Ben Guest
Gary Neville has recalled the final few months of Roy Keane’s Manchester United career, describing one particular meeting as ‘horrific’.
Roy Keane has never been one to mince his words, and following a 4-1 defeat at the hands of Middlesbrough back in 2005, the Irishman delivered a scathing assessment of his teammates performances to the clubs in-house TV station, MUTV, with his comments deemed so bad that the interview was never aired.
Speaking at an event in Dublin on Wednesday night, former Manchester United captain Gary Neville told Off The Ball that he quickly realised that Keane’s Old Trafford career was all but over when the squad were called to a meeting to watch said video.
“I’d seen this happen to David Beckham over a period of six to eight months at United,” Neville said.
“With Roy and the manager, there was always a chance that it would come to this.”
“The manager came down into the dressing room and the minute he said we needed to watch the video, I just thought that’s it.
“I knew Roy, I knew the manager and I just thought that was it.”
“There were things that were said in that room, a moment where you spoke to Carlos, I think you said something to the manager… and there was just no way this was going to carry on,” Neville added.
“That meeting was horrific when we watched the video. It’s not funny, honestly, it was horrific.
“The watching of the video, then the meeting after that — which was basically Roy, the manager, Carlos — it was horrific.
“For the lads in the dressing room who were at the club 10, 15 years, to see this happening was horrific.
“You couldn’t say anything, you were just thinking, ‘For fuck’s sake.’ You knew that that was it.”
Interestingly though, Neville said that he didn’t actually think that Keane’s comments about the Middlesbrough defeat were too bad, not when compared to the criticism that the sharp-tongued Cork man had delivered in the wake of a defeat to Bayern Munich four years previous.
“From our point of view as players, we didn’t have a problem,” Neville said. “We’d worked with Roy for 12 years and I think his interview after Bayern Munich [in 2001] was actually worse.”
Keane left the club shortly after the fall-out, joining Celtic in December 2005 after 12-and-a-half trophy-laden seasons at Old Trafford.
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