There's no sign yet of the Sunderland team bus but the manager is here alright, an hour or so of media chatter to skip through before he can get down to work.

Roy Keane is in decent form, looking as fit and energetic as ever he did. The summer has been like nothing else he's experienced before in the game, hectic in a way he hadn't fully expected it to be. He admits that promotion took them a little by surprise and the upshot was that his sights had to be set a fair bit higher in terms of transfer targets, with all the attendant problems that presented. Bigger names take that little bit more wooing, their agents that little bit more tolerating, their clubs that little bit more buck for their blue chips. It's a world away from the six-week solong and farewell he was used to enjoying as a player but it would hardly be him if he wasn't immersing himself whole, involving himself in the minutiae of each deal struck.

"Yeah, I have to say they intrigue me, " he says. "They definitely do. I was speaking to our chief executive Peter Walker today and as much as I was saying to him to go and seal the deal we're trying to get done at the minute, it still comes back to me as the manager. I'll identify a player and Peter will do the negotiations with the club and the agent but it still comes back to me.

"In an ideal world, what I think I would like to do is get to a situation where I can identify a player, give his name to Peter and then completely step back. I would try not to get involved too much. But you do, you can't help it. You end up speaking to the player's manager and player himself because you're that keen to get involved. You feel that you have to get involved to get the thing done."

Is that because for you, this is the start of your relationship with that player?

"Possibly so. Yeah, I have to say that would be a factor. In any deal, you have to get permission to speak to a player but once we have that, we wouldn't be at all blase about it.

I will make the effort to go and meet the player, I will travel wherever I need to, whatever it takes. And I know that when I was a player, that kind of thing meant an awful lot to me. If a club makes the effort with you and makes the effort with your family, it makes a difference. So that's all part of the challenge.

Some managers might be quite relaxed about it because maybe they're at massive clubs and mightn't be that desperate for a player but to me, if you want a player, you have to go to any lengths to get him."

It's for this reason that he found himself having to tell Sunderland supporters to chill out when they found the days of early summer passing without a stream of stars flowing through the gates of the Stadium of Light. He was putting in the hours alright but was rapidly finding out that the smart work on transfers has to be done before the summer starts and that for all the achievements of last season, Sunderland is still quite a way down the list of desired stops on a top footballer's roadmap.

Never mind that in winning the Championship last year they became the only team in the history of English football to win any professional division after losing their first four games, they're still shabby old Sunderland in the popular imagination, the team from the north of England's most deprived city. The name of their manager doesn't carry as much weight yet as we in Ireland might have assumed it would. Which is why he still maintains that a poor start to the season could see him drummed out of the place.

"Absolutely, " he says. "I think it's the same for every manager. You can be successful one minute but lose a few and you're in trouble. You look at Mourinho last year, people were talking about him losing his job . . . what a mad world that is. A couple of years ago, they were talking about the manager at United.

That's the beauty of management I suppose.

I enjoy that side of it, the uncertainty that comes when you lose two or three games and people start questioning you. I enjoy it, I have to say."

And you don't feel that because of the uniquely Irish set-up at Sunderland that you're protected to an extent?

"No. No, no. Jesus Christ, no chance."

The conversation moves on to something he'd said in passing earlier on. For all that the summer has been frantic, he's still managed to make time for himself and his family away from the job and the game. The contrast with when he was playing and especially in the post-cruciate days couldn't be starker and when he examines it now, he reflects that his relentless devotion in the later years took its toll.

"It did near the end, yeah. It was just football, football, football. It was all about watching what I was eating, how much I was sleeping, what fluids I was drinking, the diet side of it. And I think again, I used that term 'balancing act' before. Maybe I went too far the other way and became obsessed with it.

Eventually, maybe I wasn't enjoying it as much as I should have been because I was becoming obsessed with everything else like travelling and diet. There's actually nothing wrong with a player carrying a few pounds but near the end, my body fat levels were ridiculously low and I think that probably led to one or two knocks that I could maybe have avoided.

And did that all affect your enjoyment of the game?

"Possibly so, possibly so. Certainly in the last few months of it, my enjoyment of it went down a bit. A big part of that as well was the fact that I was feeling my hip quite a lot.

But the other stuff was a factor. And it's something again that I've brought forward with me into what I'm doing with our players.

I try to make sure they get the balance right.

We treat them as well as we can and if they have to let a bit of steam off sometimes then that's something we take into account. Maybe I didn't let off enough steam towards the end of my career, I have to say. It's different when you're younger, when you're out and about and gallivanting and it's a good way to switch off. But maybe the last one or two years of my career, I didn't switch off enough."

He's adamant that he's better at it now, though, and that when he's off, he's off and the phone is switched to silent. Even though Spurs and the start of the Premier League comes around just next Saturday, he reckons he might leave the players alone in the early part of the week . . . "so they don't get sick of me". He's full of little asides and good humour and you can see he's relishing the prospect of it all, right down to the managerial mind games he hopes to play with his opposite numbers, Messrs Ferguson and Wenger among them.

"We used to enjoy it really among the players [when the United and Arsenal managers bickered]. I personally used to enjoy it.

Because we generally knew that our manager tended to come out on top in those situations. So that helped. I've seen examples of it where it didn't work for some managers but I personally always enjoyed that side of it, even as a player. I always liked when in a team-talk the manager would mention another club or the manager of another team and that would get you geed up, no doubt about it. There's definitely a place for it."

All in all, he's mad for road. Yeah, he'd have liked players with a bit more top-flight experience in his squad but the music's about to start and he's happy to dance with the partners he has rather than cry about the ones he doesn't. Whatever else the season brings, the one thing he won't allow them to have come May is a string of excuses.

"The players want for nothing. I've got good dieticians, good weights trainers, good fitness trainers. If you're a player, you have to enjoy that and you have to plug into that.

When a club is struggling like Sunderland were last year, lots of things are let go. They might only be small things like the food in the canteen or the travel arrangements, but they're there. Everything was loose at the club and I'm just trying to tighten everything up.

We're nowhere near that yet and we're still trying every day. But some things are going the way I want them to.

"Thank God, we have a reserve team back this year. For a club like Sunderland not to have a reserve team is crazy. How are you supposed to get young players and players coming back from injury ready for the first team if there's no reserve team? It was always the plan to get back into the reserve league even if we didn't get promoted. It was before my time that it had been gotten rid of and I think there was lots of reasons for it . . . the team had been relegated, there was a lot of uncertainty and there was financial considerations as well. I can't say I understand it but it happened and we've changed it back now."

With that, he's up from his seat and away out onto the pitch to set about the training session. All the kids have been moved off the pitch by now and as he strides out as far as the centre circle, the hubbub in the stands swells to greet him. There's a bracelet of orange-bibbed stewards there to keep the grass clear but they're vastly outnumbered and soon they're looking like rust on a radiator. Sure enough, it doesn't take long for the pipes to burst and a great flood of excitement to spill out in Keane's direction. He smiles and takes it in good spirit and order is restored after a couple of minutes of frantic shooing from apologetic adults.

But as the army of kids scatter away into the stands again, delighted with their brief and bloodless coup, the thought occurs that there's a fair chance that most of them would look at you blankly if you asked them had they ever heard of Saipan. They were in pre-school for Portugal and Holland in 2001, were literally in nappies for Turin in 1999 and weren't born in time for USA '94. Maybe some of them remember him lifting the Premiership trophy for the last time in 2003 or maybe they have fathers and brothers who've bent their ear about the great Roy Keane, midfielder of his generation.

Most likely though, most of them couldn't give a stuff if he ever kicked a ball or not. Nostalgia means nothing to a gang of 10-year-olds, a person's past is a matter of complete indifference to them compared with what's happening now, today, tomorrow.

No wonder Keane smiled when he saw them come running. Now, today and tomorrow are all that exist for him too.