As Roy Keane reflects on an eventful career, Joyce Woolridge questions the representation of United's skipper and the influence of the ghost writer

“Journalists and players have an uneasy relationship… Journalists tend to try and make the player say the things they want him to say. And it is all too easy for them to do this… This shows particularly when they are on the ‘discontented player’ story.”
Eamon Dunphy, Only A Game?

A ghost stalks the pages of Roy Keane’s autobiography: the unquiet spirit of professional Irish malcontent, Eamon Dun­phy. The ghostwriter who transcribes the tapes and knocks the pieces into shape usual­ly leaves some sort of footprint on the text of a footballer’s life, whether a flowery met­aphor or a stock phrase.

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Any new football books out? Yes. Any good? No

Good news for tree-lovers. Stung by all the bad publicity generated by Roy Keane’s score settling, Manchester Un­ited are to ban their players from producing books that don’t have the official stamp of approval. The millions keenly anticipating David Beckham’s planned autobiography needn’t fret as it seems set to escape the cull, contracts having been signed some time ago, but we may be de­prived of the raw insights of Paul Scholes (working title: Ginger!) and Nicky Butt (Kicking Butt).

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Sunday 1 Business as usual at Stamford Bridge as Chelsea’s 1-1 draw with Arsenal sees Patrick Vieira sent off and a David Seaman blunder. Bolton move off the bottom with a 1-0 win over non-scoring Aston Villa, thanks to a goal from Birmingham-born Michael Ricketts and a disallowed goal from Juan Pablo Angel. “In this country we have got good referees who are being let down by assistants who are not so good,” says Graham Taylor. Lloyd Owusu’s goal with his first touch for the club puts Wednesday on their way to a 2-0 win in the Sheffield derby.

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Ian Plenderleith dissects a biographical account of Lars Leese's career to discover that, unlike his wife, the German never quite felt at home in South Yorkshire

When German goalkeeper Lars Leese signed for Barn­sley at the start of their Premiership season in 1997, he was one of six foreign players at the club that year. As the journalist Ronald Reng describes it in his excellent biography of Leese, published in Germany earlier this year, Barnsley boss Danny Wilson was “like a kid in a toyshop who was finally allowed to buy international stars – or rather, players who were international and were taken for stars in Barnsley”.

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Kasper Steenbach recounts Brian Laudrup's short and unhappy spell at Chelsea in 1998

Overall, Brian Laudrup is today a happy man – he lives with his family at an exclusive address on the coast north of Copenhagen and turns out as a striker for the local amateur team. The chief executive of FC Copenhagen, Flemming Østergaard, is also happy. He heads virtually the only European club that is presently in­creasing in value on the stock market. Since he took over in 1997, the club has been turned into a big name in the entertainment business, having hosted the Eur­ovision Song Contest and a Mike Tyson fight. And, above all, he runs a club that has succeeded in attracting the support of most football fans in Copenhagen for the first time in recent history.

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