Wasted Talent? No Such Thing!

Towards the end of his miserable reign at Ipswich Town, Roy Keane was asked if he might have done anything differently.

- Chris Dunlavy

By that stage, the Irishman was almost exclusively coaching the Under-21s, his famously short fuse sizzled to its roots by disenchantment with modern professionals.

“Ah look,” he said, fixing the reporter with that penetrating glare. “If ifs and ands were pots and pans… it doesn’t work like that.”

Keane’s ire is frequently misplaced, but he had a point. Football is chock full of hard luck stories, and there’s often a compelling reason for failure.

Ravel Morrison was once described by Sir Alex Ferguson as the most gifted teenager he’d ever seen.

Yet for all the talk of squandered talent, a chronic lack of tactical discipline meant Morrison was never going to be England’s answer to Zinedine Zidane. His struggles are not so much a ‘what if ’ story as a realisation of the inevitable.

Similarly, the old argument that Matt Le Tissier would have won 50 caps for Spain is predicated on highlights reels, not the day-to-day reality of a player who couldn’t tackle, run or stay out of his local.

Scott Davies, the former Reading midfielder who now plies his trade at Slough Town, is a perfect example. As a novice reporter in 2007, I watched Davies hammer Aldershot to the Conference title with a succession of long-range screamers.