The Keane calamity, the PR disaster and the threat to authority

As more and more teams return home from the World Cup, some in delight, some in disgrace, internal reviews of how each performed will soon be under way. Emphasis on the word "internal"; in contrast, the Football Association of Ireland, having enjoyed a welcome back for their squad from some 100,000 people in Phoenix Park, Dublin, on Tuesday, have decided on the equivalent of parading naked down O'Connell Street. It will not be a pretty sight.

A fortnight ago, just before the decisive final group match against Saudi Arabia, the FAI announced: "Irrespective of the outcome of the team's remaining participation in World Cup 2002, the officers and general secretary of the FAI are recommending to their board of management that an independent external review of the association's organisation and involvement in World Cup 2002 be undertaken on our return to Ireland. The report will be made public when completed."

Although reluctant at the time to embark on any further explanation, the general secretary, Brendan Menton, has subsequently hinted, in two conflicting reports, that while the inquiry might open up a Pandora's Box better left firmly shut, he believes it will vindicate the FAI's stance on the most important issues. That is an optimistic, if not presumptuous, attitude.

What might the conclusions be? Taken in chronological order, the choice of Saipan as the base for a week's acclimatisation, involving three flights and a journey of almost 20 hours, might be regarded as unwise, and there was clearly a misunderstanding about the nature of this initial period: the manager, Mick McCarthy, regarded it as a period of rest and relaxation, with light physical training, while Roy Keane's obsessive ultra-professionalism led him to expect something else; the captain, already irritated by the number of hangers-on offering farewells at Dublin airport, was therefore understandably put out that skips containing training kit had not arrived and that the quality of the training pitch was poor.

He then made all of this, and much more, clear in two lengthy word-for-word interviews in Irish broadsheet newspapers. Each, in the Sunday Independent and the Irish Times, was riveting but highly ill-advised, which a more sophisticated media officer would have recognised and attempted to prevent. It hardly made sense for Keane, in such chippy mood, to be spilling out all his resentment and complaints in 5,000-word interviews a week before the World Cup began.

The public relations operation is another issue that the inquiry will feel obliged to address, and is one from which the FAI cannot emerge with credit. Menton was told months ago that having one veteran press officer running the show at a major international tournament was courting trouble, and so it proved. England have had three media officers with them at all times, one of them a former BBC reporter trusted to speak on all policy matters and kept fully informed of them.

But when 20 journalists turned up at the Irish team hotel early one morning seeking a reaction to Keane's emotional half-hour television interview, Ireland's press officer had not even been told that he was giving one.

Similarly, a misunderstanding meant that the handwritten statement drafted by Niall Quinn in the back of the team bus was released too early and implied that the players did not want Keane with them, just at the time when Quinn was negotiating through the night to have him brought back to Japan. Whether any member of the squad should have been involved in such negotiations, initially behind the manager's back, is another matter that the inquiry might feel obliged to consider.

What of McCarthy's role in all this? His supporters will argue that Keane was an explosion waiting to happen and that no official could have accepted the challenge to their authority that his highly personalised and foul-mouthed outburst represented. What made it worse was that it occurred at a team meeting, rather than in private, where it might conceivably have remained. That was the manager's choice, as he had decided to bring up the subject of Keane's newspaper interviews – brandishing a copy of one of them – in front of the whole staff and squad.

An in-house inquiry would be wary of attaching any public blame to McCarthy, in the knowledge that his sensitivity to criticism might lead him to walk away without fulfilling his promise, and contractual obligation, to lead the team into the next European Championship campaign starting in September.

An outside body will have no such qualms, which is one of several reasons why the whole concept is flawed. But there is one way it could still be avoided: the FAI's management committee can reject the proposal at its next meeting in a fortnight's time.

Only then will Irish football be spared a Lady Godiva act of breast-baring and breast-beating.