James Lawton: Keane's alchemy is to mix his own spirit with the lessons of Clough and Ferguson

It may be 48 hours old now, but the triumph of Roy Keane at Sunderland was so clean, so classic, so rich in his potential for a future among the football managers of the ages, that the angst and the self-advertisements of, say, the perennially attention-seeking Sam Allardyce should not divert us prematurely from its weight or its style.

Especially - in an age when so many managers, from Jose Mourinho down, seem to spend many of their waking hours making the case for themselves - the style.

So far, at least, Keane's footwork in the training ground, on the touchline and while walking into the great maw of football publicity, has been faultless. It has mocked those fears - not shared here, incidentally - that by now his post-playing career would already be resembling the burned-out hulk of some mis-directed vehicle of war.

OK, so he had a bit of prior: 11 sendings-off, his leadership of a mob of Manchester United players chasing down referee Andy D'Urso sending out the blood-chilling message that football might just be on the brink of anarchy, the requirement of Sir Alex Ferguson to visit him in a police cell after one particularly riotous night out, his callously premeditated, vengeful tackle on Alf Inge Haaland, the Saipan explosion in the face of the Republic of Ireland coach, Mick McCarthy, and, finally, the uncompromising attack on what he believed was the lack commitment of some of his Old Trafford team-mates.

No, maybe these were not the antecedents of one of football's true statesmen, but Niall Quinn, the man who brought him to Sunderland despite being branded Mother Teresa when they collided in that World Cup controversy, was astute enough to project the often violent force of Roy Keane into a different context.

It was the context of responsibility. Of being able to shape the men and the events surrounding him. Of running a team not necessarily in his own image but sharing his own deepest values about how the game should be played and with what degree of commitment. Quinn concluded with brilliant prescience that we would see a different Roy Keane; we would see arguably the most influential and dominating player in the history of the Premiership applying all the lessons he had learned under two of the most inspired managers the game has ever seen, Brian Clough and Sir Alex Ferguson.

Correctly, Quinn came to the conclusion that behind the singularly arrogant image, there was indeed a man with both the intelligence and the character to learn his lessons. It was necessary to curb the drink. It was important to examine the effects of his behaviour on both himself and his team. D'Urso, the victim of the outrageous mob scene, quickly became a witness for Keane's defence. He said that the United captain had expressed his regret for what happened and proved this was so with subsequently impeccable behaviour.

At Sunderland all kinds of explosions were anticipated when Keane found that the players under his command had neither his talent nor his rage to win. There were no detonations. Just decisions, a whole series of them which revealed an ability to balance the talent of a player and his willingness to give the best of himself.

Noting his old team-mate Dwight Yorke's impressive performances for Trinidad & Tobago in last summer's World Cup, and maybe recognising an imperative in the veteran to make some final statement about a career which often veered between brilliant success and dire controversy, he saw a suitable investment in both talent and desire.

A firm hand, plainly, has been accompanied by a streak of practicality. Recently, he left three of his players behind when they were slow to board the team bus to travel to a game, but the point had been made and, he made clear, needed no further recrimination.

All kinds of tests will face Keane in his first season in the Premiership, and it would be absurd to suggest that his career is already made and that it now merely awaits the call from Old Trafford when Ferguson finally decides he has done all that is required in assuaging his own need for success. Keane will face new pressures, new tests, in the top flight and he will be examined against the old truth that it is only in the difficult times that you get the true measure of a football man. But, then, maybe Keane has already provided some imperishable examples of his response to the toughest of challenges.

When Ireland was split over his defection from the 2002 World Cup, it was impossible not to note that he was by far the biggest reason the team were in the Far East. He carried Ireland virtually on one leg. Now, in this week of all weeks when his old team visit Italy defending the narrowest of leads, who can forget his response to the identical situation in Turin in 1999? Keane's performance, his refusal to let Juventus pass into a final denied him by a booking sustained at the height of the action, was for some hard judges the single most outstanding competitive effort they had ever seen.

Such achievement, you have to believe, now lies at the heart of Roy Keane's success as a manager. It underpins his confidence - and cannot but affect the reaction of all those he chooses to represent him on the field.

Whatever other strengths he brings to the challenges that now await him with that special pressure which comes to those who have already excited the highest expectations, there is one that stands alone and without flaw. It is that nobody needs to be told what he did - and what he can always reasonably demand of all who play for him. It is simply to give everything they have.

Eriksson remains in world of his own despite long list of calamities

Now, someone and something quite different - the life and operating style of Sven Goran Eriksson. Who could not envy him as he waxes nostalgically serene on the back of the daftest contract ever awarded, even in football? He says that whenever he comes back to England he is besieged by well-wishers. They tell him to disregard the critics: that he did a good job while he was here. He didn't three times stare like a befuddled rabbit at the football headlights switched on by Luiz Felipe Scolari. He didn't drive Paul Scholes, the nation's best midfielder by a mile, out of international football and into a lather of frustration that students of the player's career would never have believed possible in such a wonderfully committed - and patriotic - English footballer.

He didn't pamper and genuflect before the David Beckham celebrity circus in a way guaranteed to turn the stomach of anyone who remembered how it was when Sir Alf Ramsey led the nation to success at the highest level.

He didn't leap from his dinner table when summoned by Beckham to a meeting of players discussing the possibility of strike action because Rio Ferdinand had been left out of the team for failing to submit to a drugs test.

He didn't pick Theo Walcott for a World Cup before he had played a single first-team game for Arsenal and, even more unforgivably, before he had seen him play. Pele, no less, said the decision was "unique". He was too diplomatic to say that it was almost certainly the worst decision ever made by a national team manager.

Who wouldn't envy Eriksson? Only those losers who, for all the stress and the pain of it, remain determined to live in the real world.

Moores needs Australia attitude

England's cricket leaders are convinced that in Peter Moores (right) they have the perfect replacement for the departed coach, Duncan Fletcher. He will, they say, bring to the team new standards of commitment and professionalism. He will arrest the descent into absolute futility. He will say that playing for England is a vocation rather than an interminable piss-up.

We can only wish him well - while perhaps reflecting in the light of Australia's latest annexation of the World Cup that it might have been wiser to invest Down Under. Any Australian, short of one of the more relaxed deckchair attendants on Bondi Beach, could have taught us a few urgent lessons. The point is Peter Moores has to do more than remake a cricket team. He has to invent a new culture.