Roy Keane says his Town team have shown a tendency to be naïve during the latter stages of games this season. The Blues boss was clarifying his comment last week when he said that the club is too nice.
Keane says he wasn’t referring to the club, its staff or the fans but to the team when he said that Town are "too nicey nicey”: "There’s nothing wrong with being nice, my dad always said it’s nice to be nice, but you’ve got to have that nasty streak. The nasty streak I meant was at certain times of the game.
"I don’t mean the club or the area or the supporters, because they’ve been brilliant, but in terms of concentration [on the pitch], we’ve conceded a lot of late goals and that’s when you need a nasty streak.
"Knowing when to foul somebody, time waste, we see clubs doing it all day, but I think we’re generally a naïve team. That’s why I say the team’s probably lacked one or two characters.
"I’ve seen it with other teams and other clubs, it gets to injury time, I wouldn’t say [it's] cheating, but there are times when you can take your time with the throw-in. We’ve had it here a couple of times when clubs have come here and players have been down for four or five minutes and they get up and there’s nothing wrong with them.
"There’s a cuteness to it, that’s what I meant. I didn’t mean the people at the club, but I mean the players need to be more streetwise.”
The Town boss hasn’t spoken with owner and chairman Marcus Evans recently but says this is entirely normal with his day-to-day relationship with chief executive Simon Clegg: "Any talk of a breakdown [with Evans] is nonsense. I speak to the chief executive as normal twice a week and we were all discussing possible players to come in recently.”
Keane reiterated that he’s happy in Suffolk and suggested he would keep on living here even if he were to lose his job with the Blues: "I love it here, I'm very happy. I took my five kids out of their school in Manchester to be here. I bought the house, so I've made a commitment to the area anyway, whether I'm in a job or not.
"But I've made a commitment to the club as well. I want to see out the job for the two years of my contract and hopefully that will continue.”