… and this is the bit where a huge story turns into a seismic story.
United gag Keane.
They axe the programme on the grounds that it is too inflammatory. They call a top-level meeting, sweat over it, argue whether it could be edited. In the end, they decide they cannot risk it because of the damage it could do. They are frightened about the reaction in the press. They are worried about how the other players will react. They lose their nerve. They panic.
David Gill gives a little speech to the relevant MUTV staff, ordering a cover-up and telling them not to breathe a word about what has happened. The tape is placed in a locked drawer. When he is finally done, he takes a deep breath and picks up his mobile phone.
He stares at it for a few seconds. Then he dials Ferguson’s number.
PARIS
1.11.05
When the captain of Manchester United declares civil bloody war on his team-mates it is not something to be squeezed into a single column on an inside page. Every newspaper splashes on Keane today and it will be the same tomorrow, the day after and the day after that. Sports editors are demanding reaction, quotes, analysis, follow-ups, follow-ups to the follow-ups. The tabloids are offering shameless bribes for anyone who can provide them with a copy of the MUTV tape or, at the very least, the transcript.
In ordinary circumstances Ferguson would switch off his mobile, the doors to Carrington would be bolted shut and everything would be dealt with in private. But United play their return game against Lille at the Stade de France in Paris tomorrow and the team have an early-morning flight from Manchester airport.
A jostling scrum of television crews is waiting at the check-in desk and there is a stampede when Ferguson arrives. Fraser Dainton, of Sky Sports, thrusts a microphone under his nose.
‘I’ll take a couple of questions about the Lille game but nothing about anything else,’ Ferguson says, with a look that says he means business.
Dainton weighs up the offer for a couple of seconds and shakes his head. ‘I’ve got to ask you about Roy Keane.’
Ferguson turns and stalks off, five or six brisk paces, but then he turns back and jabs a finger.
‘THAT’S YOU FINISHED AT THIS CLUB.’
Dainton’s microphone drops limply by his side. There are no follow-up questions.
The story follows Ferguson into the business lounge. Keane is among the headlines on the television news and the newspapers are strewn over the tables, his hard, unflinching face glaring out from the back pages. The players are in little groups, huddled round their copies of the Daily Mirror, Sun and Daily Star. Ferguson has had a late-night call warning him the story is out, but this is the first the players know about it. For years they have worried what Keane, privately, really thinks about them and now they have their answer. They turn the pages in silence.
This lot are not up to it!
Keane gagged by United after TV attack
Keane’s blast gagged
United push panic button after Keane’s video nasty
Gagged!
The flight is eerily quiet. O’Shea sits alone, staring out of the window. Fletcher isn’t talking. Ferdinand isn’t talking. Richardson chooses to listen to music, wearing headphones the size of two teacups. Even Smith, usually the loudest player, seems lost in his own thoughts. Ferguson is in his usual seat: front row, left hand side, next to the aisle. He has the look of a man who has just been told a pigeon has shat on his best jacket. He has a book with him but does not open it. He starts the Daily Express crossword then gives up. Mostly, he sits in silence.
To Ferguson, the dressing room is the place for airing grievances and pointing fingers, not a television studio or a press conference. A player who goes public with dressing-room secrets is seen as a traitor, and for it to be Keane, his captain, his ally, makes it a hundred times worse. He needs to collect his thoughts, talk it through with Gill and Queiroz and work out what to do. But Keane isn’t even on the trip, still injured, and in a few hours Ferguson will have to face the press and somehow put on a brave face.
At the back of the plane we are taking bets on whether he will turn up. We didn’t sleep well last night. We still don’t know exactly what Keane has said but the more we hear, the more serious we realise it is. The inquest has started already and there is talk of heads being banged together at MUTV. Did nobody at the station realise how ludicrous it was, two days after a 4–1 defeat to Middlesbrough, to ask a loose cannon such as Keane to play the role of ‘pundit’ in the first place? They weren’t to know the captain of Manchester United would start ranting like a demented London cabbie, but even so…
The press conference takes place in the ballroom of the team’s hotel and when Ferguson walks in he is flanked by David Gill, Diana Law and Phil Dickinson, the club’s translator. Gill does not normally attend press conferences and he hangs back, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible for a man well over six feet. Ferguson marches to the top table, doing his best to look normal. He lowers himself into his seat, squinting into the flashing camera bulbs, and there is a rush for places.
‘Alex, can we ask for your reaction to what Roy Keane has said on MUTV and the decision to pull his interview?’
He gives us his stock phrase of rebuttal, deliberately slow for maximum effect. ‘I’m … nae … getting … into … that…’
He points out that the purpose of the press conference is to talk about an important match in the Champions League, and not Roy Keane. Not strictly true, but that’s all he wants to say about it. He says anyone who ignores him is wasting everybody’s time. There are to be no Roy Keane questions. Repeat: no Roy Keane questions.
The story is too big for that. Over and over he is asked about it. Over and over he dodges the topic.
It is put to him that the supporters must be alarmed by the way the season has gone. Does he understand the fans’ concerns that United seem to be going backwards?
Finally, he opens up a little. ‘Of course I understand their concerns,’ he says. ‘They deserve better because they are the most loyal fans anywhere. There is no question about that. We have had some disappointing results and I know exactly how they feel. I just hope they know how I feel too.’
We fumble for a way to engage him in conversation but he gives us very little more. At the next pause, he looks to the door and tries to wrap things up.
He is preparing to make his move, but there is something he wants to get off his chest before he leaves the room. ‘There’s such a fascination with this club, this is manna from heaven for you press guys, isn’t it?’ he says. Astonishingly he suddenly starts to laugh. ‘We’re front page, back page, middle page, in the comic strip, the lot. I used to get upset about it but not any longer. I know full well that you’re only doing your jobs. I know there is pressure on you and there is no point me getting my drawers in a twist about it. It happens, and in a strange way it’s fantastic for us that this attention falls on our club. We are the biggest club ever, in the planet, the universe. Remember that…’
As he steps off the top table, he stumbles over a French journalist’s rucksack, poking out from the front row of seats. For one awful moment it looks as if he is going to fall on his backside. He regains his balance, pretends to swipe the culprit over the head and walks away with a beaming smile, playing up to the television cameras.
On his way out he passes the News of the World’s James Fletcher, one of his favourite journalists on the Manchester patch.
‘Fletch,’ he jokes, ‘you’re the ugliest fucking journalist I’ve ever seen.’
‘Thanks, Alex.’
THE LEAK
2.11.05
Lille 1
Manchester United 0
Champions League, Group D
The ‘Keanegate Tapes’ are splashed over four pages in the Daily Mirror today, under the two-fingers-upat-the-Sun billing of ‘Scoop of the Season’. It is difficult to know where they have got their material from but it was inevitable that this would happen once the story
of Keane’s gagging came out. MUTV might have been under orders to keep the evidence under lock and key, staff might have been threatened with their jobs and an entire workforce warned to say nothing, but there was always going to be someone with a loose tongue and the telephone number of a tabloid newspaper. It’s rumoured to have cost the Mirror in the region of £15,000, though it is such a huge story they probably regard that as a snip.
Their back-page splash – ‘world exclusive’ – is a mixture of awe and self-importance:
Roy Keane has been sitting on the sidelines for six weeks watching Manchester United slip behind Wigan, Bolton and Charlton in the title race. And he has had enough.
We can reveal, in the ‘Play the Pundit’ slot on MUTV that has erupted in controversy, Keane not only laid into defender Rio Ferdinand’s approach, but harshly criticised senior players and attacked the younger members of United’s faltering team.
The headline says it all:
Keane: we should get rid of under-performers
And inside the first double-page spread…
‘Just because you get paid £120k a week you think you are a superstar’
It’s explosive stuff. Keane accuses individuals of playing with their reputations, of not trying hard enough, of not understanding the principles of the club. He says it has gone on too long, that there should be a clearout, that United are in danger of becoming a club in decline. He didn’t play against Middlesbrough and part of him is saying, ‘Roy, stay out of it, it’s not your business.’ But he can’t. He just can’t. He says:
There is talk about putting this right in January and bringing in new players. But we should be doing the opposite. We should be getting rid of people in January. There are no characters in this team any more. They’ve been asked questions and they are not coming up with the answers. I am sick of having to say it and they are sick of listening to me.
He was not surprised by the Middlesbrough result, he says. He watched it in a bar in Dubai and, at 3–1, he walked out, humiliated. He could not stand it any longer: all the people looking over, pointing and smirking.
‘I’ve been expecting something like this to happen,’ he says, before laying into his team-mates again.
‘These guys think the day they got their new contracts was the best day of their careers. They think they have made it, but they haven’t.’
Steve Bower asks him to look at Middlesbrough’s goals on a video monitor. Keane goes through them individually, picking out the players he holds responsible. ‘The younger players have been let down by some of the more experienced ones,’ he says. ‘They are not leading. There is a shortage of characters.’
According to the Mirror he starts with Ferdinand:
Just because you are paid £120,000 a week and play well for twenty minutes one week you think you are a superstar. Well, it’s not enough to play well for twenty minutes. It’s a ninety-minute game. You get well rewarded but you have to put in the hard work to earn those rewards. Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink robbed Ferdinand for the second goal and I have seen that happen before. It’s poor defending.
Richardson gets nailed too. This has been his breakthrough season and, already, he drives a Bentley and wears a diamond-encrusted watch. He is a decent player but a bit flash, a bit arrogant, someone to keep an eye on. Keane has spent a lifetime cutting down to size a thousand different Kieran Richardsons. He describes him as a ‘lazy defender’ and says he ‘deserved to get punished’. Richardson gave away the penalty for Middlesbrough’s fourth goal and Keane makes himself clear: ‘He wasn’t doing his job.’
The interview goes on for thirty minutes but it is obvious very early on that it is going to have to be pulled or heavily edited.
Keane releases all his pent-up frustration. ‘I can’t understand why people in Scotland rave about Darren Fletcher,’ he allegedly says. He blames Van der Sar for the first goal: ‘He should have saved that – that was saveable.’ He picks out O’Shea for the final goal: ‘He’s just strolling around when he should have been busting a gut to get back.’ He’s scathing about Smith’s performance in midfield: ‘What is he doing there? He is wandering around as if he is lost. He doesn’t know what he is doing.’
You wonder whether the players will ever forgive him. But it’s not forgiveness that Keane wants. He wants improvement. He wants the mythical 110 per cent. He wants to look into the other players’ eyes and know they are putting in as much as he is. He needs to know that he is not alone, that his teammates care as much as he does.
The nub of it is frustration. There is no European Cup winner’s medal in his collection and, at this rate, there never will be. He has had his chance to go to Bayern Munich or Juventus but he has hung around, frustration building on frustration, grievance on top of grievance, and now the toilet is flushing on another league season. He is looking round the dressing room, at players he knows have talent, and he is wondering whether they know how to use that talent, or whether they even care. ‘At this club it seems to me that you have to play badly to be rewarded,’ he says. ‘Maybe that is what I should do when I come back: play badly.’
The question is whether his attack has gone too far, and the only person who can judge that is Ferguson. Keane has broken just about every unwritten rule of dressing-room protocol. Yet the fans are on his side and tonight they let Ferguson know about it. There are 4,000 of them at the Stade de France and, three minutes into the game, they are bellowing Keane’s name.
Keano, Keano, Keano…
When the first rendition dies down another follows within two minutes. And then another. It is a chant that spreads like fire. As Lille score and take hold of the game, it grows louder and louder.
Keano! Keano! Keano!
Richardson puts what should have been a simple cross out of play for a goal-kick. Instinctively, the cry reverberates round the stadium again. Louder and louder. Angrier and angrier.
KEANO! KEANO! KEANO!
At the final whistle Ferguson blanks the Lille manager, Claude Puel, and heads straight down the tunnel without shaking hands: the classic managerial snub. He doesn’t see his players make their way apologetically over to the away end to applaud the United fans, and it is probably just as well. There are V-signs and one-fingered salutes. But the clapping is not reciprocated.
THE FALL-OUT
4.11.05
The Manchester Evening News, traditionally a pro-United newspaper, has described the current team as ‘shapeless rabble’. The Daily Mail, which has a history of getting big stories right, says there have been boardroom talks about whether Ferguson should go. In the Guardian, a season-ticket holder and freelance writer, Rob Smyth, has explained the reasons for the crowd’s disillusionment:
Most United fans have had enough. They have had enough of 4-5-1; of an abuse of the traditions of the club that has not occurred since the Dave Sexton years; of the moronic twitter of Carlos Queirozzz; of a gaping chasm where once there was the best midfield in Europe; of the apathy of Rio Ferdinand; of Sir Alex Ferguson.
It is time, he says, for Ferguson to be sacked:
This should not be confused with a lack of respect and gratitude for the unprecedented happiness he has brought to the club but if you love someone you have to set them free and, based on the unforgiving demands of modern football and his performance over the last five years, Fergie does not deserve to be manager of Manchester United. Reputation and gratitude are not enough.
Mick Hume, another supporter/writer, is equally unforgiving in The Times:
I would have liked Keane to point the finger off the pitch too. I would have liked to hear him say: ‘Fergie out, Queiroz out, Rio out, anybody but Rooney out. Bury the groundsman, hang the DJ, burn the pies.’ To lose 4–1 to Middlesbrough is embarrassing but I would take a 14–1 beating by Chelsea if it meant somebody would do something about clearing out Old Trafford before we really do become Who-the-fuck-are-Man-United.
These are unspeakably bad times if supporters are demanding sackings and openly abus
ing the players. Ferguson has an outdoor, seen-it-all-before kind of face, but he seemed genuinely shocked by the hostility inside the Stade de France – United’s fans traditionally pride themselves on never turning on their own – and the flight back to Manchester after the match felt like an overcrowded lift, airless and bad-tempered.
Ferguson was doodling into a little red notebook when we boarded the plane, scribbling diagrams of tactical manoeuvres where he presumably felt the team had gone wrong. Most of the players avoided eye contact and sat in silence. Van Nistelrooy had his arms folded, his knees hunched up against the seat in front of him, his chin pushed down on to his chest. When we spoke to him in the stadium, in his role as stand-in captain, he told us he had never known the team spirit to be so low.
‘This must be the most difficult time I have known at the club,’ he said. ‘When I came here four years ago it felt like we were unbeatable. It was so enjoyable. I remember games when I was having four or five chances. Good chances. There was constant service, attack after attack. As a striker, it was great. But things are different now, so different, and there’s nothing I can do about it. We’re not playing well. We have difficulty keeping the ball. It’s not fluent that the ball goes from player to player. We’re not having flowing attacks. We don’t play in the opponents’ half, with crosses coming in, second balls won. We’re not applying pressure on our opponents. Our confidence is down. Sometimes we hold back when we have to go for it. I don’t know what’s going on.’
This is the One: Sir Alex Ferguson: The Uncut Story of a Football Genius Page 8
