I’d like it noted that I’m not the first one to mention David Beckham. I’m sitting with Robbie Keane in the referees room at the California home of the LA Galaxy, the StubHub Center, and we’re talking about why Ireland’s greatest ever striker chose Los Angeles for this chapter of his career. I’ve been careful to avoid mentioning Beckham directly, but Keane has no doubt about the influence of the Englishman’s move here in 2007.

I think probably if you asked everybody, Becks’ influence on everybody coming here was huge. He was the one who set the standard and set the bar for people coming here. He certainly put MLS on the map...He’s like the equivalent of Tiger Woods in golf. That’s how I see it. That’s the influence he’s had on MLS and a lot of people should be grateful for that

For the majority of their recent history the Galaxy have been synonymous with Beckham, and with him finally having left the team before this season started you could forgive other players for wanting to come out of the shadows – particularly a player who is not only one of the top five European international goal-scorers of all time (only Puskas, Kocsis, Muller and Klose have outscored him), but has also arguably had much greater influence on the field for the Galaxy than Beckham ever had.

In the ten post-season games that brought the Galaxy back-to-back MLS Cups, Robbie Keane scored seven goals and contributed two assists. When Beckham was here, the thought of him not being an All-Star selection would have been unthinkable in box office terms, whereas Keane has been such a consistent shout for MVP, he’s almost made himself invisible in the running (recent conversations I’ve had on the subject tend to run, “Magee or Di Vaio?”, “What about Keane?”, “Yeah, well, obviously Keane...”).

Keane though, is happy to acknowledge his predecessor’s influence and let his feet do the talking as regards his own importance. The Galaxy are now underway in a playoff campaign for an unprecedented third title in a row. If that campaign is to succeed, Robbie Keane’s contribution will be vital - not just his goals but the work he does exhausting opposing defenses and midfields as he floats between them looking for a weakness. He is, as his coach Bruce Arena puts it, “one tough bastard” – though as Keane himself will put it with a shrug, “It’s just me – I don’t know anything different.”

Keane came to MLS in the summer of 2011 and had an immediate impact, slotting into a dominant side that took that year’s Supporters' Shield and went on to lift the MLS Cup. It was a run that was popularly characterized as Beckham finally getting a trophy for his time in the US, but the final also had the symbolic moment of the team’s three Designated Players (since Beckham’s arrival, teams are allowed up to three such salary-cap-exempt players) of Beckham, Keane and Donovan combining on the game-winning goal. It wasn’t quite the triumph of the Galacticos, but the three Galaxian stars seemed to be making a case that building a team around such players may be the next wave of MLS team-building (no team with a Designated Player had ever won an MLS cup till then).

And then the flip side of such celebrated success. The now champion LA Galaxy began an off-season promotional tour that bled into their Concacaf Champions League campaign, that in turn bled into the start of the 2012 MLS season. Arena would later lament that “the 2011 season never ended.” As the MLS season began, Keane was still scoring but the team was losing. By the time the Galaxy appeared at a White House reception honoring the 2011 champions in late spring, they were in severe danger of missing the 2012 playoffs altogether.

At that point, as legend has it, senior team members, including Keane and Beckham, got together and thrashed out the problems with the side, and the Galaxy dominated the second half of the season en route to a back-to-back MLS Cup win. Keane is proud of the turnaround, and I ask if that moment marked his true arrival in LA – a point where he found his voice. Keane agrees, though thinks his job description demanded it.

I think when you’re a Designated Player, there’s more responsibility anyway, because people are looking at you to do something in the game, or say something in the dressing room … For me, last year was more satisfying than 2011 – obviously any year when you win a championship it’s great, obviously, but I felt more part of the team last year because I was here from the start. The start of 2012 wasn’t good enough. For whatever reason we weren’t playing as a team, we weren’t pulling in the same direction as a group. For what reason, I’m not too sure. It was certainly something we spoke about as senior players and we sat down with Bruce and spoke about how it was something that had to be stopped fairly quickly. We could either “keep going the way that we are” and nobody wanted that, or “we can get on with it and try and kick on and realize that we are a good team and on any given day we can beat anybody”. And certainly after the European Championships, how we kicked on from there, it was incredible really.

This brings us to the unique conditions of the MLS season, which, running as it does from March to December, inevitably mean that there are moments, such as European Championships, or World Cup campaigns, when Keane has had international duty clashing significantly with team dates. Yet he has never suffered from the impression that he sees club duty as a kind of necessary evil to be endured for the sake of prolonging his international career – as Beckham’s unfortunate early days at the Galaxy seemed to convey. Just a couple of weeks before we speak, Keane had appeared for Ireland in what was essentially a meaningless World Cup qualifier against Kazakhstan, scored the equalizer in a 3-1 win, then jumped on a plane to complete a 5,000-mile, 14-hour journey that got in at 4pm (“I actually got out of the airport at 5.25pm and had to be at the ground by 6pm”). He then came on that night as a sub in a crucial late-season win for the Galaxy.

I felt fine and I wanted to be involved because I knew how big a game it was to clinch that playoff spot... Each time I go away with the Ireland team and come back here, I’m finding it a lot easier than I did at the very, very start. So it’s probably something that, you know, I probably would have been advised not to do at the start, maybe, but I think your body gets used to it. Saying that, if it was down to the physios and stuff like that it’d probably be a no-no you know. But the way I am, I want to play and I want to be a part of everything and it’s just in my nature to be part of that.

Despite how matter-of-fact Keane is about the unique rigors of playing in MLS, its conditions are a challenge. I bring up the fact that this interview will appear in the Guardian and that a lot of people I speak to from Britain tend to ask about the “standard of play” in MLS, while not thinking about the other challenges of the league: huge distances, multiple timezones, types of stadiums and surfaces, playing at different times of day each week — not to mention the fact that all these variables contribute to a regular season that plays out like one big season-long international qualifying competition where sides must peak for the playoffs. To this mix, Keane adds the forced-parity that is structured into the league:

The difference over here is that no-one’s better than anybody else, really. Everybody’s on an even par if you like … not everybody, but, you know … anybody can win the league, so that’s the difference between here and Europe as well. People think, ‘Oh, he’s gone to the LA Galaxy, and he’ll win every year,’ but it doesn’t work like that. You know, ‘Go to the Red Bulls. Play with Henry, Tim Cahill, and win.’ It doesn’t work like that, because the league is structured in such a way that everybody has a chance

And on whether he knew in advance what he’d be facing?

I think when people – players – speak about MLS they kind of know what they’re getting into before they come here. It’s not something you’re just thrown into and you go “Shit, what’s happening here? I’m going to New York on a five hour flight — I didn’t know about that.” You know what you’re getting yourself in for, and if they don’t know that they’re quite naive. I knew what I was getting myself into so that didn’t shock me a lot. Of course, when you’re used to getting a 45 minute flight from London to Newcastle – every flight is 45 minutes, isn’t it, when you go with the team in England – compared to that, five hours is obviously completely different. But it does take … if you don’t get your mind set right before you come over here, and know that that’s going to be the case, well then there’s no point people coming over here, because you’re just kidding yourself thinking that you’re going to be living in LA and it’s all rosy in the garden.

But you settled especially quickly …

The likes of Becks were here so they helped me settle in fairly quickly, you know. I don’t really have an answer for you on why that exactly is, but I think if you’re hungry and want to succeed and have that fire in your belly of wanting to succeed, I think you’re certainly on the right road if you have your mentality right. My mentality going into it was ‘Forget about where I’ve played before, and what I’ve done in the past, because that means nothing. It’s about now, and what I do from here on in.’

What about that decision to come here in the first place. Beckham arriving had planted the seed in his mind, and these days not an MLS transfer window goes by without a handful of European players being quoted about being “interested in playing in America at some point”. But what made Keane make the leap from “That looks sort of interesting” to “This is the time”...?

It was something that was certainly in the back of my mind, something that I’d be looking at in the future. But it happened fairly quickly and it wasn’t at the time I was expecting to go to be honest with you. It just came at a time when I was in and out of the Tottenham team and I just fancied a change. If I was playing week in, week out for Tottenham it probably would have been a completely different scenario, you know? But the fact is it came at, I think, a good time for me. I could have stayed there, signed for another team, a few more teams in the Premiership. But I’d just be playing for the sake of playing then – trying to score a few more goals, get a few more league appearances under my belt. I just wanted a completely new challenge and the Galaxy just came in that space of time when Becks had been over training with us (Tottenham) and told us how much he enjoyed it you know. So it came at a time I wasn’t expecting, but now, looking back it was certainly the right decision.”

Two championships later, and in contention for a third, you could say it was the right decision.

Interview Part two: On Lionel Messi, Teddy Sheringham and outsmarting defenders

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