Keane did not spend wisely

Dec 5 2008 by Mark Douglas, The Journal

ROY Keane added many things to Sunderland Football Club during his colourful 28 months in charge, but not even the most fervent student of the cult of Keane would argue that value for money was one of them, writes MARK DOUGLAS.

Of the £80m that Keane lavished on 34 permanent signings during his time in charge of Sunderland, less than a third of that represented money well spent.

That appalling ratio had not escaped the attention of Ellis Short, the American millionaire who acquired a controlling stake in Sunderland by stealth over the summer and injected the funds that made Keane’s summer spending spree possible.

Short made his fortune gambling huge wedges of cash on hedge funds and private equity in the mid-nineties – a world in which Keane’s miserly success rate in the market would have left him penniless and broke within weeks.

So it is perhaps no surprise that the manager and Sunderland’s majority shareholder shared different opinions when it came to how to approach doing business in the January transfer window.

While behind the scenes Keane was convinced a further overhaul of his playing staff was required in the New Year, Short was understandably reluctant to commit further funds to a manager who could never claim to have truly mastered wheeling and dealing during his time in charge of Sunderland.

For every high-profile success he enjoyed (Kenwyne Jones and Kieran Richardson) there was an equally sizeable gamble that had failed (Pascal Chimbonda, Michael Chopra) – and the squad he has left behind looks woefully unbalanced and bloated.

His early forays into the market were expensive, almost £11million spent in that first season, but he could be forgiven after the reinforcements he had spent heavily on secured promotion to the Premier League.

It was in the second season that the wheels began to come off – Keane ending up physically exhausted after a long and tortuous search for players capable of keeping them in the Premier League.

The pursuit of David Nugent was the nadir, Keane leaving the door open for a striker who ended up flopping spectacularly at Portsmouth. There were high-profile successes – tapping into his old contacts to sign Kieran Richardson and taking a huge and successful gamble on Kenwyne Jones – but they were over-shadowed by a string of expensive failures.

Paul McShane and Danny Higginbotham have been loaned out after proving no better than what Sunderland had, and the jury is still out on Michael Chopra and Craig Gordon – signed for a combined value of £14m.

Once again, though, Keane’s failings were glossed over by the team achieving the aim of survival, and by the manager salvaging some of his reputation with the astute signings of Andy Reid and Jonny Evans.

This summer was meant to herald the definitive close season of Keane’s managerial career but instead his signings ended up fatally undermining his stewardship.

Provided with the £30m warchest that he had publicly demanded from the Drumaville consortium, the Black Cats manager opted to invest heavily in players with Premier League pedigree.

Steed Malbranque, Djibril Cissé, El-Hadji Diouf, Anton Ferdinand, Teemu Tainio and Pascal Chimbonda undoubtedly added quality that Sunderland had not possessed previously, even if it came at a premium.

George McCartney – also expensively – filled the left-back spot while David Healy was signed from Fulham and barely used.

The most damning indictment of Keane’s transfer policy is that, with the exception of Ferdinand, none have made a sustained positive impact on the team this season. Indeed Chimbonda appears to have done the opposite, threatening the spirit of a group who had bonded during their first season in the Premier League.