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Same here. Tap-ins and penalties wasn't even a criticism TOWK threw out very often, was it? His line was more that he's offered nothing against decent opposition in years. I know this because he mentioned it once or twice. Still though, everything is about TOWK.Quote:
Originally Posted by SwanVsDalton
So that's it then. He's just walking away.Quote:
Originally Posted by DeLorean
Typical. As soon as it gets tough for him.
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As an aside (ish) I was listening to the Last Word last night and so many of the comments were od the type that TOWK used to post back when he started coming on here... Never scores against big teams, always scores tap ins... Etc.
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Can't wait for arguments in the years going forward where it's even questioned if he was one of our greatest players?
It's a slam dunk.
It's always worthwhile to go back to the start of threads sometimes.Quote:
Originally Posted by Condex
Ah Condex, where've ya gone?
Ya see. We agree sometimes. Now, I'm not gonna be pleasant to you again until Sunday evening. Provided we've won.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kingdom
The memories that stick out in my mind the most, generally involve Robbie Keane. They are some of the greatest, if not the greatest nights. I actually wish he was staying on for another campaign.
Ní bheidh a leithéid ann arís!
You have to go back 18 years to get to pre-Robbie so it's unsurprising. Thankfully the last campaign gave us some.Quote:
Originally Posted by paul_oshea
Goal v France in 2009 is the most forgotten moment I feel.
I think Mark Kennedy v Yugoslavia is the oldest non-tournament non-Robbie Keane memory I have.
I thought that part was clearly referring to me. Sorry. My apologies. Maybe you were referring to posts from ten years ago too. Still not quite sure what the point is in bringing it up though. Keane retired. Just a few nice words and leave out the bitterness. There's no need for it whoever/whatever you're referring to.Quote:
Some people treated his sheer need for goals with a bit of disdain (penalties and tap-ins) but I just thought it was another sign of the steely selfishness all great strikers possess.
He's not walking away. He's retiring because he's not in O'Neill's plans anymore, which I thought was pretty easy to decipher from O'Neill's statement last month. He got to retire with a few more tournament appearances under his belt anyway so he went out on top figuratively speaking.Quote:
So that's it then. He's just walking away.
Keane matured from ego into admirable star, ‘Ireland’s best’: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ke...best-xw87l5300
Excellent article from The Times
Do you have a subscription? C&P?
didn't need it, seems to be a free articleQuote:
Originally Posted by DeLorean
Ah... I just needed to register and you can read two articles a week I think.
That's a great article. Kinda welled up. Having him around the squad the last 18 months was a great idea.Quote:
Originally Posted by tetsujin1979
Anyone else wanna see him as a coach?
I dont want to register....C&P :D
A manager will never make you 100% happy. Its kinda annoying, Robbie has been retired. Doyle is still a decent player. ARGH! I hope I don't get bitter towards the end of the campaign through a lack of goals or any penetration in the final third.
I think there are still games Robbie could do stuff for us(take Moldova home and/or away for example), sure he is ahead of Villa in the scoring charts at La Galaxy and Villa is one of the few who is really trying out there too, not seeing it as a pre-retirement holiday.
It's probably the nostalgia and sentimentality talking... but, like Paul, I wouldn't have minded him staying on for another campaign. Especially when I see the alternatives.
But the timing probably is right to go. I'm sure he'll be back in some capacity.
Okay, but the hamster fella gave out to me for posting full articles before! :D I presume this will be treated as an exception.Quote:
Originally Posted by paul_oshea
Keane matured from ego into admirable star, ‘Ireland’s best’
In any other country or any other sport, Robbie Keane would be a national treasure. However Ireland, the land of 100,000 begrudgers, is a hard sell. Even 67 goals from 145 internationals was sneeringly dismissed as a statistical joke by some of the brighter sparks on Twitter yesterday.
Then again, criticising the 36-year-old from Tallaght has, for some considerable time, been something of a national pastime. Often picked upon, either for his questionable decision-making on the pitch, or his career choices off it, the public perception of the Ireland captain contrasts wildly with the regal and religious terminology used to define the marquee players from other sports: Henry Shefflin remains King Henry while Brian O’Driscoll was frequently told, “In Bod we trust”.
Whereas they could do no wrong, Keane, for so much of his career, could do little right. “Don’t care about them,” Keane said of his critics. “As you get older, you care less about what people say about you, good or bad.”
Others were not as relaxed about the issue, though. “Personally, it wrecks my head,” his friend and former Ireland team-mate, Richard Dunne, said in 2013. “Robbie is always getting it in the neck. People saying, ‘Robbie should be dropped, he doesn’t do it for his country’. Look at his CV. Who else has done what he has for us?”
The answer is nobody. His tally of international goals is not just a British and Irish record but also places him 15th in the game’s all-time list, clear of Sir Bobby Charlton, Diego Maradona, Michel Platini, Cristiano Ronaldo and Johan Cruyff. “The truth is that Robbie was our Luis Suárez, our [Lionel] Messi, our [Cristiano] Ronaldo,” Niall Quinn, who Ireland’s previous record scorer with 21 goals, said.
Yet the uncomfortable truth is he spent much of his Ireland career held in fairly low regard. Remember the clamour for him to be stripped of the captaincy during Steve Staunton’s reign? “The ego has landed” headlines which followed his move to the Los Angeles Galaxy? Or the repeated observations that the bulk of his goals were scored either in friendlies or against the whipping boys of the world game?
That was often the perception. Now let us examine the facts.
Only 23 of his 67 Ireland goals came via friendlies, with 44 from competitive games, 15 of which coming against Europe’s lower ranked sides — Malta, San Marino, the Faroe Islands, Gibraltar and Andorra. However, the remainder were scored against respectable opposition in either qualification games, or the finals of leading tournaments, with only two in games Ireland lost. Remember the last-minute equalisers against Germany in Ibaraki or Spain in Suwon? “I’ll never forget them,” Keane said yesterday.
Nor should his club career be forgotten. The 13th highest scorer in Premier League history — Keane’s 123 goals from a decade in England’s top flight places him above Didier Drogba, Ronaldo and Suárez in the pecking order.
With this in mind, the criticism of the Dubliner seems not only excessive but unduly harsh. Quinn never suffered similar scrutiny. Nor Frank Stapleton, Ireland’s third most prolific goalscorer with 21. Yet the aggregate sum of their international goals tally — plus the 14 of another crowd favourite, Kevin Doyle — is still inferior to Keane’s.
“It’s absolutely crazy,” Quinn said. “Robbie was outstanding for his country. By a country mile he is the best striker we have ever produced and for me, he is possibly the best player we have produced, too.”
Yet Keane is largely unloved. Why? “Money,” Kevin Kilbane said. “Whenever we weren’t doing well, whenever people criticised us, the amount of money we were earning was a stick that was used to beat us with.”
Born into an era when players’ wages multiplied dramatically, Keane’s soaring income separated him from the society he came from. Tellingly, particularly in the early years of his career, his sometimes dour public persona did not help. Nor did a tetchy relationship with the press, which mellowed as the years went by. And, let us be blunt here too, some old-fashioned jealousy was the cause of much of the resentment, too.
“You are telling me Robbie Keane is not highly thought of here?” Martin O’Neill, the manager, asked members of the press earlier this year. “Are you serious? I always thought he was widely respected - seen as an iconic figure. Certainly in England [where O’Neill lives], he’s viewed in a good light.”
Time, however, has served to erode much of the sourness his critics felt towards him. When Keane was first handed the Ireland captaincy, in 2006, it coincided not only with Staunton’s appointment as manager but a time when the FAI wanted a rebuild. “De Gaffer” read the fine print of his portfolio and interpreted the appointment of a young captain as a necessary call.
Instead, handing Keane the armband proved to be one of Staunton’s many bad ones. At 26, the striker did not yet possess the necessary wisdom for the role and all his shortcomings were exposed on a terrible night in October 2006 when Cyprus outfought, outthought and outscored Ireland to win their Euro 2008 qualifier 5-2 in Nicosia. Guilty by association, the junior member of the coalition had to fight to save his reputation.
But he struggled to do so with his only competitive goals under Staunton coming against San Marino at Lansdowne Road. With morale abysmally low throughout the Staunton reign and a crisis always around the corner, tales were told out of school. “It became a bit of a bore to be around that squad,” one player said. “I got fed up hearing the same jokes from the same group of lads.”
So by the time Giovanni Trapattoni arrived in 2008, Keane had sensed the need to change. Players were encouraged and cajoled by their captain to visit sick children in hospitals. By 2010, Keane was also persuading his team-mates to sign away their image rights to the Professional Footballers’ Association of Ireland (PFAI), allowing the players union to fund their educational and back-to-work programmes.
Around the same time he became the quiet financial backer of a schoolboy club in Tallaght, Fettercairn FC, because he remembered what it was like to “have to get a bus up to Crumlin to develop as a footballer”.
“I want young lads having a club on their doorstep,” he said.
Then, before a key qualifier against Macedonia in June 2011, he rounded on three Ireland players, Jon Walters, James McCarthy and Anthony Stokes, who had withdrawn from the squad. “It’s not good enough and not fair on those players who are here,” Keane said. A risky strategy that could so easily have backfired, but the ploy worked. McCarthy and Walters’ attitudes towards Ireland improved from thereon in, while Keane scored twice in Skopje in the subsequent 2-0 win. “Robbie got the squad to gel again and forget about all the distractions,” Trapattoni said.
“Then, before the match in Skopje, when he was carrying an injury, I asked him: ‘Robbie, this is not the match to get it half-right. You have a responsibility. Are you able to play or not?’
“And he said: ‘yes, boss I am ready to go’. He played for the entire game, taking a pain-killing injection to get through. That shows character.”
From that moment on, fewer and fewer doubted his character, and were able to see how a once petulant player who had been so wayward in his passing, and his thinking, was maturing into a leader. By the time he lost his place in the side under O’Neill, he could easily have traded in the trans-Atlantic journeys for the easier life in the MLS. “Yet I love representing my country,” he said, even though his role now was an unofficial cheerleader.
Daryl Murphy, the Ireland striker, added: “Before the Bosnian match [the play-off last November] he got us all together and delivered a big speech. It was all about sticking together no matter what. They were the right words at the right time. He got us going. He was great to me. It didn’t matter to him that I was the player who was starting up front [instead of him]. His support was brilliant.”
As was his Ireland career. “A national treasure,” Quinn said.
Plenty disagree. Yet no one can argue that the striker whose cartwheels once appeared to be an extension of his ego matured into a much more admirable player and person. “He will be missed,” Quinn said.
Hugely.
Try this link: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ke...9f352dd1452e9d
That ET article was nicely strung together with a timely use of quotes. Though I think way too much is made of the begrudgers, as they say, empty vessels make the most noise.
Not a single comment begrudging him in any way since he announced his retirement.
It seems certain comments from months, years ago even, still touch a nerve with one or two people.
Which is odd if they don't have any merit.
True. For me though it's not the begrudgery a such, you're always going to get a certain amount of muppets. It's more the fact that he's not celebrated to the extent that he should be, compared to some of those mentioned in the article. It no big deal though, his records and legacy will stand the test of time.Quote:
Originally Posted by geysir