Manchester United are a club in freefall. And there is one man, just one, who could walk into that dressing room tomorrow and frighten the life back into it.
His name is Roy Keane. And the calls for the Corkman to take the Old Trafford hot seat are getting LOUDER by the day.
With Michael Carrick hanging on by a thread, former team-mates are now openly backing Keane to come home. Quinton Fortune, who played alongside him in United’s glory years, told BOYLE Sports: “Roy Keane coaching at Man Utd would be a lot of fun.”
Fun? For the fans, maybe. For a squad that’s forgotten how to win? It would be the shock of their lives. And that’s exactly the point.
United in MELTDOWN
The numbers are brutal. United have won just one of their opening nine Premier League games and sit a scarcely believable 17th in the table, nearer the trapdoor than the top four.
Tuesday’s dramatic 3-2 comeback against Roma in the Champions League ended a nine-match winless run, but nobody at Old Trafford thinks one night in Europe has fixed anything. The club is expected to use the international break to decide Carrick’s fate, only months after handing him the job permanently last summer.
The usual names are already being thrown around: Eddie Howe, Julian Nagelsmann, Antonio Conte, Unai Emery. Safe. Sensible. And, for a lot of United fans, deeply uninspiring.
5 reasons Keane is the man for the job
1. He IS Manchester United. Seven league titles. The 1999 Treble. Twelve years in the engine room and the best part of a decade wearing the armband. No candidate on the shortlist understands what that club is supposed to feel like the way Keane does.
2. Standards. Full stop. Every former team-mate says the same thing. Keane didn’t tolerate passengers, and this United squad is full of them. Fortune says he “raised everyone’s standards” in training and matches. That’s not a tactic you can buy in the transfer window.
3. He’s done the job before. People forget. Keane took over a Sunderland side rooted to the bottom of the Championship in 2006 and dragged them to the title and promotion in his first season. He has also been Ireland assistant under Martin O’Neill and worked on the coaching staff at Nottingham Forest.
4. He’s been right all along. Keane said back in January that United needed “a bigger and better manager” than Carrick, even as the interim boss was winning. He was mocked for it. He doesn’t look so silly now.
5. The fans would LOVE it. Old Trafford is crying out for someone who feels the defeats as much as they do. Nobody on earth would be angrier about 17th place than Roy Keane.
The shock admission
So will he do it? Here’s the twist. Speaking on The Overlap, Keane admitted the itch has never gone away. “There’s definitely part of me” that still believes he should be a manager somewhere, he said, insisting he could have been a really good one.
But in the same breath he poured cold water on a comeback, saying that after years in the TV studio there’s “no going back now” and that he doesn’t miss the rollercoaster of management. On Stick to Football he also admitted he “feels for” Carrick.
Never say never, though. Keane has walked away from bigger things before, and he has come back to the game before too. If the phone rings from Old Trafford, would the most competitive man in football really say no?
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