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Columnist Aileen Eager looks at ‘the new Troika’ – the Irish soccer management.

At the risk of antagonising women readers of this newspaper, I am about to suggest that men are better at doing things that many women find difficult, if not impossible. Having said that I realise women who have found the matches are now busily setting fire to the page. Way to go, girls.

No, I am not forgetting world shaping achievements like giving birth (though men obviously were there at conception, setting the whole wonderful process in motion) and, while not exactly claiming they did it all by themselves, manage to look pleased and proud at the end result. Trying to ingratiate myself with any women still reading, here is where I get to say well done, moms everywhere, well done!

Nor am I thinking of guy stuff like changing a wheel or being handy with a brace and bit. Certainly not, for I know women who excel in both those areas traditionally reserved for the lads. I’m not even thinking of plumbing though I have often wondered what makes anyone decide to be a plumber. Come to think of it I don’t know any women plumbers. Blocked drains, frozen pipes, all of that - yours, lads, with pleasure.

I am thinking, rather, of the tricky business of forgiving and forgetting. And what a week it has been for both. And that in a roundabout way brings us to the saga of Saipan, the island of long, long memories.

Put it this way - had the chief protagonists of that episode been women, would we have the harmonious ending we have today? I don’t know - I think the wounds would have been too deep, whereas lads seem not to feel things as personally as women do. Hence today we have the new troika of Delaney/O’Neill/Keane.

Perhaps it is because women bruise more easily, feel more deeply, they find it difficult to forgive and impossible to let go. Here I hold my hand up - I still smart from being humiliated publicly by the nun who taught me Latin for my Leaving Cert. And it had nothing to do with Latin. Forgive, yes. Forget - that’s different.

Whatever, the country may not be quite as divided on the appointment of Roy Keane as assistant to Ireland FA manager Martin O’Neill as heretofore, but there are those for whom it still rankles. Somewhere in Waterford there is a man who rang a radio programme during the week to let it be known he has burned his Ireland shirt.

Even before Keane has arrived the jokes, and the metaphors abound: ‘A marriage made in Heaven?’, ‘nitro glycerine?’, ‘good cop, bad cop’,

RTE’s Sean O’Rourke spoke to a UK sportswriter on Wednesday who had this to say: ‘Keane has these strange eyes. When you’re talking to him, even when he’s being nice, his gaze is so intense it would cling your back to the wall’. Words surely waiting for a cartoonist’s pen.

And it is disheartening to know that already the bookmakers are offering odds on the tenure of Keane’s position as assistant manager to O’Neill - anything from a month to two years.

It is to be hoped that as assistant manager Keane will not do press conferences, nor have access to journalists or they to him. Affable man that he seems to be, the journos drew no blood from Martin O’Neill at his first press conference nor, in fairness did they try. This made a nice change from RTE’s Tony O’Donoghue goading Giovanni Trapattoni - though I sometimes wondered if, courtesy of Manuela, it was watered down in translation.

Tony is no doubt a nice guy but predator-like he corners weakened prey. In Atlanta ’96 he persisted in sticking a microphone in Sonia O’Sullivan’s face when it was obvious she was distressed and in tears after dropping out of the 5000 metres final. Tasteless.

What of the current Ireland players about to begin working close to Roy Keane? What lies ahead for them. As manager of Sunderland he drove his players hard, introducing them to army assault courses and paint-balling expeditions.

There is a gladness in the air these days that is rare, a sense of expectancy and for that we give thanks.

And yet … and yet … even as I write has the first crack appeared: a reported exchange between O’Neill and Keane on Saipan. Somebody, quick, please, gags all round.

NOW!

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