Sideline Cut: The sight of Kevin Keegan on the sideline of England's football grounds always makes me feel inexplicably anxious.

The danger is that he is just one bad season away from I'm A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here! You can imagine KK approaching the task involving the bowl full of slimy lizards with the same pious devotion and quivering ambition he brought to the role of England manager.

Wearing his little singlet, a poignant reminder of his days on Superstars, he would plunge that great mane down amongst the reptiles and emerge with the prized possession in his mouth, like an eager puppy returning with the bone.

And Kev would be playing for keeps as well, imploring the public to vote for him instead of Jimmy "Oohh I Could Crush A Grape" Crankie or Limahl from Kajagoogoo.

Keegan is the Penelope Pitstop of the cartoon world of English Premiership football, always lurching from one calamity to the next without ever losing the saintly veneer he established during his playing days. During last Wednesday evening's FA Cup game at White Hart Lane, Keegan's demeanour was genuinely troubling. Without a win at Manchester City in almost 20 games and down by three goals at half-time, it was not hard to detect a very real and alarming crisis bubbling beneath the once great "permanent" curled do that filled many centrefolds for Shoot! magazine.

Humiliation looked to be the certain outcome of the remaining 45 minutes and because Kevin wears his heart on his sleeve, because he is incapable of masking the physical pain the game inflicts upon his soul, one could sense his reserves of composure ebbing. The famous accusatory outburst against Alex Ferguson came to mind. The star line of that two-minute interview is destined to overshadow all of Keegan's achievements in the game to become his epitaph.

Keegan is a strange fish. For all that he has won as a player and been through as a manager, he often comes across as an innocent. During his emotional tirade against comments made by Ferguson, the judgement was that he had lost his cool and, more importantly, revealed his shock that the Manchester United man could play so low. He sounded like a teenager who had just watched his girlfriend leave the disco with his best mate. He sounded lost.

And yes, United won that Premiership title - they would have done regardless of what anybody said - and Keegan departed Newcastle in stunningly abrupt, covert circumstances one January afternoon the following season. But he survived and polished up his Messiah act as saviour of Fulham, as England manager and now as the man who would return Manchester City to its status as credible rival to the glory team across town. He has an evangelist's skill of packing his suitcase and leaving one town when hope turns sour only to work a new and hungry audience of believers just miles down the road.

Keegan's record as a manager is wildly uneven and ambivalent; although his early years at Newcastle were phenomenal, he was of course bankrolled by Jack Hall, just as he was by Mohammed Al Fayed at Fulham. His England career was brief and inglorious and was best summed up by himself when he admitted on television, "maybe Kevin Keegan is just a bit too short for the job."

The fascinating thing about Keegan is that he has a knack for putting all the blocks in place but somehow manages to toss them all about him at the vital moment. Last season, he restored City to ninth in the Premiership but since last November, the series of mishaps, misfortunes and poor results at the club has been almost comic.

Speaking on Irish radio some time ago, James Lawton of The Independent - easily the finest of the London soccer writers - was asked about Keegan. His tone dropped towards the funereal and he sounded uncomfortable as he expressed the view that he thought Keegan had a lot of qualities, honesty being chief among them, but he worried that he would end up as a widely parodied figure.

Because the past is so redundant - because it suits the Gordon Gekkos of Sky television and the shareholders at clubs like Manchester United to spread the pretence that English soccer only truly began in the 1990s - the depth of Keegan's worth is generally overlooked.

But there was a time when Kevin Keegan was English soccer. During a period when the national team was underachieving and racism and hooliganism were on the rise on the terraces, Keegan was the jewel in the crown. A cult figure at Anfield and then twice the European Player of the Year, in 1978 and 1979, when he played in the same arenas as men like Karl Heinz Rummenigge and Franz Beckenbauer and Paulo Rossi, true giants of the continental game.

He was abundantly confident and fanatically positive and athletic and, though never the most languorous player to behold, he lit games up. Pictures of Keegan in that ultra-tight England gear worn in the games for the Espana '82 campaign are, like Kajagoogoo and the Falklands War, touchstones of the period. He wasn't all that likeable but he was good.

Keegan was always smart enough to negotiate himself handsome personal deals wherever he went and led the field in espousing the "playboy" lifestyle that is automatic for all big-time players today. Although a family man, Kev liked Speedos and pads in the Balearic Islands and he liked playing golf.

He was always a worrier, though. He is a highly strung man, a Hamlet-type figure who has delivered to the modern lexicon almost as many one-liners.

"I don't think there is anyone bigger or smaller than Maradona." "I know what's around the corner, I just don't know where the corner is." "The tide is very much in our court now." "The English fans are the best in the world and the Scots are second to none." These lines will live as long as the classic poems.

As a player, Keegan evaded his own doubts and phobias by simply excelling and outworking and outrunning them.

Confined to the sideline, that is no longer possible and so publicly and painfully, his paper palaces have gone up in flames around him. And yet he is a man of substance, a grandson of a Newcastle miner famed as a hero in one of the worst mining disasters in the history of the North, when over 100 men and boys died.

When at Newcastle, he took great pleasure in living in Wynnard Wood, the old haunt formerly ruled by the owners of those mines. That is where he believes he comes from, from the same stock as Shankley and Ferguson. But he was never as grounded as those men or as ruthless and clever.

He is a bit of a dreamer, Kev, always flying on a wing and a prayer. But he makes for great excitement. The style he invoked at Newcastle was one of the glorious failures of the modern game, his tenure at England was never less than dramatic and at Manchester City he has at least restored some soul into a club that was visibly rotting. And as a local footnote, he showed great faith and patience with Richard Dunne.

All of which made the heavenly comeback against Tottenham last Wednesday evening so heartening. That 4-3 game, already dubbed the miracle at White Hart, had nothing to do with Keegan. He was just a passenger. There must be a guardian angel looking out for him. It has staved off the latest of the sad endings that seem like the logical close to all of Keegan's managerial adventures and sets him up for a Manchester Cup derby against his old nemesis Ferguson.

And I'll tell you what, he would love it, love it if . . .