If one of Robbie Keane’s great gifts was to score in games which would otherwise be forgotten, then the match against Oman was the perfect send-off.
Nobody will remember anything about this evening except that it was the chance to say goodbye to Ireland’s captain. Ireland scored four goals, but Oman were so poor that it didn’t matter, all that mattered was that Robbie Keane got one of them.
When the two teams walked out about nine minutes before kick-off, the ground was disappointingly empty but Irish match-going crowds weren’t going to change the habits of a lifetime simply because the record goalscorer was playing his last match for Ireland so they rolled up late and missed the opening expressions of thanks.
But they needn’t have worried. There were plenty more, most crucially from an Oman side who could have been specially selected for this occasion.
Beforehand, Keane was the last player onto the pitch and he was greeted and thanked by the president and the gifts kept coming. Oman were the most notable providers, but there were others. Videos messages from Bono, Mary Black, Pele and Giovani Dos Santos were broadcast at half-time, while the Icelandic thunderclap echoed around the stadium, presumably, in tribute to Robbie Keane.
If there was a difference between Keane’s regular goalscoring nights for Ireland and the game here, it was that this was an evening when others were going out of their way to help Keane score as opposed to those games when it looked like nobody but Keane would ever score.
That was another of his talents: to ensure that a game that was expected to go Ireland’s way went Ireland’s way. Without him, Ireland’s record against the teams they were expected to beat would have been a lot worse.
So Oman allowed us to roll back the clock, even if for half an hour, he struggled to find the chances that we had become used to him taking. Then the goal brought back all those memories of the prodigiously gifted teenager whose international career began eighteen years ago as he flicked the ball over an Oman defender and volleyed into the net.
Then he rolled out the old celebration which never was aesthetically pleasing or, as they say, a high tariff routine. But he committed to it here as he had done throughout the period it was part of his repertoire. It was almost a tribute from Robbie Keane to the Robbie Keane celebrations of old.
It fitted in to the night of tributes which capped a week of tributes which a man with his record and commitment to Ireland clearly deserved. In some of these tributes, disappointment was expressed that Keane was never fully appreciated. This seemed to bewilder a few people even if the reason, whether you agree with it or not, is not bewildering.
In his retirement statement, Keane mentioned his goal in Ibaraki as his most memorable moment, but it may be that his penalty against Spain in the last sixteen of that World Cup captured his gifts perfectly. Here was a player with the confidence and belief to take and score a penalty in the last-minute of a knockout game and embrace that pressure rather than run from it.
In the six years that followed, Keane often failed to reach those heights. Between 2002 and 2008, he scored in competitive games against Albania, Georgia, Cyprus, the Faroe Islands, Israel, San Marino and Wales. These goals helped Ireland win games they might not otherwise have won, but there will be many who remember his edginess in key matches against sides like France and Switzerland and it may explain some of the hesitation to embrace him.
For some of those years, Keane was not helped by the meltdown of the post-Saipan era and the anarchy of Steve Staunton’s management. His first campaign under Giovanni Trapattoni was his finest for Ireland when he scored key goals in the biggest matches, including one of his best in Paris.
There will be some who will argue that, because of his goals, he was Ireland’s greatest ever player while others – like John Giles – have left him out of an all-time Ireland XI in the past.
Few would have agreed with that this week, but equally there didn’t seem to be much enthusiasm for this game, even if it was billed as the chance to say goodbye.
There is something contrived about the scripted farewell in sport, given that by its very nature sport contains brutal punctuations and, as the best cliches remind us, provides moments that cannot be scripted.
The farewells in sport are ongoing: the loss of pace, the dulling of reactions and the frightening realisation that this, too, is coming to an end, like it has for everyone else every time before.
When John Lennon was asked to give his reaction to Elvis’s death, he said that Elvis really died when he joined the army and it may be that Keane really retired between the play-off against Estonia in 2011 and the European Championships qualifiers under O’Neill when he was moved to the margins and scored only against Gibraltar.
That was the necessary brutality of sport and it was reflected in the moment when the board went up here showing his number. On an evening of tributes, this was a moment of real emotion, a signal that this was the end. There was no turning back now and from now on we would have to find something else to remember on nights like these.
