Roy Keane: The power and the fury of football's most driven man

It was once said of Roy Keane, football's angriest superstar, that the most significant milestone on his road to Damascus was a police cell in Manchester three years ago. There he explained to his boss, Sir Alex Ferguson, the background to an accusation that he had assaulted a woman in a city-centre bar during a drinking session that followed one of Manchester United's championship triumphs.

Ferguson, bleary-eyed after being dragged from his bed, anxious but suppressing his horror that the famous club was again being paraded across the front pages of the tabloids, said: "Tell me the story, Roy." Keane spoke of his anguish at the effects of the incident on his wife Theresa, their young family, his own family back in Cork and the club. He said he saw more clearly than ever the folly of celebrity footballers drinking publicly in a city drawn to them like moths to a light. But if the affair went away, the pain and the anger didn't. Roy Keane does not drink publicly any more, nor, it is claimed, privately, but the story of his life has lost none of its drama. Those who know him best, who have watched, at times mesmerised, his extraordinary development as a footballer of legendary commitment but brittle temperament, who see him more than anything as a one-man war zone of the spirit, say that his troubles, and even his glory, cannot be detached from that basic resolve to turn his back on the bottle.

One team-mate sums up the central tension of Keane's life with a savage succinctness. "Somewhere along the road," he says, "it dawned on Roy that he was a disaster on the drink. The trouble is he is finding out that he can also be a disaster off it." Even Keane's fiercest supporters, those who have always admired the zeal he has brought to the business of winning football matches, have some difficulty now in defending the excesses of his nature.

His latest assault on the senses of polite society comes in a searing autobiographical work, currently being serialised by the Rupert Murdoch empire and reported to be enriching the player by £1 million – a nice little earner on top of his £70,000-a-week-plus earnings at Old Trafford. In the book, co-written with Eamon Dunphy, the controverisal Irish journalist and former footballer, he re-ignites the storm over the row with Irish national team coach Mick McCarthy that led to Keane leaving the recent World Cup before a ball was kicked. He sneers that the Football Association of Ireland is such a poor payer that it has to settle for coaches like McCarthy, a former hero of the Irish team, and Jack Charlton, who is revered in Ireland as the man who finally put the nation on the international stage with appearances in two World Cups and the European Championships.

More serious, many believe, is his assertion that he deliberately injured the Norwegian Alf-Inge Haaland as the result of a three-year "grudge". This claim is likely to provoke disciplinary action by the Football Assocation – some have called for a 12-week ban – and possibly legal action. Keane, who was reported to have grabbed Juan Sebastian Veron around the neck following a mistake by the Argentinian that may have cost the team the title, also rails against the "Rolex culture" of many of his United team-mates and says they "got away with murder" in their last futile season. The references to team-mates remain unspecific in the serialisation, but it was a rare hint of coyness in an outpouring that John Giles, the former Leeds and Ireland star, reckons could prove the most honest memoir ever produced by a footballer.

Says Giles: "There is so much to admire in Roy Keane the professional footballer, but you have to worry that he is in danger of destroying himself. He demands so much from himself, which really is admirable, if not unique in the modern game, but sooner or later he has to accept that football is a team game and there is a point where you can only answer for yourself. You cannot be everybody's keeper." Such a desire may indeed be part of his trouble. His explosion in the Irish World Cup camp, his friends say, was motivated more than anything by a frustration that preparation was poor, and that when he raged against the organisation of a training session, the dangerous condition of the pitch and the failure of mineral-replacement drinks to arrive while players sweated in the heat, he was voicing the complaints of a player who had done more than anyone on the field to ensure Ireland's presence in the great tournament.

His supporters say that he was also terribly miscast in the matter of his team-mate Niall Quinn's hugely commended gesture of committing the £1 million proceeds of his testimonial match earlier this year to charitable causes. While Quinn's Sunderland team were playing Ireland at Sunderland's Stadium of Light, Keane went to the cinema with his wife. But the whole picture did not emerge, say the Keane camp. Keane had a problem with the journalist producing the match programme, a writer who years earlier had urged the Irish crowd to boo Keane after a run of non-appearances from the national team.

It was also said that in that incident there could be found some of the origins of the eruption at the World Cup, Keane claimed he had given McCarthy a week's notice that he would not be appearing in Sunderland – he pleaded exhaustion after a gruelling, injury-affected season with United – but the Irish coach only released the news on the eve of the game. In fact, Keane is a regular visitor to hospitals and has done much to support his old junior team Rockmount, in Cork. It didn't help, though, when he referred to the widely popular Quinn as "Mother Theresa".

Nowhere, though, has Keane's sense of responsibility been more pronounced than in the care he has shown for his parents, Maurice, a Cork character nicknamed Mossie, and Marie, and his three brothers and sister. Keane's father was laid off when a tyre factory was shut down 30 years ago, and he has not worked since then. But from the moment the young Keane signed for Nottingham Forest, regular financial support for the whole family was scrupulously supplied. "Mossie", a popular figure in the bars around the harbour city, is otherwise known as Sterling Moss on account of his son supplying him with plenty of the British currency.

When Keane moved to Manchester United, for £3.7m, he moved his family from Mayfield, an area dominated by council housing, to a big redbrick house in its own grounds in the Whitechurch district. It was one defining statement of Keane's nature, but there were others less uplifting. At Forest his passion for the game was celebrated by Brian Clough, but there were times when he fell into disfavour with the disciplinarian manager. In his autobiography, Keane reveals how Clough punched him in the face after a critical mistake in an important game. Keane also drew bad publicity for some unruly incidents, once at a nightclub.

The dichotomy in his professional profile was already pronounced. On the field he had a raging desire to win. Off it, the rage lingered on in his social activities, and if he had a moment of self-discovery in that police cell in Mancheser, it had been a long time coming. On the field, too, his control often slipped. Alex Ferguson, often against heavy odds, attempted to make a virtue of the anger and the indiscipline that repeatedly brought his player to the attention of the Football Association. "Roy Keane," said Ferguson, "is a great warrior. One of the most committed players in the game, and you have to understand that about him before you make any judgement."

The passion was evident from the start. He stood out for his energy and his ambition in the Rockmount team, and when his later efforts for Cobh Ramblers failed to attract English scouts, he wrote to every English football club, in effect chiding them for their neglect of a sure-fire winner. When he was called to Dublin for a youth training session, he astounded the Irish FA coaches with his commitment. One of them recalls: "Roy was a driven man from the start. As a young teenager he put so much more into his training. One day we had them running round the track and Roy just about lapped the rest. No doubt, he had a fire in him."

Now the fear is that the fire will consume him as well as so many of his opponents. Giles, in his column in the Daily Mail this week, advocated the advice of the great American golfer Walter Hagen, who said his fellow professionals should all take time to smell the flowers.

Giles, recalling his old days as a famously committed professional, said he understood a lot of the forces that drove Keane to his point of current loneliness. "I understand his frustration when he believes that team-mates are not operating on his own level of commitment, I understand his irritation at what he considers over-celebration, and I know that for some competitors the joy of winning will always be outweighed by the pain of losing. But there is a point where you have to look beyond yourself and your own demands, and when I did that I felt a lot better for it. I hope it happens for Roy Keane because, by any standards, he is one great footballer."

There has never been much argument about that. Though never in the first rank of creative midfielders, his ability to influence a game can be staggering, and was most famously displayed in 1999 when his performance in Turin against Juventus rescued United from what seemed certain defeat and set up the historic triple success crowned with the European Cup in Barcelona's Nou Camp stadium. Keane was missing that night because of an accumulation of yellow cards, one of them incurred in that epic performance against Juventus. So he watched his team-mates pick the fruits of his own extraordinary labours, and later he was angry when, in his opinion, they celebrated too long.

It was a statement from the depths of a driven, restless and at times deeply troubled man. For the moment, it seems, he remains trapped in the terrible competitive rage which has made him one of the great footballers of any age. But one for whom each game, each day, too often seems not so much a challenge as a provocation.

Life story

Born: Roy Maurice Keane 10 August,1971 in Cork.

Family: Son of Maurice and Marie Keane; married to Theresa; they have three children.

Club career: Played for Rockmount as a junior and then Cobh Ramblers, both in Ireland; joined Nottingham Forest in1990 and moved to Manchester United in 1993, where he scored 45 goals and has been captain since 1997.

International career: He gained his first full international cap for the Republic of Ireland in May 1991 under the management of Jackie Charlton; he now has 58 caps and has scored nine international goals.

Honours: Six Premier League titles (including two FA Cup and league doubles, in 1994 and 1996); Voted Player of the Year by both the Football Writers and the Professional Footballers Association at the end of the 1999/2000 season

He says: From his forthcoming book, Keane: the autobiography: "The players were too used to Rolex watches, flashy cars and mansions that they forgot about the game that got them the Rolexes, the cars and the mansion."
– on his team-mates.

"I've made mistakes. I was naive and probably drank a little too much"

They say: "The people of Ireland may forgive him but I never will. He is a disgrace to his country"
– Jack Charlton