Roy Keane (Niall Carson/PA)
And so when Mohamed Salah said that if the former Liverpool centre-back had been choosing the man of the match for the resounding victory over Manchester City, he would never have given it to him, Carragher went there. “I’ll see him in the car park,” he roared.
Dave Jones, Micah Richards, Daniel Sturridge and Carragher all burst into laughter, but Keane, who had offered that very same invitation to an abusive Ipswich fan last week, simply lowered his eyes, perhaps caught between a rueful admiration for his colleague’s audacity and his own bashfulness at being poked. For once, he was lost for words.
As too was Sturridge earlier in the afternoon. During the preceding match between Chelsea and Aston Villa, the Nathan Barley of punditry was asked to analyse Nicolas Jackson’s opening goal and responded non verbally, trilling like a budgerigar, a man inventing a new form of communication, the vocal emoji.
At full-time Jones went back for more, asking him what he made of Cole Palmer’s finish. This time he went for ‘whippity doodah’ which was, I suppose, a little more enlightening if equally unorthodox. Maybe it will catch on, this new form of birdlike football discourse, where talk is cheep.
Sky Sports made the wise decision to confine its team to the studio after the Portman Road incident. The pitch-side podium has never made much sense, bringing only the illusion of intimacy into our sitting rooms.
The whole point of watching at home is we know we are not there. Following a game on television and going to the match are two distinct experiences that no gimmick can meld. Even if the presenter manages to grab a pre-match word with a time-pressed manager, it is no more illuminating than if he was standing in the tunnel or was collared in the corridor. The risks, as last week demonstrated, are simply not worth it.
Keane, looking ever more like a sage with his siege of Stalingrad beard, enjoyed a typically forthright afternoon at Anfield. When the audio line from Stamford Bridge briefly went on the blink, he largely left it to Jones, Sturridge and Richards to improvise the commentary, a fish-out-of-water scenario that sounded like a tentative lockdown watch-along and left Richards sighing “Thank God for that!” once the link was restored.
The former Manchester United captain started the broadcast by correctly predicting that Pep Guardiola would drop Ederson, catching everyone else by surprise, and it showed that shrewd judgment is as much his stock in trade as the put-downs that make him, like Sammy Nelson once called his Northern Ireland team-mate Gerry Armstrong, Don Quickquote, the pithy king of the clippable quip.
What makes Keane such a valuable pundit is his plain speaking. But he does not ration his praise − on Sunday he recorded his admiration for Palmer and Salah and for everything Guardiola had done − but he delivers it in the manner of a man for whom a kick up the backside and a pat on the back are only ever 18 inches apart.
That was Alan Hansen’s approach, too, and both combined the unsentimental, often brutal incisiveness of the dressing-room jury with a discernible twinkle in their delivery. Keane even gave us a reminder of Hansen’s verbless sentences when extolling Liverpool after their win over Manchester City: “Rock solid. Energy, pace, power.”
For the first time in seven years, the doctrine of Pep’s infallibility, which has pervaded the English game as he racked up so many trophies, is faltering and Keane admitted that it was something to be relished, not for partisan reasons but to see how Guardiola would try to fix it.
There are no caveats, no tortured subordinate clauses to his verdicts, no shrieking. Keane continues to play the vital role of reminding us amid all the technical, tactical and statistical analysis that standards and character still count.