FA lacks the heart to tackle indiscipline

According to his own best-selling, £1m autobiography Roy Keane set out to "hurt" his sworn enemy Alf-Inge Haaland and, having achieved his objective with a proficiency which would have satisfied a professional thug, walked off the field with the uplifting sense of a job well done.

Of course, had he not been a celebrated footballer and had performed his assault on the street or in a night-club rather than on a football pitch in full view of the nation he might now be liable to imprisonment. This is the routine consequence of causing grievous bodily harm with intent.

Instead of doing time, however, the Manchester United midfielder, to his own intense disappointment ­ and that of his club's director and legal voice Maurice Watkins ­ will, failing an appeal, have to pay a fine of £150,000 and serve a suspension of five matches.

This, presumably, is the Football Association's idea of imposing a new regime of discipline and standards on a game which lurches from one case of anarchy to another. Keane earns around £75,000 a week, which means that his fine is the equivalent of no more than two weeks' wages. He is the captain of the nation's best supported club and, as such, is an example to young people across the land. The message these young people receive today is that unabashed violence is a relatively minor matter.

At the hearing in Bolton yesterday, evidence was given on Keane's behalf by Eamon Dunphy, the player's ghost-writer and a leading Irish journalist and author.

The thrust of this testimony, it is understood, is that Keane really didn't say the incriminating words that were attributed to him in the autobiography The ghost-writer took "artistic licence", which says more than anything that Keane respects the need for certain standards of behaviour in the game which has lavished on him such huge rewards about as much as the thousands who forked out their money for a book which they believed was an authentic expression of the author's experience.

The public know that most sporting autobiographies involve at some point the assistance of a professional writer. But what they might also reasonably presume is that the man whose life story the book purports to tell can muster the energy, and the interest, actually to read what is going out in his name and creating an impressive thud in his bank balance.

The defence of Keane yesterday directly contradicted this understanding ­ and the sentence that followed the FA's finding that Keane was guilty of two charges of bringing the game into disrepute ­ asserting that it didn't really matter either way. Keane had had his moment of revenge, his huge payment from a publisher, and, after paying a fine which for him was, relatively speaking, a matter of small change, he would merely sit out five matches.

One of the old, tortured declarations of football authority is that no one is bigger than the game. Down the years a stockpile of evidence has accumulated in direct opposition to this pretty thought. The Keane episode is another major contribution. In his autobiography Keane or his ghostwriter, or perhaps both, made some other bracing statements. One was in defence of Keane's former team-mate Eric Cantona whose attack on a "looper of a fan" would have led to his instant banishment in any game which set any store on genuine discipline. Another was to say that the FA Cup was a "load of bollocks". The book has been praised for its honesty, but yesterday the word seemed particularly misapplied.

In seems that its most dramatic statement was, according to its authors, a lie. So, you have to believe, is the notion that football authority has any real heart for the job of cleaning up the game.