Robbie Keane on Late Late Show Tonight

[CollegeTillIDie]

Pat Kenny knows nothing about Irish football. He follows ManUre.....

[macdermesser]

[QUOTE=Darco Ooragnak;795899]Didn`t manage to get it all..

cheers Darco for putting that up

I actually thought the crowd were quite patient on Wednesday .. and quite supportive too. There were boos when the team went off at half time, but actually cheers when the team came back out in the second half. And the boos came from a minority in the crowd .. personally don't see the point of booing .. it's only negative energy and not productive .. and creating an atmosphere where, as Robbie says, that young players are not going to look forward to coming over for the games. There were boos at the final whistle .. but they were quickly replaced by applause for the efforts. I think the media has exaggerated what actually happened at the two games in terms of crowd reaction .. but at the end of the day, I think the FAI should hold their hands up and admit that it has not come off .. if they had appointed Beenhaker (on the same money with Poland as Robson is with us) with Staunton as his assistant, with a view to taking over after 3 or 4 years then this might have all worked out. And to be fair, the average poster on this board could see this at the time, while the people charged with caring for Irish football, for whatever reason, failed to spot the bleedin obvious.

[PaulB]

Great Piece by Tom Humphries in the Times this morning, if anyone ahs a subscription, maybe they could throw it up.

Personally thought the interview was a joke, Robbie may as well have bene interviewed by Kermit the frog, no probing whatsoever.

[Dr. Ogba]

An open letter to Robbie

http://www.chatsoccer.eu/blog/?p=43

My sentiments exactly, thought the interview was an insult to all Irish fans...."sure we can't think for ourselves, the media told us to do it"

very ill-advised interview, I can respect the fact that he did come out to face the music and looked quite emotional but there is now a growing culture of deflecting the blame which is seeping down from the upper ranks of the FAI to the players now...

Just be a man, accept some of the blame that has rightly been attributed to you, vow to do better and you'll at least earn back a little bit of respect from the fans...

[BaZmO*]

Well I dunno, maybe I'm being overly cynical but.... Bobbie being wheeled out after the first Cyprus debacle, and then Robbie after the second.
And no sign of the Gaffer or Oscar Wilde??? Hmmm...

[NeilMcD]

m : Robbie Keane. Robbie Keane. You crazy, mixed-up kid. What were you thinking jetting across to lecture the confused peasantry on the insidious evils lurking within the media?

Lawdee. We can accept that the media's embarrassing failure to qualify the country for next summer's European Championship finals is something you might well take personally, Robbie. Still. That doesn't make you Marshall McLuhan.

And we can only imagine how deeply you must resent the fourth estate's tendency in recent years to score goals only against very poor teams. But your deconstruction of the media-celebrity-football matrix lacks clarity, Robbie.

Listen. We hacks may be the lowest form of life you can imagine, but we are at least a couple of evolutionary stages beyond being your publicists. If you ever give us a second glance you might notice how few of us actually wear cheerleaders' skirts and tassels while we work.

Jimmy Cannon, a crusty old sportswriter who didn't know how to pull a punch, used to say that sportswriting survives because of the guys who don't cheer. Sportswriting just about survives in this country and a lot of the time we do actually cheer. But, Robbie, we have nothing to be cheering about.

The cheering thing was a theme Jimmy Cannon felt strongly about.

"I don't want sportswriters being fans," he wrote about the baseball beat. "I want them to be the guys who neither love nor hate the sport and whose life is not wrapped up in the sport and who remember they are working newspapermen and not baseball people."

We've all done plenty of cheering for you, Robbie. In the good times maybe you mistook us for fans. That's the cheering that got you boot deals and endorsement contracts and made you a very wealthy young man.

There's been so much cheering done for you that it's just about possible to understand how you would mistake journalists for publicists and come to resent the sudden withdrawal of fondling and fawning when times go bad.

You know well how it worked. You once - amusingly, I thought - refused to attend a press conference because your agent hadn't been given final approval on an Evening Herald article. The article in question made you out to be a cross between Mother Teresa and Pele and was actually a puff piece arranged by your boot sponsors, whose name and logo figured prominently across the two pages.

Still, great and fearful was your sulky wrath.

You know how these things are. The same agent once responded to an interview request with you by inviting me to fly to England, where he would arrange a five-minute slot with you.

I genuinely thought he was joking, Robbie, but he said that, no, you were very busy being a footballer and all that. I could take it or leave it. So I left it.

We've done longer interviews since and they have been grand and whatever they provided for the newspaper those interviews gave you a chance to transmit some of your personality to the Irish soccer public; they gave the people who buy the boots and the tickets and the jerseys some idea of what kind of a fellow Robbie Keane is.

That is good for everyone when it comes to creating a bond between players and public. That sort of exposure has meant that in good times you are feted and in bad times generally, Robbie, you are forgiven. People feel they know Robbie Keane.

It's not so long ago, for instance - just two years, in fact - that in the run-up to a huge game against France your own preparations for that match involved a night of karaoke till the small hours in the local and then a prolonged occupation of Lillies Bordello till the early hours the following night.

Good luck to you, but before you lecture us about how we are all in the same boat and all want the same thing you might stop to think about how short-changed the paying punter felt. Same boat? Some of us seem to be rowing harder than some other people in the boat, Robbie.

One of the many failures of the regime presided over by your old friend "Stan" has been the whole media-relations thing. Back in the Mansion House when "Stan" was launched by John Delaney (who, we now realise, was doing so only because his wife and children were being held at gunpoint somewhere else) there was much brave talk from "Stan" and his Uncle Bobby about how the media were going to be co-opted into the deal and we'd all be just a part of Stevo's Army.

That was kind of off-putting right from the start - being patronised and told how we'd soon be all on the payroll working as shills in the brave new world. But we have seen regimes come and go and we shrugged and got on with it.

Of course it took one bad result for the shutters to come down and for the team and management to adopt a policy of speaking only through gritted teeth.

It's not really of any interest to the general peasantry how the media are treated by the Irish team, but it should be. The media are merely the instrument through which players communicate with the people who pay their wages and puff their egos.

It doesn't really matter if the team find us all to be a lowdown bunch of scurvy curs; the bigger picture is that if you want to communicate with the general public it is much easier to do it through expressing yourself reasonably in interviews than indulging in epic sulks or performing in a string of karaoke nights.

That's why when you wanted to get your pouty message across you decided to get your face onto the Late Late Show on Friday night.

Ah, Robbie. When you ban the media from setting foot in the team hotel, when your manager gets everybody to drive to Malahide and then gives 20-second press conferences the bulk of which are composed of silences, when players are pulled from one-on-one interviews at the last minute, when the team and officials sit at the front of the plane eating hot food while the common hackery look on starving - when all these things happen it's best that the team perform with a passion and an excellence that bowls us all over because there isn't going to be much goodwill left in the media.

And funny enough, there is going to be less goodwill left among a general public who feel not only that they don't know the current team but also that the side offer very little that can be identified with.

In that regard it was nothing short of hilarious to hear Steve Staunton respond to a question about the team's isolation from the public by stating that ye go for walks on the beach, and sometimes go to Malahide. Brilliant!

The media are not perfect. Sometimes criticisms are excessive. On the other hand, the rewards at your end are always excessive so it balances out.

All the media ask and the general public ask is that the team prepares as well as is humanly possible and gives the green jersey as much as is humanly possible.

Not speaking to the media is petulant and childish. Not because we are so charming that you are missing out on the chance to become better people just by mixing with us, but because you leave a vacuum to be filled.

On the day before the Germany match, for instance, the FAI nixed an interview this paper had arranged with Stephen Hunt, who was ineligible to play against Germany but was perfectly happy to be interviewed. So the space had to be filled with a critical piece about the current regime.

That's not ideal for anyone, but the space unfilled by the meagre harvest from sulky press conferences and nixed interviews always gets filled by analysis pieces and critiques, and without the need on the part of the media to maintain the lifeline of access the pieces get more and more robust.

Robbie, it wasn't actually the media who were booing you in Croke Park last week. It was the people who pay your wages. They felt they had been short-changed. And they were right.

And seeing you on the Late Late asserting that people booed because of what they read in the paper overestimates the power of the media and underestimates the intelligence of the fan.

We, fans and hacks, all have jobs to do, real worries and mortgages and pressures. You are our distraction. You live the life, you score the goals, you wear the green. We're sorry if you think that we have all let you down, but now you know how we've been feeling.

[shakermaker1982]

spot on article.

[youngirish]

Just watched that interview (thanks Darco Ooragnak for posting it) and have discovered from Robbie that the Irish media have brainwashed me like the Nazis pre 1945 into thinking Stan isn't good enough for the Ireland job. This surprised me to say the least since I haven't even lived in Ireland for 7 years and therefore haven't read any Irish newspaper or seen an Irish news show in that time. I never knew our media was so far reaching. Thinking about it now, yes I would have thought a 4-0 home loss to the Dutch, a 5-2 away loss to Cyprus, a 2-1 last minute away win to San Marino, a gutless performance away to the Czechs, and a 1-1 home draw with Cyrpus were good performances unless the herald had informed me otherwise.

Surprisingly Keane is even more of a whinger in real life than he appears to be on the pitch (is this possible?). Truly the best man to motivate the dressing room before a hostile away encounter. I remember all those times Roy Keane, Kenny Cunningham and Mick McCarthy were all crying about how tough any criticism was for the team when they were captains.

Forget about the deadful team selections and his tactical ineptitude I think Stan's worst mistake was appointing Robbie Keane as captain. This should have been a sign of things to come. Hopefully whoever gets appointed as our next manager will immediately rectify this mistake and give the armband to Dunne.

[Billsthoughts]

Bit of perspective lads. hes a footballer hitting a bad run of form not a mass murderer. I think Kenny asked some hard questions just didnt follow up on them but again he was interviewing a footballer not a politician. fair play to robbie for agreeing to do the interview in the first place and for showing a bit of loyalty(however misplaced) to his under fire manager. Everyone knows Stan is not the man for the job but we dont have mass recriminations. He is a bad manger sack him and replace him with a good one. Lets see what the players can produce then.
Only other thing is when he was talking about the player not wanting to come over I couldnt work out whether he was angry with the player or the media? anyone else on that?

[jbyrne]

Great Piece by Tom Humphries in the Times this morning, if anyone ahs a subscription, maybe they could throw it up.

think the recent reporting in the media has actually been very poor. most of the articles i read over the weekend, and then humphries today, are just the media concentrating on their relationship with the irish international team set-up and trying to defend their corner and having a good whinge about how the set-up has frustrated their ability to do their job. couldn’t care less about their relationship with the irish team. complete non-event of an issue that does not deserve all the coverage it gets. the real issue is our awful recent performances but our self serving hacks seem to think their position in the whole thing is actually the main event

[Billsthoughts]

think the recent reporting in the media has actually been very poor. most of the articles i read over the weekend, and then humphries today, are just the media concentrating on their relationship with the irish international team set-up and trying to defend their corner and having a good whinge about how the set-up has frustrated their ability to do their job. couldn’t care less about their relationship with the irish team. complete non-event of an issue that does not deserve all the coverage it gets. the real issue is our awful recent performances but our self serving hacks seem to think their position in the whole thing is actually the main event

well its a total event of an issue if you are on the one hand complaining about the media and on the other hand f*cking them over at every oppurtunity. bit of common sense by both the players and the media mite go a long way to getting rid of the nasty atmosphere that surrounds the irish football team now.

[RogerMilla]

pathetic stuff from keane.

The MEEDJA told us to do it.

Absolutly no respect for the fans who have followed him far and wide, either that or in an ivory tower so high and removed from reality that he actually beleives that his teams performances should be cheered on regardless of quality.

[citizenerased]

Robbie: don't blame the messenger
Tom Humphries

Locker Room : Robbie Keane. Robbie Keane. You crazy, mixed-up kid. What were you thinking jetting across to lecture the confused peasantry on the insidious evils lurking within the media?

Lawdee. We can accept that the media's embarrassing failure to qualify the country for next summer's European Championship finals is something you might well take personally, Robbie. Still. That doesn't make you Marshall McLuhan.

And we can only imagine how deeply you must resent the fourth estate's tendency in recent years to score goals only against very poor teams. But your deconstruction of the media-celebrity-football matrix lacks clarity, Robbie.

Listen. We hacks may be the lowest form of life you can imagine, but we are at least a couple of evolutionary stages beyond being your publicists. If you ever give us a second glance you might notice how few of us actually wear cheerleaders' skirts and tassels while we work.

Jimmy Cannon, a crusty old sportswriter who didn't know how to pull a punch, used to say that sportswriting survives because of the guys who don't cheer. Sportswriting just about survives in this country and a lot of the time we do actually cheer. But, Robbie, we have nothing to be cheering about.

The cheering thing was a theme Jimmy Cannon felt strongly about.

"I don't want sportswriters being fans," he wrote about the baseball beat. "I want them to be the guys who neither love nor hate the sport and whose life is not wrapped up in the sport and who remember they are working newspapermen and not baseball people."

We've all done plenty of cheering for you, Robbie. In the good times maybe you mistook us for fans. That's the cheering that got you boot deals and endorsement contracts and made you a very wealthy young man.

There's been so much cheering done for you that it's just about possible to understand how you would mistake journalists for publicists and come to resent the sudden withdrawal of fondling and fawning when times go bad.

You know well how it worked. You once - amusingly, I thought - refused to attend a press conference because your agent hadn't been given final approval on an Evening Herald article. The article in question made you out to be a cross between Mother Teresa and Pele and was actually a puff piece arranged by your boot sponsors, whose name and logo figured prominently across the two pages.

Still, great and fearful was your sulky wrath.

You know how these things are. The same agent once responded to an interview request with you by inviting me to fly to England, where he would arrange a five-minute slot with you.

I genuinely thought he was joking, Robbie, but he said that, no, you were very busy being a footballer and all that. I could take it or leave it. So I left it.

We've done longer interviews since and they have been grand and whatever they provided for the newspaper those interviews gave you a chance to transmit some of your personality to the Irish soccer public; they gave the people who buy the boots and the tickets and the jerseys some idea of what kind of a fellow Robbie Keane is.

That is good for everyone when it comes to creating a bond between players and public. That sort of exposure has meant that in good times you are feted and in bad times generally, Robbie, you are forgiven. People feel they know Robbie Keane.

It's not so long ago, for instance - just two years, in fact - that in the run-up to a huge game against France your own preparations for that match involved a night of karaoke till the small hours in the local and then a prolonged occupation of Lillies Bordello till the early hours the following night.

Good luck to you, but before you lecture us about how we are all in the same boat and all want the same thing you might stop to think about how short-changed the paying punter felt. Same boat? Some of us seem to be rowing harder than some other people in the boat, Robbie.

One of the many failures of the regime presided over by your old friend "Stan" has been the whole media-relations thing. Back in the Mansion House when "Stan" was launched by John Delaney (who, we now realise, was doing so only because his wife and children were being held at gunpoint somewhere else) there was much brave talk from "Stan" and his Uncle Bobby about how the media were going to be co-opted into the deal and we'd all be just a part of Stevo's Army.

That was kind of off-putting right from the start - being patronised and told how we'd soon be all on the payroll working as shills in the brave new world. But we have seen regimes come and go and we shrugged and got on with it.

Of course it took one bad result for the shutters to come down and for the team and management to adopt a policy of speaking only through gritted teeth.

It's not really of any interest to the general peasantry how the media are treated by the Irish team, but it should be. The media are merely the instrument through which players communicate with the people who pay their wages and puff their egos.

It doesn't really matter if the team find us all to be a lowdown bunch of scurvy curs; the bigger picture is that if you want to communicate with the general public it is much easier to do it through expressing yourself reasonably in interviews than indulging in epic sulks or performing in a string of karaoke nights.

That's why when you wanted to get your pouty message across you decided to get your face onto the Late Late Show on Friday night.

Ah, Robbie. When you ban the media from setting foot in the team hotel, when your manager gets everybody to drive to Malahide and then gives 20-second press conferences the bulk of which are composed of silences, when players are pulled from one-on-one interviews at the last minute, when the team and officials sit at the front of the plane eating hot food while the common hackery look on starving - when all these things happen it's best that the team perform with a passion and an excellence that bowls us all over because there isn't going to be much goodwill left in the media.

And funny enough, there is going to be less goodwill left among a general public who feel not only that they don't know the current team but also that the side offer very little that can be identified with.

In that regard it was nothing short of hilarious to hear Steve Staunton respond to a question about the team's isolation from the public by stating that ye go for walks on the beach, and sometimes go to Malahide. Brilliant!

The media are not perfect. Sometimes criticisms are excessive. On the other hand, the rewards at your end are always excessive so it balances out.

All the media ask and the general public ask is that the team prepares as well as is humanly possible and gives the green jersey as much as is humanly possible.

Not speaking to the media is petulant and childish. Not because we are so charming that you are missing out on the chance to become better people just by mixing with us, but because you leave a vacuum to be filled.

On the day before the Germany match, for instance, the FAI nixed an interview this paper had arranged with Stephen Hunt, who was ineligible to play against Germany but was perfectly happy to be interviewed. So the space had to be filled with a critical piece about the current regime.

That's not ideal for anyone, but the space unfilled by the meagre harvest from sulky press conferences and nixed interviews always gets filled by analysis pieces and critiques, and without the need on the part of the media to maintain the lifeline of access the pieces get more and more robust.

Robbie, it wasn't actually the media who were booing you in Croke Park last week. It was the people who pay your wages. They felt they had been short-changed. And they were right.

And seeing you on the Late Late asserting that people booed because of what they read in the paper overestimates the power of the media and underestimates the intelligence of the fan.

We, fans and hacks, all have jobs to do, real worries and mortgages and pressures. You are our distraction. You live the life, you score the goals, you wear the green. We're sorry if you think that we have all let you down, but now you know how we've been feeling.

© 2007 The Irish Times

[livehead1]

You don't honestly believe for one minute he is going to 'waste his time' reading this do you?

[Ozymandias]

robbie stated that his beef was with the media at the start of the interview...but then stated that the fans only booed as a result of the media reports...I find this insulting...I can make up my own mind..I didn't need papers to tell me that the performances in cyprus and san marino were rubbish...or even the win against wales was poor fair.... I didn't need the media to help me raise eyebrows to some of stans selections...or to question how someone can be excluded from the squad and then brought in as a late replacement and actually start the game......I pondered all this on my own because I actualy went to school and was educated to a certain standard that lets me make up my own mind......I see the media as a way the fans can get an insight into the players and management...they are the medium as we don't meet the players out as much anymore..which is ok.....but how dare Robbie Keane state that I as a fan that is demoralised by the current set up am reacting this way because of media reports....Robbie I am not a lemming and neither are the majority of the people that follow this team around europe knowing we aren't going to qualify for anything or even score more than one goal

[Noelys Guitar]

And will people please stop asking for the new manager to have an "Assistant" like Aldridge or Stan! Why would we want a manager who needs an "assistant" forced upon him. We want a manager who brings his own backroom people in. Who knows what hes doing from day one.

[Calcio Jack]

I used to enjoy a lot of TH articles, but IMO he has some nerve coming out and saying that Robbie Keane overestimtes the power of the media... if he doesn't believe that the media doesn't have the power to act as an influencer..then maybe he could explian as to why he every chance he gets distorts the facts in relation to how Thomas Davis/the GAA are trying to annexe Tallaght from Rovers. He tries on a regular basis to push trhe Thomas D agenda and now to hear him come accross and describe himself as being not just a reporter but also a fan of Irish soccer is pure twofacedness when you look at what he's written in relation to Tallaght. You can't have it both ways Tom

[Jerry The Saint]

Bit of a sulk from Humphries too

when the team and officials sit at the front of the plane eating hot food while the common hackery look on starving

Clearly a sore point

In fairness, it's understandable - Robbie is the one who put the blame on the media so he feels he needs to defend his profession. As a bonus, it allows him to associate himself with the tradition of Great American Sportswriters which he is very fond of doing. He loses points for failing to mention the Dublin Minor Camogie team

[citizenerased]

he is right keane is a disgrace..good article

[fergalr]

He tries on a regular basis to push trhe Thomas D agenda and now to hear him come accross and describe himself as being not just a reporter but also a fan of Irish soccer is pure twofacedness when you look at what he's written in relation to Tallaght. You can't have it both ways Tom

Absolutely! This cannot be said often enough – this is a man with an agenda. He obviously loves his Dublin hurling and writes about it. He obvious despises football and writes about it (pretending to be an impartial observer).

Bit of a sulk from Humphries too

Quote:
when the team and officials sit at the front of the plane eating hot food while the common hackery look on starving

Clearly a sore point

Well spotted. For all the guff in the article it turns out that his main gripe is his big rumbling belly.

Surprisingly Keane is even more of a whinger in real life than he appears to be on the pitch (is this possible?).

But to get back on topic - this sums up the man and why he should never have been given the captaincy.