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KEANE: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY
by Roy Keane
Penguin/Michael Joseph, £17.99, pp. 294, ISBN 07181455

One could imagine an American visitor to Hatchards being mildly puzzled by a joint biography of the Kennedys which sports a picture of two duelling footballers on its cover, but no, Jack and Bobby turns out to be a chronicle of the Charlton brothers. As such it recapitulates, and to a limited degree extends, a saga that sports journalists have been amusing themselves with for nearly 40 years, certainly long before the celebrated joint appearance in the 1966 World Cup final.

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On the surface – a surface diligently polished by the sports writers and professional colleagues – the story of the Charltons is one of diametrical opposites. The only link between retiring five-foot nine- inch Bobby and volatile six-foot three-inch Jack, legend suggests, is their parentage as the sons of a self-absorbed Geordie miner (Charlton Sr proceeded to his shift at the pit rather than watch England play Portgual in the 1966 semi-final) and his canny wife Cissie. Mother’s boy Bobbie was the golf-loving, semi-suburban establishment man, a performer full of grace, poise and dazzling achievement, though sadly not much of a managerial fixer once his Manchester United playing days were done. Self-reliant Jack was the game- massacring (I refer to his well-attested love of country pursuits) man of the people, a tough rearguard clogger who somehow talked his way into Ramsay’s England squad and rather surprisingly reinvented himself at the helm of the Irish national side 20 years later.

The reality, as teased out in Leo McKinstry’s voluminous study – no interviews with the subjects but diligent reading in the secondary sources – is slightly different. Traumatised by the death of so many friends in the Munich air disaster of 1958 – he was fortunate to escape with a few cuts – Bobby, in his pre-1966 days, was not quite the golden boy on whom official history insists, but an aloof, enigmatic figure, admired more by exponents of the free-flowing continental game than English managers in stolid pursuit of a ‘system’.