Can I just shock you; Roy Keane and Sir Alex Ferguson are no longer friends.
Yes, the most successful manager-captain duo of the Premier League era fell out during Keane’s explosive departure from Manchester United in 2005 and will probably take their differences to the grave.
“I wouldn’t forgive Ferguson,” Keane told Off The Ball in 2019. “The media spin, how I apparently upset everybody, it was all nonsense. I don’t care if it’s Alex Ferguson or the Pope, you’re going to defend yourself.”
Keane also played down Ferguson’s famed man-management style in the interview and threw doubt on whether he had the best interests of the club at heart.
“People talk about Ferguson’s man-management. Nonsense. People said he always had the best interests of Manchester United at heart. Darren Ferguson [his son] won a medal. He was very lucky.”
Ferguson himself criticised Keane in his autobiography, discussing that MUTV incident in detail.
“The meeting in the room was horrendous. I just could not lose my control in that situation. If I had let it pass I think the players would have viewed me differently.
“Throughout my career I have been strong enough to deal with issues like that. Roy absolutely overstepped the line. There was nothing else we could do.”
While both men would rather commit a felony than reconcile, Keane has taken to publicly praising the other managerial great that shaped his playing career; Brian Clough
Clough gave Keane his first taste of English football with Nottingham Forest when he signed the Irishman for £47,000 from Cobh Ramblers in 1990.
”I remember, [Brian] Clough came to me during my earlier years at Nottingham Forest,” Keane once recalled.
“He calls me in before one of my first games and he says: ‘you can pass it, you can shoot and you can run – so just do those three things’. As silly as it sounds, a lot of players can’t do all three, so that’s when I knew I had that going for me!”
Clough’s affection for Keane was clear and his footballing brain was clear, according to Nick Miller of FourFourTwo. ‘On an occasion when Clough was in one of his more irascible moods, he stalked around the dressing room offering a different insult to every player,’ he wrote.
‘Accusations of laziness and complacency were tossed around, while he told goalkeeper and staunch Yorkshireman Mark Crossley to ‘buy a house in Nottingham or fuck off and play for Barnsley’.
‘When he reached Keane, Clough said:…
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