Booker Prize-winner Roddy Doyle nails Keane's attitude and cadences... Compelling, eye-opening, and - whisper it - great fun -- Ben East * METRO * Reflections of a spent, alcoholic teacher. The New Yorker, 2 April 2007. Teaching online text (2 April 2007) Telford, Lyndsey (21 December 2011). "Seamus Heaney declutters home and donates personal notes to National Library". Irish Independent. Independent News & Media . Retrieved 21 December 2011.

Allen Randolph, Jody. "Roddy Doyle, August 2009." Close to the Next Moment: Interviews from a Changing Ireland. Manchester: Carcanet, 2010. Our experience of Barrytown and the people that live there is constructed through the interplay of language, as Doyle's texts consist primarily of dialogue between various characters with a minimum of narrative exposition." Matt McGuire (Spring 2006). "Dialect(ic) Nationalism?: The fiction of James Kelman and Roddy Doyle". Scottish Studies Review. 7 (1): 80–94.

Roddy Doyle (born 8 May 1958) is an Irish novelist, dramatist and screenwriter. He is the author of eleven novels for adults, eight books for children, seven plays and screenplays, and dozens of short stories. Several of his books have been made into films, beginning with The Commitments in 1991. Doyle's work is set primarily in Ireland, especially working-class Dublin, and is notable for its heavy use of dialogue written in slang and Irish English dialect. Doyle was awarded the Booker Prize in 1993 for his novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. Other children's books include Wilderness (2007), Her Mother's Face (2008), and A Greyhound of a Girl (2011). Doyle's first three novels, The Commitments (1987), The Snapper (1990) and The Van (1991) compose The Barrytown Trilogy, a trilogy centred on the Rabbitte family. All three novels were made into successful films. The musical version of The Commitments has, he says, more than lived up to his once-in-a-lifetime criterion. "Whether it works out commercially or not, it's an amazing experience to see all these people come together. At one point, before the first preview, there were something like 77 people employed – which is an army in a theatre. And to be involved in it, not just witnessing it, was amazing."

I read Roy Keane's first autobiography several years ago, and meant to read this about four years ago when it first came out, particularly as the first book seemed to end abruptly, since it was written in 2002, and there were many things about his career that he had yet to write about. Martin Doyle, "Roddy Doyle adds his Two Pints worth to marriage equality Yes vote campaign", The Irish Times, 1 May 2015.It is the dearth of integrity that makes Pietersen such a peevish, trifling character, and the surfeit that makes Keane so entrancingly epic ... the personification of honest to a fault ... he is as close as sport can offer to an Old Testament prophet. Heroically unconcerned with being loved, almost insanely devoted to telling what he regards as the plain truth, he may not always be engaging. But ... he stands out as utterly and irreducibly true to himself -- Matthew Norman * THE INDEPENDENT * A book that offers great insight into the modern manager's job ... The book does not attempt to deflect the mistakes Keane made but it adds a dimension to the man. Especially in his reflections on small details of behaviour, and there are scores of them ... Keane must hope that the decision-makers in football take the trouble to read the book itself People miss the fact that Keane is funny. Caustic, yes, clenched, he'd admit. Angry (though no longer prone to rage, his book claims) more than most. But funny. The light touch in The Second Half is not exclusively Doyle's. Yet the heavy stuff compels ... The account of Keane's Sunderland reign is riveting. The everyday trials of a first-time manager are uncovered as in no other book ... The Second Half is brutally honest -- Jonathan Northcroft * THE SUNDAY TIMES *

Keano rarely fails to entertain and with a ghost outrider such as Roddy Doyle, we get a snappy, snapping tale,, with Keane putting the boot into those he considers deserving but also not sparing the rod on himself... Like the midfield dynamo in his prime, this story could run and run * RTE GUIDE *

Two Pints (2017) was produced by the Abbey Theatre initially in pubs and later in the theatre itself. [22] Roddy Doyle's works, mostly set in a fictional Dublin suburb, often star quietly frustrated everymen, and it's this book's achievement to make you see its mighty subject in that light -- Anthony Cummins * DAILY TELEGRAPH * If you write a book, you have got to be true to yourself. It's no good just making something up. You have got to show what is in your heart, and what is in your head, and that is what Roy has done -- Terry Venables * THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY * Altro difetto, se così si può chiamare, è il monocentrismo. Ok è il libro di Keane, ma qui si tratta di un autentico One Man Band che concede giusto le briciole a tutti i campioni, come lui, che lo circondavano. Inoltre mi permetto di rilevare una eccessiva indulgenza nei propri confronti stemperata solo da un’autocritica appena accennata. Abel, Marco. "Roddy Doyle." British Novelists Since 1960: Second Series. Ed. Merritt Moseley. Detroit: Gale Research, 1998. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 194. [2]

A genuine pleasure; it is a masterpiece of the genre and one that paints, in an entirely unintentional way, an extremely flattering portrait of the man ... Keane is not afraid to laugh at himself by telling stories against himself ... His thoughts on his players are humane, interesting, candid and never less than believable ... Keane's story is of a man, too, one who has had to look at football and life anew as a manager, and it is this added perspective that gives richness and humanity to the tale Keane's eminent co-writer, Booker Prize-winning Irish author Roddy Doyle, does a brilliant job. His gift for comedy and swearing, together with his wonderfully transparent style, not only captures his country man's voice but also adds some much-needed light and shade to the unforgiving business of being Roy Keane. It's not a sentence I expected to write but the account of Keane's triumphant first season at Sunderland is particularly uplifting -- Neil O'Sullivan * FINANCIAL TIMES * Two books in one - the tales of a truly great Premier League footballer, flawed by raging moments of visceral destructiveness... then the tortuous account of an aspiring, complex 21st-century manager... addictive road-crash reading... But the book's true revelatory value is seen during Keane's time as manager of Sunderland, which he relates with a remarkable candour and honesty. An incomparable achievement - written with Booker prize-winner Roddy Doyle - illustrating the contemporary demands on a player and boss whose life has always been conducted with its own stark, peculiar, and sometimes violent, logic

Summary

A man ponders the gradual erosion of his marriage. New Yorker, 5 November 2007. The Dog online text After reading a few autobiographies of players and staff associated with Manchester United, certainly the biggest premiership club in past two decades, now in turmoil, Roy Keane's The Second Half is one of the most honest and straightforward memoir I have ever read.