Roy Keane

I know that Shy is better placed than I to comment on Roy Keane's time in charge of Sunderland but I thought I'd get down some of my thoughts on him as a manager.

Being in charge of a Premiership club these days seems to invite extremes when it comes to decision making at Boardroom level. You have David Moyes who has been in charge of Everton for six years without seemingly able to make any progress, Gareth Southgate at Middlesbrough who is bringing through youth team players but whose ambition seems to rarely reach beyond finishing mid-table and then you have boards who back their manager to do whatever it takes to actually win things: Manchester United, Arsenal and Aston Villa are the only three clubs in the Premiership where I would say the managers job is his for as long as he wants it. All the other clubs, including Chelsea and Liverpool, are time bombs waiting to go off, the detonator being the failure to win a major trophy, relegation or that old favourite the lack of progress.

Newcastle, West Ham, Tottenham, Portsmouth and now Sunderland, clubs who have one thing in common, their supporters all want the game to be played a certain way and who would prefer it if they were successful in a cup competition once every so often but don't expect them to pull up trees on the way to breaking into Champions League territory, have all changed their managers before the second Saturday of December.

Where did Roy Keane go wrong? I think he made one critical mistake and that was he didn't think he could realise the vision he had for the club in the time he was going to have available. Having spent more than £50 million on new players last summer he no doubt felt almost obliged to finish in the top half of the table, the problem was that the players he signed had not individually achieved much in their careers and yet he was hoping that some strange sort of alchemy would bring their disparate skills together and form something greater than the sum of their parts. The fans seemed to be behind him, although crowds were beginning to slip and the fans were leaving early in the games against West Ham and Bolton, the radio phone-ins seemed to be proving that Roy Keane had the supporters right with him on his journey.

Keane was an exceptional player, one of the best midfield players of his or any other generation in the top league of English football, whether he will make an exceptional manager remains to be seen.