Martin O'Neill and Roy Keane

[geysir]

Thanks WexCar, interesting reading. The win bonuses will bump up most of those salaries, but for some (Croatia and Bosnia for example), they earn tips that make it worth their while coaching. Bilic (when he signed with Loko) complained that he was not allowed to install "his" agent in the club, as it was already taken by the son-in-law of the President.

Our management team's basic high salary, one of the highest in Europe, is for failing to qualify. For doing their job and qualifying, they are contracted to receive a huge bonus on top of that basic salary and no doubt more bonuses on top of that should they pick up up a few points at those Finals.
Possibly there are some beleaguered African countries which have such a (20x to 30x) discrepancy between their local league manager's salary and international manager's salary. For us, living in the relatively affluent part of europe, the fact that the huge inequality exists, reflect a serious dysfunction existing in irish football.
The dysfunction is not just with the local game but also with the biased focus on the senior intl team.
The FAI is there to represent and administer all that is about Irish football.
The intl job is part time and what it takes to be the manager of our team is not that much different than being the manager of Wales, or Scotland for that matter.
The main justification for exercising such a discrepancy of favour of distribution of available resources by the association which runs Irish football, is if income earned can be fed into the local game. That has not come to pass. Other mentioned possible beneficial justifications, in reality have had minimal benefit to the local game

Does our team need Roy Keane? hasn't O'Neill more than enough support with his other mates? This is just an international team, it is not farcical for a medium level association to have an assistant manager earning Eur700k p/a?
If you take Croatia as an example, their domestic league is poorly supported, not that much different from the LOI, yet there's not much danger of their FA paying a fortune for an international manager. The Croatian players are better than ours. Are they born with that talent and somehow by some quirk of the stork, being born in Ireland means you are not born with the talent? I doubt it. The Croatian clubs manage to hold onto their star players and reap the benefit of some lotto level transfer fees and are able to fund their their club structure and academies. The Croation FA don't need to pay their intl team manager a fortune to make a silk purse out of the available players, the players are already at a very decent standard.

[Spudulika]

If you take Croatia as an example, their domestic league is poorly supported, not that much different from the LOI, yet there's not much danger of their FA paying a fortune for an international manager. The Croatian players are better than ours. Are they born with that talent and somehow by some quirk of the stork, being born in Ireland means you are not born with the talent? I doubt it. The Croatian clubs manage to hold onto their star players and reap the benefit of some lotto level transfer fees and are able to fund their their club structure and academies. The Croation FA don't need to pay their intl team manager a fortune to make a silk purse out of the available players, the players are already at a very decent standard.

1. The manager is paid very well compared to league managers, plus he gets the chance to make large sums of money by capping players.
2. Croatian clubs make very little from sales of players, the majority of whom have already moved outside the coutnry at a young age. A clear example is the paltry 250,000eur (before tax) that arrived in Dinamo Zagreb's bank account after the sale of Eduardo. In addition the majority of players who are sold outside the country are owned by 3rd parties (usually local politicians or businessmen).
3. The standard of the Croatian league is okay, but the large number of sub-standard players (who would't get a kick of a ball in the LOI) goes down to "favourite" contracts. The pay for play at youth level translates somewhat at senior level, some clubs try to rescue it but the big 2 clubs hoover up all the talent very quickly.

Salary and bonuses of International managers is not as important as results and what it means to the economy and view of the country. Additionally in Croatia all resources are poured into football, with drops into basketball, volleyball and handball. In Ireland we have the GAA and Rugby getting the lion's share, so football needs whatever it takes to get headlines, especially with the sky leagues next door.

[DannyInvincible]

According to the Sun, Roy Keane showed up at Tom Cleverley's door suspecting him of having leaked stories to the press over his departure from Villa: http://balls.ie/football/roy-keane-vs-tom-cleverley/

Not long after Keane’s exit from the club, reports in The Daily Mail claimed that he had run-ins with some of the club’s ‘big name’ players, these being Gabby Agbonlahor, Charles N’Zogbia and Fabian Delph. The reports also said that the atmosphere was “horrible” whenever the former Man Utd midfielder was present. Paul Lambert has since denied these rumours, saying Keane left due to commitments with Ireland.

The Sun claims that on Tuesday of this week, the Ireland assistant manager turned up at the house of Tom Cleverley, who is on loan at Aston Villa from Man Utd. Keane believed that Cleverley was one leaking stories to the media.

The paper says that Keane, who may have been captured on CCTV, “furiously” pressed the doorbell and waited outside for 15 minutes before storming off when no one came to the door. He has since accepted that the midfielder was not the one talking to the media and is “looking for another target”.

[back of the net]

According to the Sun, Roy Keane showed up at Tom Cleverley's door suspecting him of having leaked stories to the press over his departure from Villa: http://balls.ie/football/roy-keane-vs-tom-cleverley/

Obviously Massively taking into the Account the article comes from The SUN .....so one wud propably can assume the journalist who wrote it , exaggerated the story to sell the papers or that the story itself is complete b*llox!

But eitherway ..... i do worry about how Roy is been portrayed in media...whether its his fault/not...what do the Ireland players think when they read these stories about there Assitant manager.

Cant be a good thing!

[DannyInvincible]

But eitherway ..... i do worry about how Roy is been portrayed in media...whether its his fault/not...what do the Ireland players think when they read these stories about there Assitant manager.

I don't know how accurate the Sun's portrayal of this alleged incident might be, but Roy can't stop them exaggerating. Everyone involved in our set-up from the top down is well aware of Roy's media profile/reputation and I'm sure our players are also well aware of how the media can spin things and sensationalise events. In what way would you see it affecting them?

[KK77]

The rag enough said.

[DannyInvincible]

Lambert says things were blown out of proportion: http://www.rte.ie/sport/soccer/engli...verly-at-home/

Aston Villa manager Paul Lambert has confirmed his former assistant Roy Keane did turn up at midfielder Tom Cleverley's house this week.

However, the Villa boss insists Cleverley said the incident was blown out of proportion by the media, who reported that the fiery Irishman stood ringing the player's doorbell for 15 minutes seeking an argument.

Keane, who stepped down from his role recently to focus on his position as Republic of Ireland assistant manager, supposedly wanted an angry showdown about recent 'leaks' from the dressing room from his time at the club.

However, Lambert said: "I spoke to Tom this morning really briefly and he assures me that what is being portrayed is certainly not what happened. That was it, really.

"I've probably spoken about Roy more since he's left than when he was here. I think you (should) give the guy a break.

"From the brief chat I had with Tom, it certainly wasn't how it was portrayed. That was what Tom told me this morning."

Various tabloid stories about Keane's spell at Villa Park have emerged in recent weeks.

The Manchester United legend allegedly had a fractured relationship with several senior players, most notably vice captain Gabriel Agbonlahor, due to his domineering personality.

Asked whether Keane had told Lambert he was unhappy about such stories coming out of the club, the manager said: "No. I spoke to Roy. We're good pals, not just in this regard but we're good pals in general and that will always be the same.

"Roy's obviously got his Ireland role to contend with and work on, trying to qualify for Euro 2016. There's no problem on that side. He's my pal.

"I spoke to Tom and the matter is finished."

Villa take on Manchester United in the Barclays Premier League on Saturday.

[TheOneWhoKnocks]

"He's a good man. I wasn't there long but I enjoyed it. He was very demanding and tried hard to motivate the players. He demanded the maximum - always. We did boxes in training every day, and he was passionate about them; we couldn't lose the ball. His handshake was very firm and if he had a problem he looked you straight in the eye and talked to you."

Villarreal's Giovani Dos Santos on Roy Keane.

[The Fly]

"I'd waited long enough. I fu*king hit the doorbell hard. The door was there (I think). Take that you cu*t!"

[DannyInvincible]

This New Statesman article about the striving for "authenticity" in contemporary society popped up on my Facebook feed earlier after a friend had 'liked' it, so I gave it a read: http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyl...forget-be-real

The last thing I was expecting to see in it was a brief analysis of the authenticity of the image Roy Keane portrays for himself.

In The King’s English, Kingsley Amis’s sparkling guide to English usage, the author described some words as “rendered unusable”. These words, he argued, are so debased by voguish laziness and approximation that the careful writer ought to avoid them completely.
In his new volume Authenticity Is a Con, Peter York writes that it is time to add a new word to Amis’s “rendered unusable” list. He argues that, far from a state of guileless integrity, authenticity is now a marketing stance. Anything and everything, from foods to places, can be given the authenticity treatment, like a sepia tint.

If York has a single target in mind, a sweet spot in his Venn diagram of overlapping aspects of “authenticity”, it would be this: an extravagantly bearded young man (“Edwardian Explorer Poet”, only with access to lots of moisturiser), wearing selvedge denim (everything so lustrously matte and unflashy that it becomes more ruinously expensive than the bling it mocks), wandering through Shoreditch in east London en route to a paleo-diet brunch with some other creative types, set to a backdrop of exposed brick walls.

...

A certain type of professional sportsman turns authenticity into his house style. In the documentary Keane and Vieira, Roy Keane never missed an opportunity to describe the burgeoning hatred and violence that simmered inside him every week. Football, he said, even when winning, gave him little or no pleasure, let alone joy. There wasn’t time: he was too busy filling his mind with hatred to be ready for the next week’s warfare.

It is impossible to prove otherwise, to know what Keane really thinks. Let’s not make windows into midfielders’ souls, as Elizabeth I almost said. There was, however, a note of self-mythology in Keane’s narrative. An authentic hard man, too full of hatred to enjoy a second of glory? Perhaps. Or a man who knows how to cultivate a sense of difference from the flashy superficiality of his more conspicuous peers? Arguably, it is Ronaldo, with his wet-look hair gel and second career as an underwear model, who has a better claim to be the authentic modern footballer.

...

What, then, explains this outpouring of staged authenticity? Partly, it is the collapse of trust, the sense that the game is rigged, the system isn’t working, that the old establishment has let everyone down. “The idea of authenticity, of people levelling with you,” York argues, “appeals precisely because people feel they’ve been lied to.”

I cannot follow York all the way to his conclusion. He thinks the idea is actively counterproductive: “The idea of the authentic self . . . doesn’t allow for people developing, feeling and believing radically different things in the course of their lives, being open to change and debate.”

...

[Crosby87]

Another article seeming to suggest Roy lives in an alternate reality.

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2304948-roy-keane-ex-manchester-united-great-a-toothless-tiger

[tricky_colour]

The other side of Roy Keane.

http://www.express.co.uk/sport/football/520245/Roy-Keane-book-extracts-Manchester-United-Aston-Villa

[Crosby87]

Fancy a look at Roys house?

https://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/blogs/early-doors/roy-s-castle--through-the-keyhole-in-roy-keane-s-seven-bedroom-mansion-154212810.html

[tricky_colour]

Would not mind living there myself!

[punkrocket]

Put in an offer.