Roy the Boy!!

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Shafted..............

Cause we never get tired of reading abour Roy, right?

Inside the minds of Roy Keane

He is football's most complex and compelling figure. Now, in an astonishingly honest interview, he tells all to Sean O'Hagan. By turns fearsome, feckless and funny, Keane talks about that tackle, his drinking and loneliness and says - for the first time - that he is ready to make peace with his Irish team-mates

Sunday September 1, 2002

I initially fail to notice Roy Keane in the reception of the Marriott Four Seasons hotel in Hale, Manchester, where we have arranged to meet. When I ask where he is, the receptionist points over my shoulder to the most infamous footballer in the land, who is standing barely a few feet behind me, chatting amiably to a member of staff. In grey sports top, track suit bottoms and trainers, Keane possesses none of the imposing presence that he exudes on the pitch. In fact, he looks almost nondescript: smaller, wirier and a whole lot younger looking than his photographs suggest.

There is something callow, almost boyish about him, that same well-scrubbed, trim appearance that young Jesuits used to have, back when the priesthood, rather than professional football, was the career of choice for young Irish men of a vocational bent. After introductions are made, he seems both eager to please and utterly relaxed, but almost immediately there is a hitch: he assumes that The Observer has booked a room for the interview - we are under the mistaken impression that his agent has done the honours. For a brief moment it crosses my mind that this is exactly the sort of thing that, as recent events have shown, could send football's reigning perfectionist charging off home in a strop, effing and blinding, and vowing never to be interviewed by amateurs again. Instead, he calmly takes charge, charming the receptionist into finding us a corner of an empty lounge. All the while, he is talkative and good humoured, evincing none of the intensity nor impatience that defines the tortured individual who emerges, seething and raging, from between then lines of his book, Keane, the Autobiography. Glimpses of that other Roy Keane, though, will emerge later.

Even by the unreal standards of modern footballing celebrity, he has had a turbulent few months. For more than a decade he has been acknowledged as one of the best players in British football, but for most of that time others have hogged the headlines while he has simply accumulated winners' medals and acclaim. Now, though, he is not just the best player in the league, but the most controversial, supplanting even his team-mate David Beckham as the centre of attention. This transformation began in May, on the eve of the World Cup finals, when Keane's long and simmering feud with the Irish footballing establishment in general, and the manager of its national team Mick McCarthy in particular, exploded amid spectacular acrimony and Keane, Ireland's captain and greatest player, was sent home without kicking a ball.

That drama merely whetted the public's appetite for Keane's autobiography which, given his reputation for frankness and recklessness, was already the most eagerly awaited football book for years. His choice of Eamon Dunphy as ghost writer, a man who has carved out a career in Ireland as professional begrudger, was always going to up the ante.

The book, of course, is the reason we are here. I had spent the previous afternoon in an inner sanctum of Penguin publishers, reading the manuscript.

The last two chapters, which give his version of the World Cup walk-out, were handed to me fresh from the lawyers at the close of day. Given all that has happened in the four weeks since, not least the decision by Alf Inge Haaland and his club, Manchester City, to instigate possible legal proceedings against Keane and Manchester United over a vicious lunge on the Norwegian - described with brutal relish in the book - Penguin's guarded approach has proved well-founded. Since extracts were published a few weeks ago, Keane has found himself once again at the centre of a storm of negative publicity, which, from the outside at least, seems to swirl around his aloof head like so much hot air.

He has been psychoanalysed, censured and castigated in print by journalists, ex-players, and professional pundits alike, whose rush to judge him has often resulted in shallow and lazy conclusions. Only Alex Ferguson, his club manager and mentor, has stood resolutely by him, despite the fact that the book is critical of many Manchester United players, their corporate supporters, and the board of directors. Keane is nothing if not consistent - everyone who does not come up to his exacting standards of behaviour and commitment gets a kicking in print.

And he is exactly the same in person. In conversation, Keane cuts an amiable and accommodating figure but, as with the book, it is the mixture of frankness, unexpected humour and utter disregard for the feelings or reactions of others that make him so compelling. In the next two hours some of the biggest names in football are given short shrift. Jack Charlton, for instance, the manager who transformed Ireland's fortunes as an international side, is admired for his footballing achievements but defined by his miserliness: 'If Jack came in here now, he wouldn't buy you a drink, he'd be hoping somebody would buy him one. He's a miser. A miser. That's all he spoke about... money.'

Charlton's sidekick Maurice Setters ('a yes man, a bluffer') fares much worse. In football such candour is anathema. For a start, most footballers want to be liked by their peers (Keane doesn't appear to care), but even where there are private frictions a facade of camaraderie is maintained in public. With Keane there is no pretence. Peter Schmeichel was a great goalkeeper, but 'as a person, not my cup of tea', while the England striker Teddy Sheringham was 'another bluffer. It's all about, me me me'. Eric Cantona, on the other hand, inspires genuine admiration, both as a footballer and as a man.

The irony is that until the book, Keane rarely courted publicity and was famed for valuing his privacy. So why do it in the first place?

'Penguin gave a good offer,' he says, laughing. 'But I suppose I just wanted it to be rawer than the usual football book.' In that, he has undoubtedly succeeded. It is also more honest, often laying bare his own faults as mercilessly as those of his team-mates and his perceived enemies.

'Well, there's no point in doing a book where you're just patting yourself on the back. A lot's gone on in my career, ups and downs, and I think this is a chance to say, "Look, I am human. I have made mistakes". There's nobody more aware of that than myself. I have this image - the robot, the madman, the winner, and obviously I've brought a lot of it on myself over the years - the sending-offs, the off-the-field stuff. I'm getting older, and this was an opportunity to put my side of the story.'

One of the mistakes that many in football - and beyond perhaps - would like Keane to own up to, is the challenge made on Haaland, a Norwegian journeyman whose not particularly accomplished career in British football is now defined by two bruising encounters with Keane. The first took place in the autumn of 1997 when Haaland was playing for Leeds. In the book, Keane writes, 'He was winding me up from the beginning of the game... five minutes from time... I lunged forward at Haaland. I was trying to trip him rather than kick him. I knew it would probably mean a booking but, fuck it, he'd done my head in.'

As a result of that misguided lunge, the cruciate ligament in Keane's knee snapped. Keane was out for nearly a year, but what incensed him was Haaland's immediate reaction - he stood over Keane and accused him of faking injury.

Three and a half years later Keane had his revenge. Haaland was by now playing for Manchester City, and towards the end of a full-blooded game with United Keane launched a vicious, thigh-high assault that left Haaland writhing on the ground and Keane receiving another red card. Haaland has not started a game since, though it is by no means clear whether this is because of an injury caused by Keane.

What about Haaland, I ask.

'What about him?' he mutters.

In the book, Keane says: 'I'd waited long enough. I fucking hit him hard. The ball was there (I think). Take that you cunt. And don't ever stand over me sneering about fake injuries.'

You definitely went after him, I say. You were carrying that for a long time...

He nods. 'Maybe so. Maybe so.'

Were you annoyed at yourself for being sent off again? There is maybe a three-second pause.

'Nah.'

Was it worth it, then?

'Not for two weeks' wages, no,' he laughs. Then, in a flash, he is suddenly serious. 'I was just saying to one of the younger players, Michael Stewart it was, that I never went after a player to injure him in my life. Even Haaland.'

I think back to the oft-repeated footage of that truly shocking moment. What exactly were you intending to do, then?

'Let him know that I remembered.'

So, you don't regret it?

'No. Even in the dressing room afterwards, I had no remorse. My attitude was, fuck him. What goes around comes around. He got his just rewards. He fucked me over and my attitude is an eye for an eye.'

Truthfully, you believe that?

'I know it's not right, don't get me wrong. I wouldn't try and tell my kid that. But I'm only human, I was out for a long year that time.'

Would you do the same thing now? Another pause.

'Probably. Yeah.'

His face cracks into a smile. 'Is my halo fading yet?' he asks, smiling but looking slightly uneasy.

A few weeks later, after the serialisation of the book has made his revelations about the Haaland tackle a national issue, Keane comes back to OSM concerned about what he has said to me, and eager to clarify his views. Haaland and Manchester City have already instigated legal proceedings, and a charge from the Football Association appears inevitable.

'I have never in my career set out to deliberately injure any player,' he says. 'In the incident involving Haaland I was making a genuine effort to play the ball. The words used in the book represent a degree of artistic licence on the part of the author. It should be borne in mind that Haaland has acknowledged that my tackle did not bring his career to a premature end.'

What is revealing about what he said to me though, apart from his brutal honesty, is why Keane holds Haaland responsible in the first place. The injury that laid him up for so long, and caused him to wreak revenge was self-inflicted, a result of that desperate lunge.

By now it is clear that though in person Keane is affable and in many ways charming, the intensity that fires him, both on and off the pitch, is always tangible. At times, he seems determined to undercut the abiding image of himself as a dour and dogged outsider; at others, he seems powerless to control his tongue, never mind his simmering sense of injustice. It is this imbalance, of course, that makes Roy Keane the most fascinating footballer of his time, part existential anti-hero, part unreconstituted hard man.

The first episode with Haaland came during a particularly turbulent period of Keane's life, when frequent drinking binges were also landing him in the headlines. Two days before the Leeds game he had a fight in the Chester Street Hotel with some Irish supporters from Dublin who were slagging off his beloved Cork. As he was escorted from the hotel, one wag shouted from an upstairs window: 'Keane, you Cork bastard, you'll be in the tabloids tomorrow'. Looking back, he now feels at least partly to blame for the extent of his injury. 'My night of drinking,' Keane writes, 'had taken its toll.'

The book makes clear that for a long period drinking was a central part of his life. His early days at Nottingham Forest under Brian Clough were a mixture of discipline and alcohol-fuelled anarchy. 'It was,' he says, 'a different game then.' From today's perspective, it looks like a different planet.

Back then Keane would leave Nottingham for Cork directly after Saturday's game, arriving there in time 'for last orders at the Temple Acre, then a meal with my mates. Saturday was dancing, drinking, kebabs... Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, same routine.' That cavalier lifestyle seems scarcely credible now in a game directed by nutritionists and motivation coaches as well as trainers and physios.

'I know,' he says, shaking his head at the absurdity of that not-too-distant time, 'but that was the norm back then. We used to get wrecked.'

Given that Cork can be a hard town, did he ever consider the very real possibility that one drunken ruck could have put him out of action for the season? 'Oh, I know. Without a doubt. In town, there'd always be one or two fellas looking for trouble, but I'd always have my four or five mates and we'd be ready.'

So, you would be up for a fight if it happened?

'Oh aye. The amount of fights I've had in Cork that I haven't even mentioned. That,' he says, laughing, 'would probably be another book. I mean, people go on about my problems off the field, but they don't even know the half of it. My uncles used to say to me, "Why don't you go and have a drink in a hotel - Jury's or the Metropole, nice hotels like that?" But, I would say, "No. No. I don't want to drink in a hotel. I don't want to sit in a hotel with the shirts and ties when I'm 20. I'd rather take me chances in the bars in Cork".'

For a moment, he seems quite proud of his youthful ability to court trouble but stay one step ahead of it. Then, almost wistfully, he adds: 'See, back then, when I went home, it was like I was never away, you know? In a way, the fight at the end of the night was the price I was prepared to pay to go home, go out with my mates and let off a bit of steam. That kind of stuff didn't make the papers until I started getting bigger. I wouldn't dream of doing it now, but it was great then.'

From the start, though, Keane's fondness for the drink proved problematic. After Forest lost the 1991 FA Cup Final to Spurs, the 19-year-old defender, who had played despite a bad ankle injury, went on the rip for six weeks. He returned to the club a stone overweight. When he joined United the drinking continued apace. In the book, he writes that 'the discovery that there was a serious drinking sub-culture at United was delightfully reassuring'.

Leaving aside the unlikelihood of Roy Keane ever uttering the words 'delightfully reassuring', I ask him how on earth top players got away with it back then?

'I tell you how,' he replies, having obviously given this some thought, 'Back then, 10 or 11 of you would go out. So, you'd all be in the same boat if you were caught. Now, you'd be on your own. We're going back 10 years here, to Robbo, Brucie, [Bryan Robson and Steve Bruce] big drinkers. Look, if players say they're going out for a meal now, they actually are. Back then, when we went out for a so-called meal, you wouldn't even see a sandwich.'

Early on, his drinking was linked to loneliness and an inability to fit in socially with his fellow players. I read him back one of his book's most honest passages. 'I found it very difficult to cope with the kind of fame that accompanied my status as a footballer. I wanted to be alone. Well, not as alone as I found myself during the early months in Manchester... Stupidity and pride meant that I would never dream of making the first move to initiate a friendship.'

He nods. 'Yeah, yeah. I had to be honest about that. When I first used to live here, I was my own worst enemy. My pride stopped me saying, "I wouldn't mind going for a meal with one of yous".'

For those of us who have watched him for the past decade or so, this is surely the irony that reveals the complexity of Keane's character: a committed and confident warrior on the field, a shy, socially awkward, and often lonely introvert off it. That, I suggest, is an interesting mix.

'It's been a hard mix,' he replies, falling silent for a long moment. 'Off the pitch, I have this "leave me alone" sort of attitude. I'm working on it, though. As you get older, you mellow. Or, you see things differently. See, back then, I'd be out with the lads and I'd feel part of it all for a while, and then other times, I'd feel like I was somehow a bit different, but not in a nasty way. Removed.'

So you drank to fit in?

'I don't know.' He pauses. 'I don't know if I'd go that far. The thing is, I'd be out in the afternoon because I'd need a few drinks to relax before I met up with the lads at five. Which is crazy. Lads I play with every day, train with every day, and I'd be "I'm meeting the lads tonight, I'd better have a few before I meet them". Madness.'

Because you felt shy or awkward?

'Yeah. Maybe so.' He laughs, slightly embarrassed. 'See it was a vicious circle for me. I'd keep to myself, then I'd meet the lads and I'd be ready for a bit of action. I kind of go berserk, if you know what I mean. The trouble might come, and I'd be full of remorse, feeling bad. It'd be, "Oh Jesus, I'm not going out ever again". And then I'd keep to myself for weeks.'

The long lay-off caused by his cruciate injury was a bleak time for a man whose life, as he suddenly realised, was defined to an extraordinary degree by those regular 90-minute bouts of combat on the pitch. He admits to eeling lost and frustrated without the purpose and the adrenalin of football. His drinking escalated. He had a row with a barman at a United reserve team party; another with his manager after he was subsequently banned from attending the first team party. His response was to go out on a drinking spree on his own.

'The injury,' he says now, 'was an eye opener. It was a big blow for me. I was only 27, 28. I'm not saying I ever took things for granted, but I had started to relax a little, and enjoy things. I was thinking, this is what it's all about, then, suddenly it seemed like it might all be over.'

Was it that serious?

'Oh yeah. Especially the way I was carrying on. I was out on the piss every night.'

On crutches?

'Oh yeah,' he laughs. 'Ridiculous. Totally ridiculous. I was doing a lot of stuff I shouldn't have been doing - not just dancing but daft stuff like jumping over hedges and cars. I'd sometimes come in the next day and I couldn't move for my knee.'

Keane denies that he checked into The Priory, the rehab clinic of choice for the rich and famous, for alcohol-related depression in the summer of 2000. He says he has a letter from the staff there that backs him up. He also denies attending meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous at around the same time in a Quaker hall near his home in Sale, Cheshire. His decision to wise up, stop drinking, and get down to the serious and dogged business of recovery came when he spent some long evenings sitting alone in the old Manchester United training ground while his team mates went through their paces.

'I'd watch the lads finish training,' he recalls, 'and they'd shoot off out of there like the building was on fire, like they couldn't get away quick enough. I said to myself, "If I do get back there, I'm going to work on the things I need to work on".' Now, he says, he often has to be 'dragged away' from United's new all-purpose training centre. 'I'll get it all back later in my career. It's no good doing this stuff when I'm 33 or 34, and it's too late.'

Does he think about the moment when he will have to give the game up?

'I'm dreading it. Dennis [Irwin] left a few weeks ago, and it's going to happen to me. I want to hang in there as long as I can.'

Is he preparing for it in any way?

'A little bit. Now that I'm not playing international games, I'll have a bit more time to maybe do my coaching badges. I'll hopefully go down that route, but you talk to other coaches and they tell you that the playing is what it's all about. The playing is the ultimate thing. There's no way to replace that, and I'm dreading it. I'll miss the buzz, big style.'

I ask if the injury, and its protracted aftermath, was the low point of his tempestuous career. He shakes his head. 'No. The sending-offs were. For sure.'

Hardly surprisingly Keane's supremely aggressive style has brought him more than his fair share of red cards - 10 in all. More surprising is how he feels about them. 'People think, "ah well, it's Roy Keane", but they really do affect me. They really do.'

Particularly the last one, nearly a year ago at Newcastle. Then the former England international Alan Shearer wound Keane up, and he took the bait. 'Shearer won, hands down,' he laughs, shaking his head, 'That was my own fault. Stupid.'

Keane's disgust with himself was such that Ferguson had to talk him out of retiring from the game. Is it simply a case of the red mist descending, and all reason disappearing?

'Yeah. It's like I'm standing over there looking at myself.' He considers this for a moment or two, trying to pinpoint the cause. 'The thing is, we were going to lose that game, and I couldn't accept it. It's like at school, or at Rockmount [his club in Cork], I couldn't accept losing. The trainers would be going, "Relax, Roy," but no, that's not me. Mad, I know, but I'm working on it.'

Keane says his binge drinking came to an end three years ago when he spent a night in the cells after another brawl in a city centre club. The incident had all the trademarks of a tabloid set-up - it actually made the Sun the following morning - but it meant that Alex Ferguson was summoned to a Manchester police station in the early hours, just four days before the FA Cup Final, and ten days before the European Cup Final. 'There was a pattern here,' Keane concludes in the book, 'the story of me, drink and cities: Cork, Dublin, Nottingham, Manchester. It adds up to aggravation.'

Was that night in the cells the turning point?

'Maybe, yeah. It was obviously getting me in trouble. I mean, without drink, that whole thing would not have gone beyond first base. I wouldn't have been there to begin with. Or, I would have walked away. It really pissed me off, the gaffer having to come and get me, and all. That was a long night, that was a hell of a long night.'

Did Ferguson give you a bollocking?

'Not that time. He could see that I was angry with myself. Not looking for sympathy or anything, but genuinely disgusted with myself. He just asked if I was okay. His reading of the situation is always spot on.'

And has he knocked his drinking on the head now?

'Aye. I've not had a drink for a while. It was affecting my knee. I spoke to the medical people at United. Especially when it was contract time, the talks, you know, I knew they'd be checking on my knee.'

His concern and canniness paid off when Keane recently signed a new contract, reported to be worth more than �4m a year. He has no qualms over the club's concern about his knee.

'It's the most natural thing in the world for the club to check about my knee. The medical people said there was a problem with me going out. And there was, I knew alcohol affected it. I'd come in the next day and I couldn't move for my knee. I was doing stuff I shouldn't have been doing. Not necessarily dancing, jumping over daft hedges and cars and that. But even standing at the bar for four or five hours is not going to help your knee. It's a selfish thing with me. If I look after myself, I'll be in the game longer, I'll get more money out of it.'

Inside the minds of Roy Keane (part two)

Sunday September 1, 2002

If Roy Keane is determined to evade - and, indeed, resents with an almost pathological passion - any attempt to stereotype him along national lines, it becomes clear after some time in his company that his native county, rather than his country, is an altogether more potent defining force. He is, first and foremost, a Corkman: fiercely proud of his roots, convinced that the city he comes from is the epicentre of the universe.

'A superiority complex is the mark of a sound Corkman,' he writes early on, poking fun at himself, and though he left his native city more than a decade ago, Cork defines him still. 'When I go back there now, people treat me the same,' he tells me. 'They're not impressed by the watches, the cars, the house. They're glad I've done well at football but there's no bullshit about it.'

Revealingly, too, his only close friends are there. You must have friends in Manchester, too, I ask at one point.

'One or two,' he says a little uncertainly. 'But, only one or two.'

Really?

'Yeah. I have my Rockmount mates. I just feel more relaxed with my own. My Cork mates. That's nothing about England or anything, I just feel more relaxed with my own.'

Born and bred in working-class Mayfield, he grew up in a close family, one of four boys born to Marie and Maurice Keane. At home, money was often tight, and at school, he 'kept his head down' and persevered, but did not shine academically, excelling instead at sport. And, at fighting. He writes:

'I got a reputation which pleased me. He doesn't take no shit. Once established, that reputation helped me a lot. There were still a few guys who fancied their chances, but fewer and fewer as time passed.'

For a while he was able to combine sport and fighting. He took up boxing, training with the seniors when he was 10 or 11. He was small though, and soon had to make a decision to concentrate on the fight game or football. You sense he would rather have become a world-class boxer.

'Boxing is the best sport in the world. It's man against man. You are on your own. There's only one person going to come out of that ring a winner. I suppose I applied that attitude to football. Even now, if the team is not playing well, I always say, "I'll fucking do well". If somebody gets pulled by the manager after the match, it ain't going to be me. That's what you need.'

It is this startlingly competitive attitude that defines Keane as one of the greatest footballers of his, or any other generation. He speaks constantly of his 'fear of falling into the comfort zone', and is disappointed that the attitude is not shared by others. Even his team-mates, don't they possess that same will to win?

'Without a doubt, they don't.'

It seems incredible to an outsider that players earning such rewards are ever complacent or lacking in commitment...

'Well, there you go. It's a fact of life. Some are luckier than others in terms of upbringing. They haven't had to fight so hard to get where they are.'

And what really winds you up is when your team-mates don't give 100 per cent?

'Totally,' he says. 'Drives me nuts. I accept if we all give 100 per cent and we lose. But, if I'm sitting in the dressing room after we've lost, and they're chatting away, not a bother on them. And I'm asking myself, why aren't they hurting?'

He has particularly bad memories of United's defeat by Bayern Leverkusen in the European Cup five months ago. 'It was a great opportunity to get to the European Cup Final,' he says. 'I mean, I know everyone's different but... I see them in the bar afterwards, and I'm like, why aren't they bothered? Why aren't they hurting? Winds me up.'

Does he ever say anything?

'Oh aye.' He laughs. 'I did say my piece after that game.'

Do you get on with your team-mates? He seems a little thrown by the question.

'Yeah,' he says, then pauses. 'I do.'

Even, it seems, the ones he thinks are not trying. In the book he castigates Dwight Yorke for not having returned from the party that started on the night of United's European Cup triumph. Yet he tells me: 'I like Yorkie, he's great lad. But a lot of lads were living off that whole we-won-the-treble thing.'

He tries to restrain himself. 'Nah, maybe I should bite my thumb. These are just my natural feelings. They come out.'

This almost pathological will to win may, ironically, have been the key element in Keane's abrupt departure from the World Cup. It underlines the tangled roots and history of Roy Keane's long war of attrition with the Irish Football Association, and the team's previous and current manager. He aired them himself in the two newspaper interviews that so incensed his manager in Saipan, citing the absence of the team kit and a suitable training pitch as just the latest examples of the amatuerishness he has had to put up with for years.

Mick McCarthy's subsequent anger and sense of betrayal were perhaps understandable, given that he had just come to some sort of accommodation with his demanding captain following an earlier outburst in training. That manger, though, clouded his judgment. When the interviews were published, an incensed McCarthy called a team meeting and invited any player who had a grievance to air it to himself and the team. Not the best arena in which to call Roy Keane's bluff.

For his part Keane saw what was coming. 'We are at a meal and a meeting is called for half seven, and none of the staff are having their lunch, just the players. I'm going, "Okay, this is it, showtime".' He slaps his palms at the recollection.

The meeting is described in detail in the book: 'I know what's coming,' he writes, 'But, I'm cool. My conscience is clear. For one thing, I'd told him privately what I was unhappy with... no need to repeat it. He's going to try and sort it out publicly, be the big man. The manager. I'm calm.'

When Keane does not respond, McCarthy then rounds on him, brandishing a copy of the Irish Times interview, and accusing him, among other things, of not being committed to his country, and faking an injury to get out of playing for Ireland in a previous game against Iran. The proverbial red rag to the bull.

According to Keane, it was this last 'insult' - with its echo of Haaland's similar taunt - that precipitated his now infamous response, which, in the book, culminates as follows, 'Mick, you're a liar... you're a fucking wanker. I didn't rate you as a player, I don't rate you as a manager, and I don't rate you as a person. You're a fucking wanker and you can stick your World Cup up your arse. I've got no respect for you.'

Back then, though, the version that emerged from within the Irish camp - and was reputedly verified off the record by at least two players - differed in some subtle but key details, most notably the player's pay-off line which allegedly went as follows: 'The only reason I have any dealings with you is that somehow you are the manager of my country and you're not even Irish, you English cunt! You can stick it up your bollocks.'

The devil, as they say, is in the details.

'People say I blew my top, but I didn't,' Keane tells me. 'I was in control.

Even the lads who came to my room afterwards said, "We thought you were quite controlled". It was,' he grins, perhaps aware that his words will stretch the bounds of credibility even in his supporters, 'a controlled outburst, if that is possible.'

Why did he storm out of the meeting?

'I swear on my child's life I knew they were going to dangle that carrot in front of me. You know: "give him enough rope". My whole attitude was, "Don't take the bait, Roy". Then he said the whole thing about faking an injury, and that was it. That, to me, is the biggest insult. If anything, I've played too much when I've had injuries. For McCarthy to come out with that. I just said, "You're a liar, you're a fucking liar". You spoke to my manager, you know I wasn't faking.'

So, you didn't, in the heat of the moment, have a go at McCarthy for not being Irish?

'No. No way.' he answers, shifting on his chair, his calm suddenly ruffled. 'That was reported in a lot of places. It irritated me because the people over there could have killed that stuff but they chose not to.'

You have no problems whatsoever with McCarthy being an Englishman in charge of Ireland?

'No. None whatsoever. God almighty, no. Look at Jack [Charlton], he did brilliant for Irish football, and good on him. No, no, they let that one roll and they should have killed it.'

And you are certain, again given the heat of the moment, that you did not employ the term, 'an English cunt'?

Keane looks pained and deeply affronted. 'No. No way. I have to live in England, and to be accused of saying that sort of thing, it's not nice for my wife and family. But, they let that run too. The FAI could have killed that, and Mick could have killed that.'

(In a recent interview, though, Keane upbraided his former team mates, Steve Staunton and Niall Quinn, for their supposed disloyalty to him after his dismissal. He said, 'Staunton is there in a press conference shaking his head saying he has never witnessed anything like it. He has never heard 'wanker' or 'cunt' before? He played for Liverpool under Graeme Souness and he's never heard that. And Niall Quinn? Who is he? Mother Teresa?')

Whatever the conflicting details of the row, there is no doubt that it had been simmering for years, kick-started by an incident in America in 1992 when McCarthy, then team captain, joined the Ireland manager Jack Charlton in upbraiding Keane for keeping the team waiting while he and Staunton went for a few pints in a nearby pub. Keane, just 20, told his captain to 'go and fuck yourself!'

I ask if his dislike of McCarthy stemmed from that relatively petty moment. 'Nah. Nah. No way,' he says firmly. 'In fact he said to me on the bus, "I'll get you back some day". When he got the manager's job, a few of the lads were going, "That's you finished, Roy".'

He leans back, grinning, and affecting an air of mock-smugness. 'Luckily enough, my career's gone so well that he had no option but to pick me.'

There is some kind of mischief here, then, alongside the stubbornness and the disdain. Time and again, often when discussing the most serious charges laid against him, Keane will undercut that same seriousness with a self-deprecating crack, or a stifled giggle.

When I ask if he has had much grief in Ireland since the World Cup, he shakes his head.

'None. Hang on. There was one fella. I was getting on the bus after the Shelbourne game [where United played a pre-season friendly] and this one guy gives me the dickhead sign. Now, I've had thousands of people saying "Roy, you did great", but he's the one who's stuck in my head. That's my whole problem right there. Mind you,' he adds, 'I'm not here to please people.'

Keane often comes across like a wayward adolescent who, having been told he is a problem child for so long, suddenly finds a gleeful satisfaction in playing out the role to the hilt.

Underneath, though, he obviously feels cut to the quick by what he perceives as the players' betrayal of him, and, ironically, of the ideal of togetherness that he did more than anyone to fracture.

'For Quinn and Staunton to sit in that press conference...' He is whispering, his voice reflecting a lingering degree of incredulity. 'I mean, I know they have to back Mick but, even if it was a day later. But not 15 minutes. I'm thinking what planet are you on? Players should stick together.'

He sits silent for a moment, simmering. 'To tell you the truth, I can live with what Mick had to say, but I was more hurt by the players. Steve Staunton sitting there, I could not believe. I'd never heard anything like it in my life.'

Because he was your pal, I ask, your old drinking buddy?

He nods. 'The stuff I could tell you about Staunton. And him about me. People in greenhouses,' he adds, ominously, 'shouldn't throw stones.'

As he talks about those long years of dissatisfaction with the Irish squad and the carnival of old-fashioned Irishness, he becomes more wound up. It is obvious that the events of the early summer are still uppermost in his mind.

'The good old Irish,' he says, breaking into a cod-Paddy voice, 'let's have a party. We'll just have a sing-song if we're beaten. That comes from the top down. And McCarthy goes along with it, just like Jack did.'

The other players go along with it too, I say, it doesn't seem to annoy them to the same extent that it does you.

'That's them,' he snaps disdainfully. 'I won't have it. I don't think I was put on the planet to go through the mill like that, and then to be a yes man like the rest of them. When I asked Mick why the kit hadn't turned up in Saipan, he goes, "Oh, DHL let me down." I mean, for God's sake, it should have arrived weeks before. Where's the professionalism, the organisation. It's the World Cup, for fuck sake. My brother's pub team doesn't train on a pitch full of pot holes. No, I'm not having it. Get real.' If they offered you the Irish manager's job would you take it, I ask mischievously.

He laughs. 'I never thought of that one. I don't know. There'd have to be big changes, professionals running it, get rid of the amateurs.' The prospect seems to appeal, the more he talks about it. 'Even if I was to go back as a player there'd have to be a new manager who could reassure me things are going to be done properly.'

I ask if he has any regrets about missing what would surely have been his last World Cup.

'No. Not one. I'd do it again tomorrow. I wouldn't change a thing. And I'm not trying to say I'm not 100 per cent clear of the blame. People say, why didn't you just bite your tongue, but I've done that hundreds of times.'

Did it ever strike him that given that it was the World Cup finals, and that he was captaining his country, that maybe he should just have done the right thing?

'I did the right thing.' he says, fixing me with a stare that could cut through stone.

After the long journey back to Manchester, the unrepentant player emerged from his besieged home to silently take his dog for its daily walk. It was pure Roy Keane, a statement both defiant and somehow tragi-comic. 'I was never going to be in hiding,' he says, the last two words uttered with an air of utter disgust.

At home he watched England play - 'because some of my team-mates were playing' - but not Ireland. 'It was hurting me because I felt I should have been playing, and I felt I could have done well.'

Did he want the team he had left behind to do well?

'Hand on heart, I wasn't really that bothered. I'm not nasty enough to have wanted them not to do well. It honestly truthfully didn't bother me. Plus, I was thinking, the better they do, they more they'll be making Mick out to be the best manager in the world.'

He did however watch the second half and extra time of Ireland's crucial match against Spain. How did he feel when the team went out?

'I was going through all sorts of emotions. Sympathy for the players, hurt because I think they would have won if the manager had done his job properly.'

I asked him if he has bumped into Mick McCarthy since. Even the idea seems to appal him.

'Nah. And I hope I don't. I'd tell him where to go. I wouldn't go out of my way to, but if he was passing, like.'

So you wouldn't, I ask, half jokingly, sit down and have a pint now? There is no humour, though, in Keane's reply. Instead his face clouds over, and his voice is filled with contempt.

'Not in a million years. I hope I don't come across as bitter and twisted but that man can rot in hell for all I care. I don't feel any guilt about saying that at all because he deserves it. He deserves it.

Fuck him. Fucking tosser!