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.
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.