Roy Keane's death stare points to Hollywood

Roy Keane's BBC interview last week was a masterclass in understated intimidation. As a manager, Keane's intelligence shines through his aggression in a way it rarely did as a player. In his leg-breaking days, we could happily pigeonhole him somewhere between passionate and psychopath and be done with it. But as he's spent more time in front of the camera, he's added a touch of criminal genius to the hard-man routine.

When his face locks up into the death stare on 0m17, you can see the calculations running through his head. Roy will still screw you up, but he'll be imaginative about it. Mobster Keano makes good viewing, but you can see why he's struggled as a club manager. Dwight Yorke's a bit of a wally himself, but his account of Keane's Sunderland reign of terror seems totally plausible. You can't run a football team on a cult of personality alone. 

The path from footballing psycho to silver screen success has been well-trodden by Cantona and Vinnie Jones. Maybe instead of scaring the living daylights out of journeymen footballers, Keano should follow their lead and find a creative outlet for his gift for dramatising ill will?

Is the media spoiling football fans?

Gareth Southgate is quoted in today's Guardian blaming internet forums and football phone-ins for the increasing  impatience of home fans. Apparently Boro are being booed off the pitch to the extent that they prefer away games to home, which Southgate attributes to laymen being encouraged to sound off "without accountability."

Personally, I'm not too bothered about Boro, but he raises an interesting point. The Internet is supposed to be a democratising force, breaking down the experts' monopoly on opinion. But in making potential journo's of us all (ummm...), does it mean we spend more time shouting to be heard, and less time thinking or listening? In media studies, this is known as the "Babel effect ", as it recalls the Biblical tale in which God inflicts confusion and misunderstanding on humanity by replacing one language with several. So the more people chatter about what's in their heads, the less they actually communicate.

Clearly, the Internet and radio phone-ins have not given birth to opinionated football fans -  they've been around a while. For most of us, half the fun of being a fan is to talk endlessly and animatedly about it until you've forgotten where you started. But it seems plausible that in briefly giving your everyman a massive audience, opinions that would otherwise stay locked into a small circle can gather momentum very quickly. The rumbling of the mob is amplified by the media, and negativity can spiral quickly. Likewise, in our fifteen seconds of radio fame the temptation to make dramatic claims is greater than it is down the pub with your mates. And on the Internet, the anonymity of the medium has consequences galore for what we're ready to do and say. So on these counts, maybe Southgate has a point - the lack of accountability in letting everyone have their say can harden opinions against a team more quickly than in real time.

There's much discussion right now of the future of the media and journalism in the digital age. Citizen journalism and shrinking print revenues are threatening the established infrastructures, with many arguing that this erodes the "closed-shop" relationship between business and political elites and media powerhouses. In other words, they're less able to shape how we think without us realising it. This is possibly true of politics and business, although you need sites of authority of some description (these will emerge, but not painlessly). That's why the BBC is becoming less proprietorial about its content - its role is shifting from exclusive production to content facilitation, reflecting the general trend in the new media marketplace. But in sport, where sophisticated production techniques and specialist expertise are so crucial to the entertainment, and where we don't need to worry so much about Big Brother anyway, I don't think this change will be as marked. As Southgate suggests, expertise and talent in sports journalism should be preserved and cherished, because there are a lot more people who want to say something than actually have something to say.