Keane v Rice – who won on points?

Declan Rice did a half decent job on shoving Roy Keane’s bitter criticism of his midfield defensive abilities back down his throat in Kosovo last night.

The word ‘half’ is deliberately chosen because nobody came out of the first 45 minutes with any serious credit but it all changed in the second and the 20 year old Hammer looked  on the case in a big way.

Ahead of the match Keane had been doing his irritating impersonation of a cheesed off grandfather, about 30 years too early, explaining that virtually everything in the lad’s game needs improvement.

But after a very good second 45 minutes he was significantly quiet about a performance which was significantly better than anything he had had to say before the game.

And towards the end of the 90 minutes  Dec made a quite magnificent intervention to deny a Kosovon striker a one on one close to goal on stopper Pope to make accusations of poor positional play look pretty stupid.

At this level criticism must be expected -hopefully if there#s a next time Mr Keane can provide some which is a little more constructive.

At the end of the night Declan came out a winner over the Irishman on points!