#2Sides: My Autobiography (12 page)

It’s an unforgiving game. Obviously you feel sad for somebody who loses their job, but as a professional all you can do is get on with
things and move on. It’s a bit cold, but that’s the business that we’re in. Things change fast in football; the next game against Norwich was coming up and you just have to put everything else out of your mind. I didn’t know something similar would happen to me a few weeks later. But it was the only way to react. You know a career can be over very suddenly; it’s something everyone at some point has to go through. You’ve just got to get on with things and keep moving on.

Some people argue the manager is overrated in modern football. But one of the things the whole saga showed me was just how important the manager can be in a club. Even if you’ve got great and highly motivated players it all has to be channelled in the right way; you need someone to put all the elements together. Someone’s got to create the right environment in the changing room; someone’s got to create an environment that carries out onto that pitch. It doesn’t just happen by itself. You can’t just throw a group of players together and expect them to be a great team – someone at the top has to be driving that.

You can see the difference between the confusing Moyes approach and the absolute clarity Louis van Gaal brought to the job. I’m just disappointed I didn’t get a chance to work with him because it would have been an education. The players at United now tell me Van Gaal is strong and determined and clear in his methods and his philosophy. If you can’t buy into his philosophy, he’ll find players who can. There was a fascinating quote from him: ‘I am training the players not in their legs but in their brain, in brain power.’ I think I could have learned a lot from Van Gaal.

Looking back, I’d say David Moyes was unlucky. He and Manchester United were just oil and water somehow. His ideas weren’t bad in themselves; they just didn’t fit with the group of players and the tradition and recent history of the club. As
players we also have to stand up and be counted and say we didn’t perform. It’s a fact. But at the same time we needed to be given the right framework and structure for our strengths to come out. We get paid to play well, and the fact that we failed wasn’t for lack of effort. We tried as hard as we could. But we didn’t play to our strengths under Moyes.

It was always going to be hard for him following such a huge character not just at the club but in the world of football. Don’t forget he also had the added disadvantage of arriving just after the departure of David Gill, the chief executive who was very influential in buying players and running the club. United was in transition and it would’ve been difficult for any new manager. Even so, David Moyes wasn’t right for Man Utd – he wasn’t clear in his ideas and he couldn’t get what he wanted over to the players.

The question of who was to blame does keep going back and forth in my mind, though. I wish he could have seen me last season, when I had one of my best seasons at United, or a few years ago when I was fighting fit and in my prime. I don’t think I was responsible for him getting sacked. I couldn’t have given more, but I do wish I could have played consistently well under him. He might have been still in the job, or at least he’d have seen me in a better light as a player. On the other side, you think: ‘Did he set us up properly to be able to give the best of ourselves as players?’ No, he didn’t. But that’s the kind of tennis game you have in your head: ‘Was it me? … Was it him? …’ That’s what goes round in your mind if you’re a good professional. You never say: ‘Oh it’s
his
fault.’ You are always at odds with yourself a bit. Was it him or was it me? It’s a never-ending rally.

Some players just don’t cope with the pressure of being in the England squad. Like Jimmy Bullard. Jimmy might never have set the world alight for England – but he was a hell of a good player I knew from way back. He made two squads but never actually got a game. It was a shame. And I think it tells us something about another thing that is wrong with England.

I knew Jimmy when we were about 11 and played against each other in the Bexley and Kent League. He was with YMCA and I played for Eltham Town. He was one of the most sought-after young players in the area – technically good, very fit. He could shoot and pass, and he was built like a marathon runner. Then I lost track of him and I heard he went into painting and decorating. Then years later, he turned up at the West Ham reserves, then went off and did well for himself. He became bit of a cult figure along the way at places like Wigan, Fulham and Hull. I think fans saw themselves in him: he was a kind of ‘Jack the Lad’ mess-about-merchant who never took himself too seriously. But he was always a better footballer than most people noticed.

When Jimmy retired he wrote a very funny book, pointing out, among other things, that Fabio Capello looks just like
Postman Pat
. He also made a serious point about the oppressive seriousness of the England setup. He felt a bit lost within the system, was never comfortable and couldn’t flourish. I’ve spoken to him about it and it was a real problem. He said the seriousness of the England camp just made it impossible for him to be himself so he didn’t really train that well.

It’s an issue because you go away and you’re suddenly completely outside your comfort zones. Like with food. At home you eat when you want. Normally I eat with my kids at about 6pm and if I feel like having something else later, I’ll just go to the fridge. But with the national team everything is so regimented. It’s almost like being in prison!

I remember one time we played a game on the Wednesday and had another game on Saturday. That left us locked in the hotel for days. So after the Wednesday match John Terry, Ashley Cole, Shaun Wright-Phillips and I organised to get some Nando’s in for all the lads. We knew they’d be hungry and wouldn’t want the official food. So we all went to dinner with the team, but ate minimally, knowing the Nandos was on its way. After half an hour we left the dinner table and … enjoyed the food we wanted. If you could’ve heard us! We were like hyenas at feeding time with a limitless supply of dead wildebeest. If somebody had got those sound effects on tape it would’ve been hilarious.

We did that sort of thing a couple of times. Another time we went for McDonald’s and everyone ordered Big Macs, and chicken burgers and stuff. It was quite an operation: the food would be delivered through the back of the hotel by one of the lads’ drivers. In the normal run of things you’d never think of doing that; it would only ever be once in a blue moon. We’re not stupid. We
know what to eat. But we were stir-crazy: we’d been locked away for like a week and no one had had any food they really enjoyed. At times like that that kind of stuff tastes fantastic. It’s a reaction to being bossed about.

One time Fabio Capello said we couldn’t have butter on our toast in the morning. I remember sitting there and putting olive oil and salt on instead. What would be worse? The olive oil and salt, I’m sure. Or another time it would be: ‘no ice cream’. We were absolutely forbidden to have even a tiny bit of ice cream. I mean – we’re only with the team for about
four or five days
. Do you really think it’s going to affect my performance if I put a bit of butter on my toast when that’s what I do every other day of the year?

Sometimes you have to give players responsibility. We’re all professionals; we didn’t get to this point in our lives by being unprofessional. We can look after ourselves. If you treat us like kids we’ll behave like kids.

It’s not just food. I remember in Glenn Hoddle’s time – because he was as strict as anyone else in this regard – we were at the hotel in Burnham Beeches and we weren’t allowed out anywhere. I was 19 or 20 years old and used to going out all the time. Suddenly I was in what felt like a prison lockdown. So I asked one of my mates to come and get me in his car after dinner. The routine was that we would finish training and then have lunch at 1.30pm or 2pm … and then there was nothing to do until a 7.30pm meeting! So we were supposed to sit in the hotel the whole time. It freaked me out. So I’d get my mates to wait with the car outside, by the perimeter wall. I’d sneak through the kitchens, escape through the back door then jump over the back wall. Me and Frank Lampard did that a couple of times: all we wanted was to go for a drive or to the local town listening
to music and chilling – just normal 18- or 19-year-old stuff but without the alcohol. We never drank. And we were never the worse for it, I can assure you. It wasn’t like being off clubbing – we just didn’t want to be stuck in the room. You’d never do that at home, so why do it before a big game? You just seize up. Boredom is a problem.

Long, boring stays in hotels can have a dark side as well. Being stuck away from home, alone in a room, players can easily get caught up in gambling. It’s just a laugh at first, but within a couple of months you can easily find yourself chasing hundreds of thousands of pounds. At that point you are too deep in a hole to climb out, and you can’t speak to anyone because you’re either embarrassed or genuinely addicted.

I talk from experience. I was once £200,000 down because I was gambling on rugby, dogs and horses. I gambled by text and on credit and the process was so easy I was in trouble almost before I realised. My bookie knew I was good for the money, and I started with bets of a couple of grand here and there. Next thing I know, I owe him £200,000 and I’m worried sick.

In the end, I was very lucky to escape. I managed to get my debt down to £107,000, then staked the whole amount on an evens bet on the favourite in a seven horse race. Watching on TV that horse seemed to run in slow motion and I was panicking. But after some of the scariest minutes of my life, it came in and I was able to settle my debt. But I’d learned my lesson. I paid the bookie what I owed – then told him never to send me odds or contact me again and deleted him from my phone.

I have say that as a captain Roy Keane was brilliant in most departments. He’d run the training and be very disciplined about it. If people seemed to be taking their foot off the pedal he would hammer them. He called a meeting once to have a go at Darren Fletcher for talking on his phone, and laid into some of the other young lads for not going to the gym and doing extra training. That was all good because the younger lads started to change their ways – and that was needed. But the next day I walked in and saw Roy talking on his phone, doing the exact same thing he had criticised Fletcher for! I just raised my eyebrows to say ‘Woah, you remember what you said yesterday?’ He just kind of smiled in embarrassment. He was probably thinking: ‘Yeah, but I can do this because I’m a senior player – I’ve worn the T-shirt, I was talking to the younger lads.’

The only thing that I was really gutted about was that I didn’t get to play with Roy during his best years. He was still a top player when I arrived; he knew the game and dictated a lot of matches by the way he played, but he wasn’t at the peak of his powers.

In his book Ferguson says how great Roy was as a player then says he could be very harsh with people: ‘The hardest part of
Roy’s body is his tongue …’ It’s true that in the changing room he would come down on people, especially on Ollie, John O’Shea and Fletcher. With those three I think he saw a little bit of himself, especially Sheasy and Fletcher. They were young lads who came over from another country and he didn’t want to see them coasting or resting on their laurels.

I remember one player, Michael Stewart, a young Scottish midfielder who was talented and the club had high hopes for him. After training one day, Michael was taking off his boots and Keane went over to him and said ‘I can see you’re going to be one of those players who, in a couple years, will be at Accrington Stanley or some non-league team, telling your teammates how you used to share a changing room with guys like Roy Keane and Ruud van Nistelrooy rather than being out there playing with us.’ And the kid – you could see it – he was broken. But he went on to play for Scotland and had a good career in the Scottish Premier League.

Yes, Roy could be very cutting. I remember he said something to me after we lost 2–0 to Liverpool in the League Cup Final. He was shouting at everyone and he turned on me: ’30 fucking million? Well, you ain’t proved nothing yet.’ I sat there thinking, why is he digging me out? I said something back like: ‘Yeah, you can fucking talk, you just keep talking.’ But he just kept shouting at the lads: ‘How can we fucking lose to people like Liverpool?’

I wasn’t one to worry about stuff like that. I don’t mind confrontation in the changing room – I think it’s better than not saying anything. If you can’t deal with it then get out. When I was growing up me and my brothers were shouting at each other all the time. At West Ham there were fights on the training ground; Leeds, though, had a young squad when I was there, and there wasn’t so much volatility.

When I went to Man United it was so much more intense. People were fighting and clashing all the time. Ronaldo and Ruud van Nistelrooy practically came to blows because Ronaldo wouldn’t cross the ball. It was around that time when Ruud was really frustrated because we were in a transitional period and we hadn’t won anything for a couple of years. He even took a swing at me once. But that’s how much the game meant to him. Ruud and I got on really well but this was just one of those times when he saw red. He had kicked Ronaldo on the floor in training because his frustration was boiling over, and then I kicked him. Next time the ball came into him I went down the back of his achilles a little bit and he turned and tried to swing at me. I leaned back out of the way and said: ‘Swing at me like that, make sure you fucking hit me next time.’ Then we got back in the changing room and all of a sudden he’s gone. But that was the professionalism. Nothing was ever carried over; no one fell out for long and then we’d be laughing about it.

But Keane could lose it. Even meeting with the manager he’d be quite confident. He said: ‘I don’t care.’ To be honest, the famous interview for Manchester United TV, where he criticised his teammates and which led to Ferguson kicking him out of the club, was quite mild for him. When I watched the video I thought, this is tamer than I’d heard him before. Nobody had seen him in public giving the lads an ear-bashing. At the same time, like the manager, I thought if you’ve got something to say your teammates, as a captain, as a professional, I don’t think doing it in the press, in the media, is the right way to do it. If the manager wants to do it, it’s up to him; it’s his prerogative. If you’re one of the team, whether you’re captain or not, I don’t think it’s your job to do that. But Roy was adamant. He said ‘I’d say this to anyone. I’d do it again …’

When he left you could see Fletcher, O’Shea and Wes Brown’s personality came out more. It was almost like they were able to breathe a little bit. They flourished and grew. We went on to be very successful and those three guys were an important part of that.

When Roy left Manchester United he was seen as having a ‘dark side’ to his character, but when he started appearing on TV everyone saw he has a good, dry sense of humour too. The frustrating thing was that you couldn’t read him. I used to think to myself: is he acting? He’d come in with a face of thunder and you’d think, fucking hell, I think he’s going to blow up on someone soon today. But most of the time, he was involved in jokes, messing about. We had a really good, funny changing room then and he was involved in most of the jokes. If anyone was to be laughed at, or anyone was wearing bad gear, he would bring them down straightaway. Roy could take it as well. He always used to cane people for doing photo shoots or anything like that. He’d say, ‘you’re a footballer – what’s wrong with you?’ On one occasion someone brought in a magazine that featured Roy doing adverts for ‘Diadora’ or ‘Seven-Up’, and Giggs absolutely ripped into him and he just kind of laughed it off.

I was surprised when he went on TV as a pundit because I remember him seeing old players on screen and the amount of abuse he used to give them! He even muted the TV so you couldn’t hear them. I used to think: ‘When he retires from football nobody is ever going to see this guy.’ But then he started appearing on TV every other week and he showed people a different side to his character.

So he wasn’t ‘Mr. Unhappy’ all the time, just a little bit of an unstable personality, a bit ‘Jekyll and Hyde.’ Every now and again he would erupt over something really trivial. And you wouldn’t
be able to read him. Sometimes I thought: Is he putting this on? I could never quite work him out.

Roy could be absolutely brilliant. I remember the famous game against Arsenal at Highbury. After the warm-up before the game Patrick Vieira punched Gary Neville on his way off the pitch. In the changing room Gary said: ‘Fucking hell, he just punched me,’ and all lads turned round. What you talking about?

‘Fucking Vieira just punched me in my back after the warm-up.’

The lads were already up. We thought: he ain’t getting away with punching one of our players! Roy said nothing. But as we’re standing in the tunnel, out of nowhere, he just explodes and goes crazy at Vieira and the TV cameras caught it all. That’s all folklore now but look at the psychology: there was no way we were going to lose that game after that. We won 4–2. That was the good element of his captaincy – Roy took responsibility full on.