ROY'S UNITED DAYS ALL BUT OVER?

“At Manchester United's training ground near Carrington on Thursday morning, Roy Keane organised for his teammates to see a recording of his performance on MUTV. Keane showed the context in which his assessments were made and a lot of the people in the room had their say.

“He felt that the players didn't actually have much of a problem with his comments. In public or in private, they don't expect football's usual platitudes from their captain.

“Shortly after Keane met Sir Alex Ferguson. The meeting with Ferguson was anything but conciliatory and served no purpose other than to confirm the bad blood that now poisons their relationship.

“For the moment at least, it's over: football's most productive manager/captain partnership has been dissolved. That was confirmed the following morning when Ferguson held his weekly news conference at Carrington. Without qualification, he said that outside the dressing room you don't criticise any of the Manchester United players.

“So, how did it come to this? The relationship has not been right since the beginning of a season that began with Keane having a stand-up row with United coach Carlos Queiroz during the club's pre-season training week in Portugal. The idea was for the players and their families to gather at a resort in the Algarve where training would be combined with some family time.

“Keane felt that it would be wrong to take his family away from their ideal holiday location in the Algarve and install them where they would not be as happy. So he refused to move them and ended up having an argument with Queiroz over it. They fell out and their relationship has not recovered. Teammate Paul Scholes, incidentally, felt exactly as Keane did, but he did it in the quiet way that Scholes does most things and people hardly noticed.

“The falling out with Queiroz would have ramifications. If Keane was not getting along with the assistant manager, it follows that his relationship with Ferguson was also bound to suffer. More than that, Keane had once been a fan of Queiroz's coaching and for the manner in which he had re-established proper discipline at United's training ground. He once saw the Portuguese coach as a future United manager and somebody that he might one day work under.

“That now seems an age ago.

“But this hasn't been about a row in Portugal or some abject defending at Middlesbrough, this has been about what Keane sees as six years of underachievement and falling standards. After the glorious triumph of the Nou Camp he thought that he saw the seeds of complacency and heard expressions of sated ambition.

“What Keane saw that night came to pass and the Nou Camp, 1999, became not the launching pad for United but the landing area.

"For Keane, it was self-induced, brought about by too many players at Old Trafford settling for less than they could have achieved. ‘If I was putting Roy Keane out there to represent Manchester United on a one-on-one,’ Ferguson once said of the Irishman, ‘we would win the Derby, the National, the Boat Race and anything else.’

“Perhaps at the heart of their now soured relationship is that Ferguson simply wasn't able to come up with another 10 players capable of winning their one-on-ones.”