You wanted to sit him down and tell him that where Roy Keane is concerned, you never get used to it. That his is the show that never ends, the movie that always has one final twist in it. Get used to it? Get used to what? To being surprised? To the head shake and wry smile you use to greet news of the latest instalment? To the sense of fascination with the man that's about to settle itself over England's north-east?

And you wanted to tell him that, anyway, this was all supposed to be over for a while at least, that you'd packed away your Roy files and your Keane library for the time being, that you had actually been planning on a couple of years away from the sport of Roywatching. That you were thinking of maybe going fishing or learning Spanish or something . . .anything normal and routine like the rest of the world does in its spare time.

That while you'd been looking forward to the day when Keane would arrive back into football, you'd been quite happy with the prospect of him leaving it for two or three years, just so we could all take stock and catch our breath. You wanted to tell him all this but he had people to sign in.

Due to the excitement generated by Niall Quinn and his Drumaville consortium, Sunderland's Friday morning press conferences have generally been a bit better attended of late than they were at the fag end of last season. But Friday was a quantum leap. All the English national papers sent someone, all the locals at least one. And they all came in vain because so put out was Quinn by the fact that Keane's name had been leaked on Wednesday night that he refused to answer any questions that weren't about tomorrow's game against West Bromwich Albion. So you had an undeniably comic scene in which football writers who wouldn't have known the West Brom right-back if he'd come in and sat down and asked questions of Quinn himself wondered idly about Sunderland's problems on the left wing just to fill the awkward silence.

It got to the point where Quinn even refused to confirm that Keane was the man they were talking to, although he did trip himself up a little at one point. In a desperate attempt to get something out of the journey, one journalist asked him if he thought, in general terms, that Roy Keane would make a good manager.

"Well, of course. We wouldn't be talking to him iff" Quinn started before catching himself and trailing off.

See? Niall Quinn has known Keane for all these years and even he's not quite gotten used to it yet.

"The day Roy retires and everything is lifted from his shoulders, I think you'll see a different man.

He'll lighten up again. He'll have a laugh some day about how he spent the best days of his life wound up like a coiled spring. He'll shake his head and wonder about how uptight and intense he was. I hope he will anyway."

From 'Niall Quinn - The Autobiography' It's rare to the point of being unprecedented that two individuals who are about to enter such high-profile a working relationship have committed so many thoughts about each other to print.

Through their respective autobiographies and occasional newspaper columns down the years, Roy Keane and Niall Quinn have continually made it known what they've thought of each other and each other's actions. Funny then, that all the time they were writing words for us to read, the real insight was lurking between the lines.

Because, actually, this whole drama probably shouldn't surprise us as much as it has this past week. When Sky's Richard Keys announced at half-time in Manchester United's game against Charlton on Wednesday night that Keane was to become the new Sunderland manager, mobile phones countrywide buzzed with text-messaged excitement. Some presumed it was a prank, many refused point-blank to believe it.

The problem isn't Quinn and Keane; it's us, the public. We take a line in a book or a remark in an interview and from then until the end of time it's gospel.

But real life doesn't work like that. People change their views on all kinds of things all the time. So it is with this pair.

When you strip away the clouds and controversies, what you're left with are two men. Just men, just people, just like the rest of us. Men with flexible moods and changeable minds no different to anyone else.

You take Keane. The Keane whose biggest drinking buddy in the early Ireland days was Steve Staunton. The Keane who went on the tear with Quinn as well.

He's also the Keane who called them both cowards during the Saipan bother and who stood by his words months later in an Irish Times interview. He's also the Keane who a couple of months back admitted to regretting how sour things had got between them all. Just a man, who for all his famed mental fortitude has just as much mastery and control over human relationships as the rest of us.

Or you take Quinn. A genuinely nice man, one who got a bum rap around Saipan from all the Keaneites who wouldn't accept that his decency wasn't some piece of grandstanding. An allround good egg who, even when Keane was calling him a coward and a muppet, would tell anyone who listened that he looked forward to the day he'd be able to bring his son to see the great Roy Keane play for Ireland again. He's also the Quinn who, back last November when the fall-out from Keane's appearance on MUTV was the hottest point of discussion in English football, wrote what was by far the most virulent piece of commentary on the whole affair.

In his Guardian column, he called Keane's criticism of United's players in their performance against Middlesbrough "farcical and self-serving". "As far as I am aware, " he wrote, "humiliating your colleagues in public is not the best way to foster team spirit. From his teammates' point of view, do they really see that as a genuine attempt to get a positive reaction or was it a rant from someone supposedly so committed to United that he has let everybody know how much he loves the idea of a move to Celtic?"

Just a man, just like Keane. A goodnatured guy given to the same fits of temper and the same occasional tendency towards having a cut as the rest of us.

So why the shock? Here is a club that needed a manager, a chairman who needed a big name to get some breathing space with his public and a consortium with money to spend. And here is a man who nobody doubted would get into management at some stage and who in his playing days specialised in exactly the kind of attitude adjustment Quinn says is needed at the club.

They fell out. So what? They said some unkind things about each other. So what?

The cost of doing that kind of business in public is that every word gets pulled apart for its hidden meaning by a public and a press with little . . . if any . . . proximity to the situation. We based our reactions on what we thought we knew of the two of them and their relationship with each other. We really ought to have known better.

The first approach came around five weeks ago. Martin O'Neill and Sam Allardyce had already turned down Quinn's audacious efforts to lure them to the Championship and time was running out before the start of the new season. When it became clear that Keane would take a bit of working on, Quinn came up with the idea of naming himself as manager instead of the alternative, which was to put someone in temporary charge.

He figured that giving the players their third manager in five months as a stopgap while they waited for their fourth in six would leave an already demoralised squad without any real idea who was in charge. And anyway, who could he possibly have corralled into taking it in the short-term, with him all the while saying that the club needed and deserved a big name?

So he took a punt and decided to have a go himself. He aimed no higher than stopping the rot. Three wins the whole of last season had released a nasty strain of a merciless defeatist virus in the club.

Everywhere, apathy hung in the air.

Training was lax, habits were slipshod.

What he knew they needed was exactly what he referred to in his book. Somebody who walked around like a coiled spring, who was uptight and intense, who was offended by the idea of defeat.

While he waited on that, he rubbed along in his own way.

But the rot is far from stopped. Five games, five defeats. The nadir was reached on Tuesday night with a Carling Cup exit to Bury, the only team in England who'd up until then been having a worse start to the season, lying as they did dead bottom of the whole league.

Quinn, who had called for and mostly received the forbearance of the Sunderland public, was beginning to show signs that the whole thing was taking its toll. The natives had been getting restless for about a week, so he chose his post-match interview to announce that he was resigning as manager and was close to being able to hand over the reins to somebody "world-class".

And not before time, either. When the Sunderland Echo ran a poll the following day asking if Quinn had been right to step down, 87 per cent said yes. "By doing both jobs, he's doing neither, " said one fan. "He hasn't found a manager yet, he hasn't brought in any decent players yet and he hasn't got the players who are at the club to win a game yet. So what exactly is it that he's doing?"

What he was doing, it turns out, was continuing to work on Keane through Michael Kennedy. That it leaked out to Sky TV on Wednesday night angered both sides and Quinn is said to have had to do some pretty fast talking to keep things on track. Still, Keane does appear to be genuinely interested in the job, one for which he will become the best paid manager in the Championship.

Kennedy was in Sunderland yesterday dotting and crossing and it is believed the announcement will be made on the club's website at some stage today.

And what then? Then we wait. The plan is to introduce him to the crowd at tomorrow's West Brom game before he meets the press on Tuesday. After that, he will have the best part of a fortnight to take a wrench to the problems that face him before meeting Derby away on Saturday week.

And boy, are there problems. They're not even just ones of morale at this stage either. There's a desperately low level of talent at the club and the closing of the transfer window on Thursday night should put paid to any efforts he might have of attracting improvements. It's accepted that there'll be money to spend in January but there was money to spend this time as well and as Quinn himself put it, "We wasted a full week trying to get Premiership players to come here and they just flat-out refused to come down a division." It's hard to see just how attractive a rookie manager can make them in the meantime.

Still, you have to hand it to him, he likes a challenge. After taking the path of least resistance for the first time in his career by going to Celtic instead of another Premiership club at the end of last year, he's confounded us all yet again.

Suppose we're going to have to get used to it, aren't we?

As if we could.

LIAM BRADY ON ROY KEANE'S MOVE INTO MANAGEMENT IT'S an amazing story but, above all, Roy Keane's appointment at Sunderland is one that's going to throw up a lot of compelling questions over the course of the season. First of all, it's going to be intriguing to see how he's going to hack management, particularly since he's someone who's been so critical of two Irish managers in the past . . . Jack Charlton and Mick McCarthy . . . both of whom, given the context of Irish football, did excellent jobs.

Then there's his relationship with Niall Quinn. There was obviously some animosity over the Saipan saga, particularly when Manchester United played away to Sunderland a few months after that and Quinn's attempted handshake went unreciprocated as Keane was sent off.

Throughout that whole affair though, Quinn . . . as he often does . . . sat on both sides of the fence. I don't think Keane is that kind of person so it's going to be fascinating to see how that evolves.

I'm also particularly interested to know who's behind the scenes at Sunderland and their knowledge of the game because, at the moment, you've got a board who don't know too much about it, a chairman who has no experience in that role . . . as well as a brief shot at management which, as we know, didn't turn out to be easy for him . . . and, now, a rookie manager. So there are a lot of uncertainties.

In one sense, it seems to be a piece of showmanship by the Sunderland board. They're desperately trying to invigorate the public up there, who are passionate about their football, and get them onside. I think they initially thought it would work with Quinn alone but that bubble burst very quickly and Keane is the big name they're bringing in, in the hope of keeping the ship afloat. They've started so badly it's untrue, especially for a team that only went down the previous season, and they've got to get things going very quickly or the season will be a total wash-out.

And that's the one thing you would say for Keane, as, after five consecutive defeats, things can only get better at the Stadium of Light. He commands authority and respect for what he's done in the game, so it'll be interesting to see if he can organise these players and give them the confidence to go and get some results.

He'll have to because it looks like his hands are tied in the transfer market, with so little of the window left to get any players from the Premiership.

Also, will he follow the hands-off approach of other managers who go into a job once the season's started?

Will he stand back and have a look at things before he starts picking his own team and making changes? One thing is for sure, he'll go into the job very, very seriously and believing he is capable of succeeding.

But whether it's actually the right move for Keane himself, time will tell.

Sometimes, these jobs come along and you convince yourself that it's the best option for you. I know from my own experience that management is not easy and I wish him all the best.

He's going to find out very quickly, though, that it's a 24-hour job. I know he loves his privacy and his time with his family, but that will all go out the window now. His life is going to change dramatically. The phone will be constantly ringing with problems to solve every day, whether it be buying a player, dealing with an unhappy player or with a payer who's got himself into trouble in a bar or a nightclub.

Ultimately, he's going to be judged on results, but all the different facets are going to make fascinating viewing.

On this side of the Irish Sea at least. I don't think in England they're going to view it with quite the same passion and fervour as over here. They're not quite au fait with the ins and outs of what's gone on with both players' careers and it certainly seems to be an Irish concern now. You've got Irish owners, an Irish board, an Irish chairman and an Irish manager. We shall see. Interesting times lie ahead however.