ROY KEANE the manager has already been shaped by life at Portman Road. Back in the autumn of 2006, he brought his Sunderland side to Suffolk for his fourth game in charge and, surveying the scene prior to kick-off in the away dressingroom, he first realised the true extent of the task he had taken on.

“It wasn’t that they were playing Abba in the changing room, but it was that the masseur was in charge of the music,” he reflected. “If I’d been a player, I wouldn’t have let that happen. It was one of the things that needed to be changed.”

Keane learned a lot that day, as his team went ahead before crumpling 3-1.

“I was still finding out about different people and characters, but some things really stick out,” he said. “There’s a shortage of leaders and characters out there anyway. When you get one or two, you have to make sure you hang on to them and build around them, but there are definitely fewer with each generation.”

He will learn in the next two weeks, in otherwise meaningless games against Cardiff and Coventry, whether there are any in this Ipswich set-up around which he can construct a promotion challenge next season.

Keane returned to football yesterday clean-shaven, but with his icy stare and jutted jaw as fearsome as ever. He had attended the reserves’ 3-3 draw with Peterborough on Tuesday, some 24 hours before Jim Magilton had even been dismissed, and was at his new club’s training facility at 8am yesterday to oversee a first-team squad which his predecessor had constructed at considerable expense, but who trail Championship leaders Wolverhampton Wanderers, by some 26 points.

Keane is relishing the challenge. “I’m not a different person,” he said. “I’ve had time to think about the few mistakes I made at Sunderland, and the good things I did there. I’ve just been enjoying myself: relaxing and not answering to anybody; having an Easter holiday, which I’d never done before; going skiing, which I’d never done before; walking my dogs. But my dogs need a break. I’m ready for this now.

“Football is in my blood and I’ve watched a hell of a lot on television.

“I wouldn’t say I ever lost my hunger. Far from it. But I am comfortable with myself. When I took the Sunderland job, it was the right job for me. This is the right job for me now, I have this gut feeling, but there are no guarantees of success.”

At one stage at his unveiling yesterday he commented on the sides that might slip from the Premier League at the end of the campaign, but did not list Sunderland among them.

Clearly, in his mind, that remains the team he built.

“People have to remember the squad I walked into at Sunderland was an old squad, a slow squad,” he said. “People talk about the money I spent, but I left some good assets at that club. I probably bought too many players in the summer, and I didn’t have the right characters. I had to manage that.

“But I wouldn’t change too much. I did a decent job – not a fantastic one, a decent one – and the team were on course to finish the job I started, despite our little wobble.

“Hopefully I left my mark, and I feel I can leave my mark at Ipswich, too, otherwise I wouldn’t be here.

“This is a club with a good heritage, who did well in the 1970s and 1980s, but as much as it’s a massive part of the club, it’s about now and what I achieve.”

The Keane revival is under way.