Red: My Autobiography (18 page)

We’ve had our run-ins with officials at United but we’ve never been a filthy team or a cheating team. We play within the rules, as much as any club does, though of course most try to push the laws to the limit. People are naive if they think it’s otherwise. It makes me laugh sometimes when I see a media outrage about a ‘crime’ that is commonplace. There was a massive storm when Becks admitted he got himself deliberately booked playing for England – but plenty of footballers have done that, including me. You’d see a big game looming so you’d get a caution by tripping a player, and get the suspension out of the way. As I said, it’s naive to think that’s not happening fairly regularly.

There’s a level of gamesmanship which every team tries to get away with – and anyone who says otherwise is lying. Players will go down too easily to get a foul. You are a defender, you are at the far post and you know you are in trouble, that the striker’s about to beat you in the air. You feel a small nudge in the back and you go down, gambling on getting the free-kick. Strikers will say the same about tumbling under the slightest challenge to win a penalty. It’s not blatant diving, but they’ll go down if they get half a chance. I’d be a hypocrite if I called them cheats.

This sort of behaviour becomes second nature, just like appealing for decisions that you know aren’t yours. ‘Offside, lino!’ even though you know the striker is onside. Cheating? If you want to be pedantic, but it happens in every sport – batsmen not walking, rugby players sticking their hands in a ruck when the ref isn’t looking.

The higher you climb, the more you feel you have to scrap for every little advantage. You think that if you don’t influence the referee then you can be sure that the other team will. It’s not always pretty. But top-level sport is about winning.

Captain

ALL THIS TIME while we and Arsenal were slugging it out as bitter rivals, Chelsea were racing ahead of both of us. José Mourinho had arrived in 2004 with his coat and his charisma and his talk of being a Special One. And, to be fair, he was living up to his own billing.

I’d never had a problem with Abramovich splashing out millions. At a club as big as United we weren’t going to be intimidated by a new kid on the block. Money could buy Chelsea success. Mourinho had organised them superbly, and they had a strong, physical team with top-class internationals like Didier Drogba, Frank Lampard and John Terry. That early Mourinho team, 4–3–3 with Damien Duff and Arjen Robben, was formidable. I don’t think they’ve been as good since.

They had bought a top manager and some top players, and we had to accept that Abramovich’s wealth had created a major new rival. But I wasn’t going to lose sleep over it, or worry about United’s place in the game. All the money in the world could never buy our history, our tradition, our fan power or prestige. It never will, not in a hundred years.

Peter Kenyon seemed to think otherwise. He moved from Old Trafford down to Stamford Bridge and now he was chirping away every five minutes about how Chelsea were going to be the biggest club in the world. Total nonsense.

They were making good progress, as we had to admit, losing one league game all season in Mourinho’s first year. They were due at Old Trafford in the penultimate game and we formed a guard of honour to welcome Chelsea on to the pitch as champions. It was the right thing to do, an honourable gesture, though it stuck in my throat. I have respect for the champions of England, whoever they are, but it always hurts to see someone else with the trophy.

People said how unhappy I looked. I think someone wrote at the time that it was like me having to clap burglars into my own home. Spot on. As far as I was concerned, that was our trophy. How do you want me to look?

After the Invincibles and Mourinho’s Chelsea, we’d gone successive seasons without a title for the first time in more than a decade – and two seasons would become three. We’d failed in Europe again in 2004/05, beaten by AC Milan in the first knock-out round without scoring a goal. We lost the FA Cup final to Arsenal on penalties. We were hurt, and the wolves were at the door.

All the fans could see was an era of Chelsea domination. You couldn’t blame them for their pessimism. United had set the bar high and now we were getting stick for falling below those standards.

We were in the throes of what I call, perhaps a little unkindly, the Djemba Djemba years. We’d had more goalkeeping problems. Barthez had been loaned out after one mistake too many and now we were moving uncertainly between Roy Carroll and Tim Howard. Either could have made a respectable number two but they had no claim to be the next Schmeichel.

As well as Djemba Djemba, we had others in Kleberson, Forlán, David Bellion and Liam Miller who were struggling to play at a championship-winning standard. None of them were bad players, or bad lads – and some thrived elsewhere – but they weren’t good enough to be first-team regulars at United. I felt sorry for them more than angry.

We all knew Cristiano Ronaldo was going to be a special player, but it was going to take several seasons for him to fill out and fulfil the potential the lads had seen when they first played against him in a friendly against Sporting Lisbon. I was injured for that game but I saw his skills on the television and the lads were raving about him when they came back. There was no way the club were going to miss out on him, but we were signing an eighteen-year-old who would need time to adapt to a new country, a new language, a new environment.

We’d captured Wazza, the best young English footballer in the country, who’d make a typically spectacular debut with a hat-trick against Fenerbahçe in the Champions League. But all the youthful promise of Rooney and Ronaldo wasn’t going to buy us time with the fans. They were growing sick of one embarrassment after another. They were used to better.

The manager might be able to see all the potential in Rooney and Ronaldo and a promising kid like Darren Fletcher. On the training pitch, so could I. But there was frustration on the terraces, and in the dressing room too, as we slipped behind Chelsea.

My brother was feeling it, and in the summer of 2005 he decided he’d had enough of being left out of the big matches. He’d not even made the squad of sixteen for the FA Cup final. This had been brewing for a couple of years. He’d play thirty-odd games but be left out when it really counted. He wanted to play more, and he’d heard that some decent clubs and good managers – David Moyes at Everton, Steve McClaren at Middlesbrough – were interested. Rumours were swirling around about whether United would let him go and it was getting tough on Phil. So I told him one day that we’d ring up the manager and get it sorted face to face.

‘Boss, can we come round?’

Half an hour later we were drinking tea in his sitting room. It remains the only time I’ve been to his house in all my time at United.

The boss got straight to the point. ‘Phil, I don’t want to sell you, but if it’s first-team football you want, I won’t stand in your way if someone pays the right money.’

I think they both knew it was time, and Phil had a great option at Everton. He was impressed with Moyes, as you would be. Everton were in the north-west, a good club going places. There was still plenty of time for Phil to enjoy a second wind to his career. But I knew I’d miss him, and I did.

I missed the little rituals – sitting together a few hours before a game, chatting about the match. It’s nice to have the comfort, the familiarity. I was sad at him leaving but I also felt lucky to have spent a decade playing with my brother, and mates like Becks, Butty, Giggsy and Scholesy.

It must have been strange for a Neville to be driving into Merseyside for his first day’s work. I never had to adjust to a fresh environment, a new set of players, different methods. But Phil, being the most diligent pro that’s ever been born, was such an instant hit that he soon became captain at Everton.

Respect to Phil, he threw himself into being an Everton player completely. Any lingering doubt about his loyalties was banished when he clattered into Ronaldo in a match against United at Goodison Park. I secretly admired him for it, even though I wanted my team to win. As ever, Phil was doing what he had to for his team.

If Phil had grown frustrated, that was nothing compared to the anger brewing inside Roy. He wasn’t tolerant of underachievers at the best of times. And now he was seething.

There were two Roys that I knew at United. I couldn’t give you an exact date when one transformed into the other but there is no doubt that there was a change, a dramatic one, in the way Roy went about his daily work around the 1998/99 period.

You probably couldn’t spot it from his performances, but Roy would probably tell you himself that he reached the point where he realised he had to look after himself better – drink less, eat the right foods, stay out of bother. His body fat must have shrunk from 12 per cent to about half that – the lowest in the club. Doing his weights, or his yoga, he became a machine.

He became an inspiration, not just in his performances but the way he pushed himself off the pitch, working like a dog even though he was already one of the fittest players at the club. I loved training with Roy in the gym because you knew you’d be pushed to the limits.

Off the field he changed too, because even the most driven of us mellow a little over time. In Roy’s first four or five years at Old Trafford I didn’t speak to him much apart from the usual brief exchanges before and after games, or at training. But in those last few years, me, Ole Gunnar and Giggsy would have great chats with him about the game, about what was in the papers, about who was saying what. Roy was always worth listening to. To be in his company was challenging, just as it was on the pitch. Say something unfounded and Roy would be the first on to you to say, ‘That’s bollocks.’ He didn’t like lazy thinking any more than lazy footballers.

But you could say that intolerant streak in Roy was his undoing.

No one wanted the split to happen – not Roy, not the club – but a problem had been building up in the dressing room, and something had to give.

A few of the younger players in the team – Rio, Rooney, Fletcher and O’Shea – were in awe of Roy and I don’t think they knew how to handle him. It wasn’t Roy’s fault. I’d played with him for ten years and you learnt to live with his direct approach, when to give it back and when to shut up. But the younger gang tiptoed around him. You can see why they were intimidated by this hard man.

A natural changing of the guard was brewing, in the same way that me, Scholesy, Giggsy and Butty had taken over from Ince, Hughes and all the big names who had terrified us initially. The younger players need to be allowed to come out of their shells. But it was hard to see what might bring change about – until that infamous programme at the end of October 2005 on the club’s own channel, MUTV.

I was actually down to do the ‘Play the Pundit’ show that day. Roy and I were both injured at the time but, fatefully, we ended up switching. On a Monday morning, you would go through the tape of the match just played – in this case a 4–1 hammering at Middlesbrough which left us trailing in the league again to Chelsea. I was first in that morning and then Roy arrived. Just me and him in the changing room.

I knew the match had been a horror-show and I could guess that Roy would be brutally honest given the way he was feeling.

Roy was up for it. He was wound up because he felt the younger players were falling short. He’d see them on their gadgets like their PlayStations and he couldn’t get his head around it. He didn’t have time to go through several seasons of rebuilding. You don’t use a word like ‘transition’ around Roy Keane.

Roy had used MUTV before to get things off his chest – to complain about some of the young players slacking. But we knew he must have gone further when the Middlesbrough programme was pulled by the club. Clearly worried by the strength of Roy’s opinions, someone had shown it to the manager and David Gill. They had blocked it.

The story leaked out of the club within hours and the press were all over it when the team, without me and Roy who were injured, flew to Lille in the Champions League. There was speculation about what Roy had said. The manager prides himself on unity, on keeping troubles behind closed doors, on not letting your enemies detect any weakness. But Roy had aired his grievances and the fans, already disgruntled at how the team was playing, were on the team’s back in Lille. It was the worst possible outcome: a poor performance, a 1–0 loss, and the fans singing ‘one Roy Keane’. The chants continued as the players made their way through the airport on the way home.

This was becoming divisive.

With everyone back at the club, Roy talked to a few of the players. I don’t think any of them had confronted Roy about it. For someone like Fletch or Kieran Richardson, that wasn’t what you did where Roy was concerned.

Then the manager called everyone up to his office to clear the air. We were all sat in there. The place was crammed, twenty of us sitting on chairs, on the desk, with standing room only at the back. We watched the tape, and, as Roy would claim, parts of it had been blown out of all proportion. And as the manager would argue, some of it wasn’t exactly the message you wanted broadcast on MUTV at a time when the team was struggling.

Roy had gone for it, but in his eyes only in the way that he always speaks his mind. The difference was this was on tape and obviously a source of embarrassment to the club at a time when the team was under pressure and the fans were agitated. Moreover, it had been pulled which had led to huge media headlines.

Anyway, the tape finished and the talking began – which is when things got really bad. It didn’t take long for the conversation to get heated. Very heated.

Some time during the exchange I realised it was all over. Now that he’s been a manager, Roy would understand himself that there was no coming back.

Roy being Roy, there was no embarrassment about that. He was willing to live by the sword and die by it. He’d said his piece, he’d got it off his chest, and he’d take the consequences, however drastic.

Things went quiet for a few days, and there was the happy distraction of beating Chelsea, which at least kept the fans at bay. But the calm was misleading. Roy and the manager weren’t speaking to each other, and it couldn’t go on like that.

As Roy prepared to make his comeback with me in the reserves, one of the backroom staff told him he wasn’t playing. He must have known the end was imminent.

The next day, the boss wanted everyone out on the training pitch, even those like me who were injured. Shortly beforehand, he pulled me and Quinton Fortune aside and said, ‘Look, Roy has left the club.’

Even having witnessed everything, the words still came as a shock. ‘Did it have to come to that?’ I said.

‘Yes, it’s best for everybody. We’ve both agreed, it’s done with.’

Roy had gone and he wouldn’t be back. I texted him: ‘I’m really sorry what’s happened.’ And I genuinely was, because there wasn’t a player at United who could match Roy’s influence in my time at the club. If I’d been a young kid growing up as a fan in that era, Roy Keane would have been my hero. I feel blessed to have played with him.

He was a great player, beyond question; a midfielder of extraordinary tenacity and box-to-box dynamism, with a ferocious tackle and an underrated ability to use the ball astutely. But perhaps his greatest gift was to create a standard of performance which demanded the very best from his team. You would look at him busting a gut and feel that you’d be betraying him if you didn’t give everything yourself.

When he became a manager, you would hear about some furore when he dropped a player for bad timekeeping, but I would think, ‘Well, why not?’ He’s not asking players to be Pelé, he’s asking them to turn up on time. And that is the sort of basic standard we had drummed into us.