It's the same old Keano at Ipswich
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IT'S THE SAME OLD KEANO
Sources criticise Roy's regime
KEANE: Struggling with Ipswich
ROY KEANE is making the same mistakes at Ipswich as he did at Sunderland - as his managerial career teeters towards the brink.Two separate dressing-room sources have revealed how Keane has alienated a section of the Ipswich squad with his odd behaviour and appalling communication skills.
And with Town stuck in the relegation zone - just one point off the bottom of the Championship - the fiery Cork-man is in danger of exiting Portman Road before Christmas.
The sources insisted Keane:
* Fails to properly communicate with his players
* Needs to radically change his coaching set-up
* Ruins players' confidence with hairdryer outbursts
Our dressing-room snitches also admitted Keane's selection policy has left players baffled and frustrated.
So far this season, Ipswich have won just one of their 16 league games, with Keane chopping and changing his side week after week, selecting just one player, Jonathon Walters, each time.
The former Manchester United skipper has also changed his captain twice - handing Walters the armband, after starting the season with Gareth McAuley before he was stripped of the job in favour of Alex Bruce.
Source No1 said: "Keane can be a bit of an oddball. When a player is dropped, no proper explanation is given.
"You are just out of the side without knowing what you have to do to get back into it.
"It'd be a lie to say morale is really bad at the club because even though the team are struggling for points, there is still a lot of spirit there.
"The bottom line is that even though players really respect Keane for what he achieved as a player - which gives him a definite edge when it comes to signing men - as a manager, he rules by fear.
"He regularly has a go at players, which isn't that unusual in football because every manager does it. Keane just seems to do it more than most and that affects confidence.
"The other part of the problem is that Roy does not have a top-class coaching team working underneath him. The kindest thing I can say about his assistant, Tony Loughlan, is that he is not highly-rated."
In fact Loughlan, the Irishman's trusted Lieutenant, is regarded as a puppet to the Portman Road master, which is at the centre of Keane's troubles.
Rather than rely on an old mate, what Keane really needs is the self-confidence to employ a man with the experience and expertise to constantly challenge him.
Cock-up
Loughlan, rightly or wrongly, is perceived as a lapdog, which discredits both him and Keane - and is a chief reason why the Irishman, who, by his own admission, made dozens of mistakes during his spell at Sunderland, is really cocking up this time.
And be in no doubt this is a cock-up. Ipswich, after all, were one of the Championship's leading spenders in the summer, forking out a fortune on new players and handed Keane a generous budget to appease the league's eighth largest support.
Yet those supporters have been left scratching their heads in wonder at what has gone wrong as Blackpool, a club whose annual budget is half Ipswich's - enter the play-offs, the place Keane insisted he would be.
That statement seems bizarre now as do some other aspects of Keane's behaviour, such as his insistence on deploying match-day stewards to keep out the public from a closed-door friendly with West Ham at Portman Road.
When fans tried to watch through a window in the club shop, the manager ordered the curtains to be closed, leading one former Ipswich director to question whether Keane thinks he is bigger than the club.
Whatever his thoughts on that are, Keane most certainly must be revising his earlier declaration that "any half-decent manager can lead a side to half-way in the Championship".
So far, Keane has guided Ipswich to the bottom and kept them there, failing to trust any of the club's four top scorers from last season, sending Kevin Lisbie out on loan where he has been prolific, pretty much telling Irishman Owen Garvan to find a new club and undermining Jonathan Stead and Paulo Counago's confidence by starting each striker in just six league games.
Worse yet, the man he signed to score goals, Tamas Priskin, has found the net just once and floated in and out of the side as the lack of consistency in team selection has inevitably resulted in inconsistent performances.
Source No2 said: "At Sunderland, it fell apart for Keane when he signed new players and then, within weeks, decided he didn't rate some of them.
"To me, he is making the same mistakes all over again. It's one thing not to fancy a player - some manager's prefer athletes to ball-players, which seems to be Owen Garvan's problem.
"But he just seems too impetuous. He's making rash call after rash call, signing Damien Delaney for £800,000 to be his left-back and then going after another player, Lee Wallace, to play in the same position.
"On the plus side, he's definitely calmer here than he was at Sunderland and he is here all the time, whereas at Sunderland he stayed away from the training ground for most of the week.
"So in some ways, he has learned from the past but in many other areas, it is the same old issues that are costing him."
Those issues need urgent attention, otherwise a once-great player's reputation will be dented.
"History shows I'm not great at dealing with setbacks," Keane said during his spell at the Stadium of Light.
It's up to the Cork-man to rewrite his own legacy.