was so spineless it seemed to underwrite all those years of Clockwork Orange violence that made English football the pariah of world sport.

He said, "I hope they go easy on us. I hope it will not take away from what the players achieved. No one wants to see supporters on the pitch, trust me, and we will focus on security. I'm not really sure what went on at the end. If you think I'm going to sit here and criticise Sunderland supporters, then you are wrong."

It was a stunning abdication of responsibility and if the Football Association does not see it as an invitation to take some meaningful action, some attempt to lay down significant deterrents before the rabble take hold again, it too will be guilty of the most appaling complacency.

Keane may say that he is responsible solely for team affairs but that would be nonsense. He has been charged with remaking a football club, giving it new competitive values and setting a professional tone, and in many respects he has been doing a brilliant job.

But this was a test of his mettle as a significant figure in a game to which, as a player, he brought both great glory and disfigurement. What would the achievement of Keane's team in beating Newcastle United, of all teams, have meant if it had accompanied, as it could so easily have been, by the death or maiming of some kid caught in the chaos that came at the end of the game. Would Keane have kept his head so firmly rooted in the sand then? Would he not have been susceptible to the idea that he was completely out of step with all that had happened so sickeningly around him?

When he led a pack of Manchester United players in pursuit of a referee he displayed a shocking lack of control and leadership. After making his spine-chilling, premeditated assault on Alf Inge-Haaland, he wrote in his autobiography that he had experienced not a sliver of regret. Sins of passion, his admirers might say, warrior sins, all washed away when the action was over and he could take his place as a statesman of the game that rewarded him so well.

Washed away? Certainly not at the weekend; no, it was as though those sins congealed around a failure to understand that decent behaviour on and off the field is not just desirable but lifeblood.

Joey Barton was the target of the Sunderland fans. They spat at him and threw bottles and coins when he warmed up on the touchline. Of course, he is not an admirable figure. But on this occasion who performed most despicably, the player who provocatively kissed his shirt in response to the jeers or the mob who baited him for behaviour which, at least to some extent, they were in the course of reproducing?

What happened at the Stadium of Darkness was that the fans of both Sunderland and Newcastle attempted to establish mob rule. They fought on the pitch after breaking through cordons of police and security men.

Roy Keane seemed to believe that the proper response was a review of security rather than anything that might just cloud a famous victory. He was utterly wrong. What is required now is something that will dig into the consciousness of the hooligans who for so long terrorised English football, something that will set a standard of reaction to all life-threatening mob behaviour. It needs to be quite unambiguous about the determination to fight a problem that still, after the dormant years, is a deadly threat to the national game.

The Stadium of Darkness should be closed down for two home games. It would send the right message into every corner of football. It might even make Roy Keane think about the immutable difference between right and wrong.

Hard to get a word in edgeways past the straight bats of public relations

In the course of his wide-ranging interview with Matt Prior in this paper yesterday, Brian Viner told of a somewhat draining need to thread his questions about the Twenty20 circus in the Caribbean through the watchful defence of the cricketer's agent.

It provided a graphic picture of the forces at work in the selling of modern professional sport.

There was a time when you could sit in the shade of the pavilion and discuss the nuances of life, and even cricket, in the company of men like Geoff Boycott and Ian Botham and Steve Waugh without hindrance – or obligation to plug a battery of brand names.

Viner's experience reminded me of a press conference at the Beijing Olympics staged on behalf of 14-year-old Tom Daley and, it seemed, his sponsors. The boy scarcely uttered a sentence that lacked a namecheck.

Unfortunately, the skill Viner displayed while simultaneously revealing the real man behind the faceguard, and the phoney world of public relations and salesmanship which surrounds him, is relatively rare.

Mostly, the big sell rolls on unchallenged. Here, it was deftly stroked to the boundary ropes, something not normally associated with the biff and bang of Twenty20.

Levy receives bitter lesson in real football intelligence

It shouldn't be too surprising that Daniel Levy, chairman of Tottenham Hotspur and the owner of a first-class Cambridge degree, has taken so long to understand the first thing about running a football club.

Roman Abramovich, bright enough to gobble up so many of Mother Russia's mineral resources, has also struggled with so many of the fundamentals.

Lower down the food chain, Don Roberts, a Leeds businessman who made his fortune in the laundry business, once asked why it was that he and his fellow Leeds United directors never received the same level of praise as a certain Don Revie.

The great Bill Shankly certainly wouldn't have been surprised by the failure of a Cambridge man to protect the legacies of Arthur Rowe and Bill Nicholson at White Hart Lane. "Winning at football isn't about the kind of intelligence you get out of a book," said Shanks. "If it was, I'd spend most of my time hanging around Oxford and Cambridge. But you wouldn't find many Busbys or Steins around there. Malcolm Muggeridge is a great man but I wouldn't put him in charge of the A team. Football is about instinct and giving control to someone who knows football and how footballers tick."

Levy's most disastrous error was a failure to understand, despite many lectures from many quarters, including this one, that appointing someone like Damien Comolli, a man of extremely slender credentials, to run the most vital area of a club, the selection and signing of players, was an act of outright football illiteracy, one that wouldn't have been countenanced for a work day by the great football men of the past, or those of the present like Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsène Wenger.

By turning to the old pro Harry Redknapp, Levy has made his first significant step into football reality.