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Mick McCarthy is now faced with a vexing question. Does he do more harm to Andy Keogh by taking him out the team or leaving him in? writes Martin Swain.

Yes, it’s a welcome back to “Keoghgate”, the continuing story of the latest in a long, long line of Molineux scapegoats who attract stick like Robbie Keane attracts transfers.

It’s difficult to sometimes know why certain players suffer more than others. One theory last night, for example, concluded that Keogh’s sloping body language out on the pitch was as much to blame as anything; on cold winters’ nights, English football fans are reckoned to respond more favourably to all-action style than players of a more languid expression.

The anti-Keogh lobby will simply tell you they are on his back because he isn’t playing well. Whatever the reason, he is certainly once more in the firing line just when he might have thought he was winning back the supporters’ favour, after a goalscoring performance in the FA Cup at Birmingham triggered a return to the starting XI.

Keogh playing freely and confidently, as he did when he first arrived two years ago, is vital to Wolves and a good foil for any of their main strikers.

But that confidence now looks ‘shot.’ His inability to make anything from four moments of goalscoring potential led to an uneasy 80 minutes for the Irish forward before he was substituted to loud ironic cheers.

Every instinct McCarthy has developed in more than 30 years of professional football will tell him to stick by his man under the weight of this grumbling. He hates nothing more than to see honest-to-goodness pros, which Keogh undoubtedly is, buckling under the burden of what he perceives as unfair and unwarranted criticism.

Indeed, when asked after the match whether the crowd’s growing disenchantment with Keogh was the reason for his substitution, the Wolves manager snapped back: “Was it ’eck – it nearly made me keep him on.”

In the end, McCarthy opted for what he called the “greater good” – to introduce a second winger, Kyel Reid, for one final assault on the Norwich goal, and, for all the store the Wolves manager places on backing for his players, that same principle must now be applied when deciding how best to handle Keogh’s immediate future.

He has never been a prolific scorer and what he would have craved more than anything last night was a chance he did not have to think about. Instead, he got the opposite, and, in choosing to pass up his opportunities to shoot for goal in an effort to set up less favourably-placed team mates, we surely saw a player evading the chance of success because of the fear of failure.

Keogh will doubtless argue otherwise, but Molineux scapegoats always have done – before admitting, generally in the retrospect of retirement, just how they struggled to cope with the unforgiving groans from the galleries.

McCarthy, then, must decide whether his team’s cause will really best be served by the display of faith and trust in Keogh to which he is naturally drawn.

The player’s continued selection or otherwise is not the only issue. The cheers which greeted his substitution quickly gave way to the South Bank chanting his name as if by way of apology for deriding him.

This neatly exposed the split personality of Wolves fans. They don’t want to get on the players’ backs, but sometimes they just can’t help it; such is the intensity of their desire for success after so many years of foiled expectations.

Keogh had nothing to do with 2002 and before, but he could still have a big say in delivering what all Wolves fans yearn for this season. How big? Maybe that will be decided by McCarthy’s man management skills as he tends the player’s battered confidence.

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