When he announced his retirement from international football on Wednesday, it was no surprise that Robbie Keane singled out the night in Ibaraki during the 2002 World Cup as a special moment.
“I will cherish all of those memories,” Keane said, “but one in particular stands out – the 2002 World Cup and scoring the late goal in Ibaraki, Japan against Oliver Kahn. The atmosphere, the adrenaline and the buzz from the fans that night is something I will always remember.”
A few days after that game, the late Noel O’Reilly sat in the Irish team hotel in Chiba City and laughed as he recalled what he’d seen.
It was, O’Reilly said, like watching a Dublin street fight. Robbie and Damien Duff were the kids who get a little bit too cheeky and look to their big brother to deal with those who were giving them grief. McCarthy had the perfect solution when he sent on Niall Quinn to deal with the brutish Germans.
“Damien and Robbie were being battered,” O’Reilly said. “Niall came in and sorted out the bullies.” Quinn was the muscle who took the long balls that were launched towards him and offered protection. “ “Then,” O’Reilly said with a smile, “the other two picked their pockets.”
That was what Robbie Keane did at his best. He picked the pockets of international defenders, seizing on mistakes and punishing every weakness. There have been few Irish players who played with such assurance, few who believed, as Keane believed, that the world was his for the taking.
He was endlessly resourceful on the pitch and his life in football has reflected that. Before he was 21, he had been to Italy and back, beginning a peripatetic career which only underlined the sense that there wasn’t a challenge or an adventure he felt he couldn’t take on.
When he went to MLS in 2011, he embraced it like other European players have failed to do. Some players seemed to misunderstand the deal. They might have seen the US as a soft touch and a place to quietly fund their pension pot, but Keane knew differently.
America was the land of opportunity, another chance for reinvention. Should he see out his time in the Premier League and play for the sake of playing, he asked in response to those who felt he was winding down? LA was different, LA was new and waiting to be conquered and those kind of challenges never bothered Robbie Keane.
The failures never bothered him either, but that was less of an issue in his international career. When he began playing for his country, Frank Stapleton was the record goalscorer with 20 goals, now Keane departs with 67 goals, a total which, as Martin O’Neill said in his tribute, is unlikely to be overtaken.
Keane always played with that fearlessness, a sense of ease which suggested he always knew he was going to be different.
His international career began in Olomouc which wasn’t a place to be creating memories. Olomouc is a university town 300 km to the east of Prague where Mick McCarthy took a new team in the spring of 1998. Sometimes Olomouc would be forgotten when people talked about the players who emerged that spring. When they talked about Keane, they would remember his home debut against Argentina the following month, but it all began in Olomouc.
Mick McCarthy would give six players their first start that day. Alan Maybury, Mark Kinsella, Graham Kavanagh and Rory Delap made their debuts, but there were two who stood out, two who even in that forgettable game were seen as the ones expected to do great things.
Damien Duff and Robbie Keane achieved much together after embarking from the same point in a university town in 1998, but the summer of 2002 was when they delivered great joy for the country and provided the counterpoint to all that happened in Saipan.
They were great friends but different personalities. Duffer was shy and quiet, a man who had been known to run across a hotel lobby if he saw a journalist who he sensed might want to talk to him. The idea of seeing his words in the media appeared to physically pain him.
Keane didn’t say much more to the press, but he always gave the sense that he understood why you might want to talk to him, even as he kept his views to himself and politely referred interview requests to his agent.
He was a star and his public persona was that of a player who knew he was a star. At times that seemed to grate with critics who wanted him to be something else without really understanding that the fearlessness came from the same place as the swagger.
Of course, Keane was right. He was a star, the first Irish player who truly appreciated the golden age the modern footballer was entering.
It’s a shame that there was no major tournament during those peak years and a shame that Ireland in 2016 couldn’t call on Robbie Keane at his peak to make a difference.
The last couple of years have been a reminder of what Ireland will now have to go without on a permanent basis, but Keane still scored goals, albeit against the weaker teams. Then again, without him, maybe nobody would have scored against the weaker teams
He also came to represent commitment. A couple of hours after his second child was born, Keane left LA to be part of the squad for the match against Germany last October. He had little chance of starting and in fact he stayed on the bench, but he was there, celebrating with Shane Long and providing something to the indefinable thing called team spirit.
He also provided a pretty definable thing called goals and Ireland will miss those most of all.
A month after Olomouc, Keane made his full debut for Ireland at Lansdowne Road. If few people had seen him in Olomouc, many more saw this game against Argentina and it would be hard to forget a home debut of such confidence and skill.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNp–iX8FWQ
Afterwards, Mick McCarthy reflected on what he had seen from the teenager.
“They were asking him what it was like to be playing with some of his heroes and he said he was proud to be playing with people like Niall Quinn and Denis Irwin. I said that that some of those players might be proud in years to come to say that they were on the pitch the day Robbie Keane made his debut. I will be.”
Mick McCarthy knew what coming. Robbie Keane did too and now that it’s gone, the rest of us will finally understand all that we’ll be missing.
