Burning Issue: Was Alex Ferguson too hard on Roy Keane in his book?

Amidst all the talking points emanating from the launch of Alex Ferguson’s book yesterday was his criticism of his former captain Roy Keane. But did Fergie go over the top? Two JOEs join the debate.

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Sean Nolan says... He went in harder than you-know-who on Alf-Inge Haaland. In this country, the most eagerly awaited bits in the Alex Ferguson book were always going to be the passages on Roy Keane. Anything on the Corkman is box office on both sides of the Irish Sea and whatever your opinion of Keane, you would want to know what his former boss had to say about him, and the manner in which he left the club. Little did we know that when the book was released, the person who would get the fiercest criticism would be Keane. Fergie devotes page after page on Keane, most of them portraying his former captain in a bad light, as a scary, malevolent presence who simply had to go after one bust-up too many. I have no reason to doubt what Fergie said, and the bits about Keane’s dressing room outburst in the aftermath of his now infamous MUTV interview sound eerily similar to the details we have on Saipan, but that doesn’t mean Ferguson had to make them public. While Keane took his former boss to task over ‘loyalty’ on ITV last night, the biggest reason why Keane should be upset is that Ferguson wasn’t equally harsh on other people who he had dealt with down the years. The Rock of Gibraltar incident, cited by Keane in that dressing room row, merits just a few words in the book, while Wayne Rooney emerges virtually unscathed from this week’s revelations. It is only Keane who has had his reputation done down. Not only does Ferguson claim to have been ‘scared’ by Keane he also belittles his skills as a manager, saying he needs money to do a job, a sure fire way to scare off prospective employers. If he says this in public, we can only imagine the type of references he gives if a chairman with a vacancy rings the Scot for advice on Keane. All the stuff about his tongue being the harshest part of his body and mentions of his eyes shrinking to ‘wee black beads’ when he got angry paint Keane as the clear villain of the book. The only other person to get anything close to such personal abuse is former Liverpool boss Rafa Benitez, who is dubbed ‘a control freak’. That’s not even in the same ball park as the grief Keane gets. I accept that it is pretty obvious that Keane is a hard man to work with, a man with insanely high standards and a man with no fear of speaking his mind. The same could be said of Ferguson, only he fails to speak his mind on quite a few subjects in his book, save for one man. He goes over the top of the ball on his former skipper. Loyalty? Only for some it seems.

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  Conor Heneghan says... The only thing slightly amiss about the criticism of Roy Keane in Alex Ferguson’s new book was that he seemed to come in for a little more abuse than everyone else. The absence of detail about the feud with John Magnier over Rock of Gibraltar is disappointing, while his soft stance on Wayne Rooney is a little more understandable considering the delicacy of Rooney’s situation at Old Trafford at the moment; trying to emulate Fergie is proving difficult enough as it for David Moyes without him doing anything that might further unsettle Rooney at Old Trafford. I haven’t got the chance to read the book myself – I look forward to doing so – but due to the fact that is has basically appeared in its entirety on Twitter and on the yellow Sky Sports News ticker, I can pretty much deduce that a lot more people – Ruud van Nistelrooy, David Beckham, Rafa Benitez and Jaap Stam to name but a few – were also the target of Ferguson’s ire, if not to the same extent as the inspirational former Manchester United and Ireland skipper. But should we really be surprised? Singling out Keane for so much attention might seem harsh but it’s not as if Fergie was bringing up stuff that we didn’t know about already. Besides, an awful lot happened between the pair since Fergie picks up the tale around the start of the new millennium and their relationship was probably the most eventful and most worthy of attention of any involving two characters at Manchester United in that timeframe. Granted, the likes of Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes and Gary Neville were there for longer than Keane was, but there wouldn’t be an awful lot of juicy material involving any of those three, unless Fergie wanted to visit the subject of Giggsy’s private life, of course, but that’s none of his business. Fergie merely confirmed details of the reasons behind his exit in 2005 and the majority of people would agree that he had to go after the way he acted; Keane himself, Fergie claims, even apologised before subsequently breaching the pair’s trust by going public with some details about their relationship, which, again Fergie claims, led to the deterioration in their relationship. As for the incredibly in-depth description of about how frightening he can be and his ability to destroy someone with a sentence, how can any Irish football fan be surprised after all that happened in Saipan, when, rightly or wrongly, Keane launched into an expletive-laden rant towards Mick McCarthy in full view of the entire Irish World Cup squad? Before I go on, I should state that I am in no way defending Alex Ferguson. Certain excerpts of his book seem to illustrate his need for a dictatorial level of control and he certainly could be petty. Even as a Manchester United fan, it was refreshing to see him being subject to an incredibly testing interview by Jon Snow, the like of which he simply wasn’t used to in his managerial days due to the fear he inspired amongst the members of the media he hadn’t refused to speak to or hadn’t banned from the training ground. But as regards his comments on Keane, I don’t think he over-stepped the line. Keane may have had a point about loyalty during his reply on ITV last night but his comments on people criticising others in books being part of modern life was a bit much. You’d swear he hadn’t called Alfe-Inge Haaland a c**t in a book of his own not so long ago. Or you’d swear he hadn’t publicly accused one of the players he used to manage of not having a heart… not long after the player in question had had a heart attack himself. If you’re prepared to dish out abuse as willingly as Keane is in public then you have to be prepared to take it and in fairness to Keane, for the most part he had no problem accepting what Fergie said about him, preferring instead to focus on Fergie’s criticism of other players, such as David Beckham (who has only ever had good things to say about his former manager). Hard as it might to be believe after all I’ve said above, I still like Roy Keane and my opinion of him didn’t change following Fergie’s so-called revelations yesterday. People were always going to look for juicy storylines from the book launch yesterday and the Keane one was particularly appealing on this side of the water for obvious reasons. But did Fergie go over the top? Not in my book, or Fergie’s for that matter. As Roy said himself, he’s not going to lose much sleep over it and nor should he.