THE Colliery is a tumbledown stump of a pub stood right across the street from Sunderland's Stadium Of Light. Inside, it's every bit as north of England as its name suggests. Folded Racing Post on the bar. Landlord sat beside punters as they drink cans of bitter and tip midafternoon fag ash on his carpet. Pool table, dartboard, telly, fruit machine. Dust.

There's a big banner hung on the pub's outside wall telling the world that the place is under new management and it could have been put there last weekend or it might just as easily be up there a few years at this stage.

Nothing about the interior points to a new energy about the place, nothing to suggest a fresh start. Nothing at all to compare with the way the neighbours have hung their sign this past week.

Bang. First win of the season on Monday. Bang. Roy Keane signs up for three years in the minutes after it.

Bang. The new manager gets the press onside with a charm offensive straight out of Dale Carnegie the next day. Bang.

Signing after signing after signing streams through the door on deadline day, internationals all apart from young Ross Wallace. Bang.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

Anyone who had doubts as to whether Keane would be able to parlay his playing reputation into managerial influence got their answer in those signings. Just the previous week, a down-in-the-mouth Niall Quinn had admitted that all efforts by the club to bring Premiership players in had failed not on financial grounds but on grounds of repute. Sunderland? Nah, thanks but no thanks Quinny.

Best of luck and all but rather you than me, eh?

Those kind of phonecalls evidently take on a rather different momentum when it's Keane on the other end. All six deadline day signings have played with him at one stage or another, from Liam Miller who idolised him as a kid to Graham Kavanagh who's known him since their FAS days together. From Dwight Yorke who owes part of his Champions League medal to Keane to David Connolly with whom he shares Michael Kennedy's good graces. Add Stan Varga and you're talking the guts of 250 international caps in total. Add Wallace and . . . Keane clearly hopes . . .

you're talking the future as well as the present. In the space of a week, Sunderland came in from 25-1 to 12-1 to win the Championship. How's that for under new management?

The new manager talked his usual exemplary game on Tuesday when he sat and broke media bread for longer than he'd ever done before.

Between the live-on-Sky press conference and separate sessions with radio, television, English dailies, Sundays and Irish interlopers, he was talking for just a shade under two and a half hours. And he was witty and charismatic and interesting to the last, so much so that some of the English journalists . . . in whose company he's been for 15 years, remember . . . came up to us afterwards and goggled at what good value he was.

It was as if they were discovering a whole new person and didn't know quite how to handle the experience. In a way they were . . . it's long been the case that very few in the English press have countenanced a Roy Keane other than the one who did Alfie Haaland so viciously. At one stage, one of the Sunday writers tried to butter him up as a prelude to a question. It was the most prickly Keane got all day . . . much more so than when someone asked him if he'd be apologising to Mick McCarthy.

Pressman: They say great players don't make great managers, but. . .

Keane (interrupting): Well that's fine because I was never a great player.

P: Well, you were a fantastic player.

K: Listen, I was never a great player, so you can throw that out the window. Wait a minute . . . what do you class as a great player. What do you class Pele as?

P: A great player. A fantastic player.

K: And you put me in the same bracket as that?

P: Well, not far off.

K: No, I don't fall for that.

But it was when he talked about his idea of management that he impressed most.

Little things kept cropping up, evidence that he'd inspected the life from all angles.

Like his intention that the club organise some apartments locally to have on standby for when a new player is signed so that he doesn't have to put down a couple of soul-draining months in a hotel room. Or like his answer when it was put to him that his strength of character should take him a long way in his new line of work.

"Well, I think that gets you a bit as well but [coaching] the top players, they need a bit more than that. There's got to be substance behind that. That's why some of the top players in the past may have come up short because they thought they had enough in that respect. People will be happy to go out and meet you and work for you but that will only get you so far. Good players are going to ask you questions about why you're playing this way, why you're training this way. I was always like that, playing under different coaches.

"Any of the lads I was with, you'd be looking to pick holes in it. I used to do it. Most players nowadays are asking, 'Why are we doing this?

What's the benefit of it?' In terms of whatever it might be, on the training pitch, preparation, recovery, travel arrangements. You've got to be looking at everything. And it was alright for me as a player, but now it's the other way round and players will be looking at me and asking, 'Why are we doing it?' And I've got to have the answers."

He'd only taken one training session with his new players by that stage and already it had given him a taste of life on the other side of the fence.

When he told the story of one of the Sunderland players coming to him after training to complain about something, it made him think that he must have been a nightmare to deal with as a player. It made the rest of us think that whoever the player was that had the cojones to go to him with a gripe after their first session together ought to be made club captain without delay.

Those scenarios are the kind of thing he'll have to deal with a thousand times a day now and he accepts that for them to work to his advantage, he'll have to keep his temper in check more often than he's done in the past.

Which is bound to be easier said than done, surely. It's not as if he flew off the handle intentionally all those times, is it?

"No it just happened. Jesus, I wish I knew, I would have stopped. It's knowing where that line is. It would be different if it were marked out.

I think it would be harder for a manager, but I hope that the experience I've had from stuff that's happened at United, I suppose, I hope I can learn from that and hopefully the penny will drop. But the bottom line is I'm a player . . . well I was a player . . . sorry, I'm a manager. It's a question of getting the balance right of what you want. You want to show the players you've got passion as well, you want players to respect you. Not necessarily to like you, to respect you. If I can do that, I think we've got a chance."

If managerial bloodlines have anything to do with it, he's got a chance anyway.

Alex Ferguson has already given football management Mark Hughes, Steve Bruce, Bryan Robson and Gordon Strachan among others;

Brian Clough has bequeathed Martin O'Neill and Stuart Pearce for starters. Keane wouldn't have been sitting in front of us on Tuesday had he not picked and mixed from both men.

"Brian Clough kept things very, very simple. I hope that I'll be getting that across. For the players coming into training this morning there won't be major changes. In terms of the football side of it, I've always said that football was a simple game. Brian Clough's advice to me before my first ever game at Forest was 'Get it, pass it to a red shirt and move'. That was his advice and I've made a career out of it.

"So I'll be trying to simplify things. Tony [Loughlan] my friend wants me to bring Triggs up to the ground because Cloughie used to bring his dog along. Maybe that's a bit far. Brian Clough's ideas were very simple but there was a genius behind it.

I hope that makes sense.

There was a genius behind it. I'm not trying to play down what he was doing. He had his ways."

And Ferguson's rules of the road didn't differ wildly either.

"People used to come to United training . . . and I used to have people over, coaches and the like . . . and they used to be disappointed when they left.

They thought, 'Is that it?' And I'd say yeah. We just kept possession. Obviously we had really good players of course.

I'm not trying to make out it's going to be an easy job, but you keep it simple and that will be my job. To keep it simple."

The bridge to his old Yoda is one of the ones he's apparently rebuilt after the extensive fire damage of last November. The Quinn bridge is also up again and, with anything up to seven of his squad also in with a shout of being regular members of Steve Staunton's, he's eager to go to work on that one too. As for McCarthy, well that's different. With him, there was never a bridge to speak of in the first place. There may well be a handshake on 25 November but it will be cursory at best on both sides.

By then, we'll be getting a better picture of who Roy Keane the manager is. As will the good people of The Colliery pub. As will he himself.

Tantalising, isn't it?