Planet Jupitus: Roy Keane can stay but that beard has to go

Phill Jupitus

Sunderland’s woeful showing against Bolton Wanderers on Saturday has lit the fuse on yet another exciting “manager to go!” firework display for the media. Recent managerial shake-ups at Charlton Athletic and Watford were merely the prawn cocktail before the steak, chips and peas with a side order of onion rings prospect of Big Roy’s departure.

A seductive mixture of ingredients are already laid out. An unsigned contract on the table, a string of bad results and post-match statements that read like Morrissey lyrics. There’s blood in the River Wear and the sharks (or perhaps pike) are circling.

This seemed the perfect excuse to browse message boards to discover what “the man on the street” was thinking. For a kick-off, he’s not really “in the street” as such. “The man” is at home, hunched over a keyboard reading the unvarnished opinions of other embittered, emotional and occasionally illiterate fans.

My favourite aspect of the chat rooms is the anonymity, so I have no idea whether “loyalmackem1966” is a lawyer, an unemployed lorry driver, a single mum or a twitching 13-year-old on crack.

The overall result of this free market of independent thought is pretty much what you might expect. They’re split half and half, right down the middle on whether he should stay or go.

But one thing the internet community seems completely united on is that even if Roy Keane stays, that beard has to go. Some of the more extreme online correspondents are blaming the beard for Sunderland’s poor run of form. “How can the players take him seriously?” one enraged fan writes. Another talks about how in the darker days of his own life he grew a beard to reflect his inner turmoil and he thinks that’s what Roy’s doing. It’s not just a beard, it’s a cry for help.

Having dabbled in the world of facial adornment, I’d just like to calm everybody down. Yes it makes him look like an anorexic Brian Blessed, but it’s just a beard. I prefer it to the half-shaven look he was sporting in September, which made him look like the fearsome Magwitch from Dickens’s Great Expectations. I can assure you that the troubles at Sunderland will not be solved with a razor.