On the face of it, the new marriage between Simon Clegg, the former chief executive of the British Olympic Association who has this week taken on the same role at Championship football club Ipswich Town, and Roy Keane, the notoriously volcanic former Manchester United and Ireland player who has been hired as the Suffolk club's new manager, appears an extremely odd one.

But, as I have been arguing to my colleagues, over the past couple of days, it could actually be a match made in heaven.

The most notorious incident in Keane's career that was littered with wonderful moments - remember how he single-handily inspired Manchester United from two-down at Juventus in 1999 to carry the Premiership club into the final of the Champions League when he knew he would already miss the match because of suspension? - as well as plenty of red cards occurred at the World Cup in Japan in 2002.

Keane was sent home by Ireland's manager Mick McCarthy, who as a player he had already publicly ridiculed, after a dispute involving how well prepared the team were for the biggest tournament in the world.

In Ireland, the "Saipan Incident" (as it came to be known) split the public right down the middle, with one half of the nation standing by Keane and the other half supporting McCarthy. It was even claimed by some to be the most dramatic ideological split the country had seen since the Irish Civil War.

It is an incident brilliantly retold in the book Laptop Dancing and the Nanny Goat Mambo: A Sports Writer's Year by Tom Humphries, the Irish Times journalist that Keane regularly confides in.

Now, you can accuse Clegg (pictured) of many things - indeed senior figures within the BOA have been only too happy to tell me of his short-comings, which is the reason that the chairman Colin Moynihan first demoted him last year and was then not too upset when he left in December - but the one thing that you could never accuse him of is being disorganised.

As befits a man who was once the youngest officer in the British Army, Clegg is meticulous when it comes to preparation.

Indeed, he always considered it a personal challenge at an Olympic Games to make sure that the British team had the best position in the Athletes' Village and were the best looked after.

Clegg also normally achieved his own personal gold medal by making sure the British team declaration was the first of the 205 to be delivered to the International Olympic Committee.

In short, Clegg is a brilliant organiser, certainly the best I have ever come across. I wish he was in charge of my life.

My only surprise about his appointment is that in the 20 years I have known him, Clegg has never once expressed an interest in football so Keane (pictured) is unlikely to respond well to him if he starts questioning him on the sport.

That, of course, is without the unique dynamic of Clegg having been formerly a member of the 7th Parachute Regiment, Royal Horse Artillery, which served in Northern Ireland during the troubles, while Keane is from Cork, a city nicknamed "The Rebel County" because of a reputation for rebelliousness stretching back to the 15th century when it was ruled by Britain.

One football insider just told me that he would give the relationship between Clegg and Keane two months, especially as Keane is not known as a people person. "The thing about management is that it requires connection with fellow members of the human race, something in which Keane has never shown much interest," wrote Jim White in the Daily Telegraph today.

"It won't last long," White predicted of Keane's spell at Ipswich.

Now, I am clearly out-of-step here with everyone else. I think Clegg's achievements at the BOA have been vastly under-rated. He took over there as chief executive in 1997 a year after the team's embarrassing failure at the Atlanta Olympics when the only gold medal won was by rowers Steve Redgrave and Matthew Pinsent. He left having overseen the most successful British team to leave these shores ever when they finished fourth overall in the medals table in Beijing last year, winning 47 medals, including 19 gold.

That would not have been achieved without the huge financial muscle of UK Sport, who have pumped hundreds of millions into sport, of that there is no doubt, but there is no question that Clegg played a large role in helping turn all those pounds into medals.

He is motivated by being so unceremoniously dumped by the BOA having played such a vital role in London being awarded the 2012 Olympics and leading Britain to those most successful Games for a century. Keane is determined to prove himself after his spell as manager at Sunderland ended with them nose-diving towards relegation from the Premiership. Two men desperate to prove themselves.

They may be the odd couple but, as I said earlier, they are a match made in heaven....

Duncan Mackay is the publisher and editor of insidethegames.com. He was the 2004 British Sports Journalist of the Year and was the athletics correspondent of The Guardian for 11 years.