THE INDIE - MANAGER FACES A FIGHT HE DARE NOT LOSE
It is a status reinforced by Ferguson's view of Keane, too. No one doubts that they have fallen out on countless occasions - not least when the captain expressed his dissatisfaction with the pre-season training arrangements in Portugal this summer - but they have always maintained a public unity. The manager has backed his captain's judgement time and time again and, now he finds himself in such fundamental disagreement, there can be no alternative but to take Keane on.
Ferguson versus Keane. It is a conflict that promises to inflict much damage on the institution that these two men have done so much to build. There is a well-grounded fear at Old Trafford that Keane, thwarted by the spinelessness of MUTV, will take his complaints about United elsewhere. Given the current state of United, 13 points behind Chelsea and humiliated by Middlesbrough on Saturday, he will find a receptive audience among a disillusioned support. He has established himself as a renegade, a teller of the truth, and his words will have so much more weight now that they have been suppressed once already.
Ferguson must either extract a promise that Keane's one-man crusade against Old Trafford's failings will cease or, most likely, he will cast him out. The January transfer window is two months away and Keane will be six months from being a free agent - even if he has not recovered from a broken toe by then there would be no shortage of suitors.
THE GUARDIAN - FERGUSON DEFENDS YOUNGSTERS IN THE WAKE OF TIRADE
As Manchester United took the extraordinary step of burning the tape showing what Roy Keane really thinks about his team-mates, Sir Alex Ferguson's mood could be accurately gauged as he made his way through Ringway airport en route to Paris and the man from Sky stuck microphone under his nose. Ferguson went the colour of a ripe tomato before jabbing out a finger and turning away. "That's you finished," he growled.
Ferguson usually swats away crises like the rest of us dismiss an irritating fly but the United manager has never had to deal with mutiny on the scale presented by Keane's blistering outburst to the club's in-house television station, an interview so explosive the show's producers, under duress from the club's chief executive David Gill, have destroyed the evidence rather than risk it being leaked.
Players and management sat in virtual silence during the flight and it quickly transpired Ferguson is livid with Keane to the point irreparable damage may have been caused to a relationship once considered impregnable. Keane, in turn, has felt no need to explain himself, let alone offer an apology, and the 34-year-old is said to be distinctly unimpressed that United, in football parlance, bottled it.
He was described as being unrepentant about identifying six players - reputedly, Rio Ferdinand, Kieran Richardson, Liam Miller, John O'Shea, Darren Fletcher and Alan Smith - during the pulled MUTV program, Roy Keane Plays the Pundit. It was probably just as well, if harmony is to be restored between Keane and his colleagues, that his broken metatarsal meant he was not on the trip.