The best DM in football history for the british and Irish people. An average player for the rest of the world ( except if you are a Manchester United fans ).
And the man behind the player is a horrible person.
I'm sorry, but this post is nonsense. For one, Roy Keane was not a defensive midfielder in the current sense of the term, and certainly could not have been termed as such when at his peak. Anyone who characterises Keane like this either forgets or just wasn't there when he spent a large bulk of his United career partnering Ince and then Butt in midfield, and yet somehow managing to be the game-controlling hub of teams that played the kind of aggressive attacking football that our current team could only dream of playing. Sure, later in his career, Keane did much of his best work screening the defense, but this was due to the simultaneous onset of age and hip problems, and the movement to 3-man midfield set-ups.
So anyone who sees Keane as 'the best DM in football history' is voicing an opinion that simply can't be trusted. Or, more likely, this is a hyperbole that you've created in order to castigate Keane and those who rate him as a footballer.
And your second sentence is worse than your first because it's patently absurd. Roy Keane was not an average player. I doubt you could find even a single person who ever encountered Roy Keane on a football pitch who would express anything approaching to that sentiment. And certainly no fan of any club who ever watched Roy Keane play against their team, and wasn't either delusional or massively embittered, would have come away thinking him an average player. They might have hated him, sure. But calling him average would be a lie. And a pretty bad, ineffective lie too.
Finally, maybe Roy Keane is a horrible person. It's possible. He has perhaps done some horrible things. He has said things that some have found horrible. Would I say that anything (that I know of) he has done or said is particularly horrible in the grand scheme of things? Not really. And, surely, it is more likely that Roy Keane is just a person, like so many others, who despite having done and/or said some negative things is capable of being pleasant and unpleasant, of loving and of hating, and of being loved and hated. Either way, as someone who's never met him, I wouldn't wish to make a pronouncement. And if I did, to be honest, I'd be inclined to go with the more lenient of available judgments, in part because I find it more true to my experience of people in general, but also because I am enormously biased by the joy that Roy Keane the footballer has brought me. And if you think that this bias invalidates the rest of my post, well, fair enough; but it does strike me as pretty unbelievable that so many can judge so harshly a man who gave so much to the team they purport to support (this is not necessarily directed at you; I've no idea which team you follow).
