The Second Half (9 page)

So maybe it was just my immature way – or mature way – of dealing with it.

I got into my car and drove out of the training ground. I pulled over just outside and cried for a couple of minutes. I just thought, ‘It’s over.’

I drove home.

I kept thinking, ‘We could have done this differently, surely.’ All this trivial stuff could have been managed much better. Not just by me, but by the manager and the club. There was a picture being painted that I was some sort of head case. If you were on the outside looking in, you’d be going, ‘Saipan, now United – he
is
a head case.’

I was thinking about my family in Ireland. I knew what Cork was like. The news would be all over the place. In ten minutes. My family in Cork are big United fans; the effect on them was going to be massive. You’d have thought they’d have been used to it after Saipan. But my parents – it was going to be torture for them. All that media intrusion again. Outside my house. Outside my parents’ house. People going, ‘Oh, right, he’s gone off on one again.’ And I remember thinking, too, while I was driving home, ‘Ah, I’ve got the club car here – I’ll have to give it back.’

It was an Audi A8 and I really liked it, and I was going, ‘I have to fuckin’ give the car back.’

If I’d known more about the consequences, if I’d known that I wouldn’t be able to play again until January, I would have stayed. I’d asked the manager if I could play for another club. This was the man I’d worked for, for twelve and a half years. I’d like to think he’d have known his stuff, and I do think that he had a responsibility to know what he was letting me in for. Or, he could have said, ‘Roy, I’m not sure. You’d better ring the PFA before you leave here today.’ But he’d gone, ‘Yeah, yeah – ’cos we’ve torn your contract.’

When I got home I rang the PFA and they said they’d look into it and they’d let me know after the weekend. That worried me – my head was spinning.

‘Fuckin’ hell, Roy,’ I thought. ‘That was another clever decision’ – walking out without my position properly clarified. Not that it would have changed my mind; I think I’d have gone about it the same way.

I should have said, ‘I’ll train and Michael will do the negotiating. We’ll see how it goes. And, in the meantime, I’ll ring the PFA.’

I would have been a good pro, I wouldn’t have been awkward. I’d have done my training. But I also thought, ‘The manager knows me.’ He might have said to David Gill, ‘Show him that statement’ – to get my back up. He knew my character as well as anybody.

The hours were going by. I was at home. Michael rang: ‘Look, Roy, we’re struggling here. They reckon there are cash-flow problems in this.’

Ferguson has said since that they honoured the contract. But they didn’t. I lost a lot of money that day. I was on a million pounds’ incentive if I played in 50 per cent of the season’s games. I wouldn’t be getting that now. They said they agreed a testimonial. But that had already been agreed months before. There was a confidentiality agreement, but I wasn’t paid for that either. My silence cost them nothing. There was no benefit to me financially. They were going to pay my wages. But not in a lump sum, just normal wages. I’d have liked whatever money I was due up front, a lump sum, instead of still being on the wage bill till the end of the season. A clean break – that would have been good. But Michael was now talking about cash-flow problems, so I knew it wasn’t going to happen.

I remember saying to Michael, ‘Michael, I’m not fuckin’ interested in the money side of it.’

He came to my house later that afternoon. He was as white as a ghost; he still couldn’t believe it.

I said, ‘Michael, it’s for the best.’

And he went, ‘Well, I believe you, Roy.’

I had to put up a front, in front of Michael and my wife and family. I was the tough guy; I had to play the role that day – even though I’d been crying in the car a few hours earlier. I was trying to hide my hurt from my wife, although she’d have seen right through me.

There was also an element of relief; it was almost over.

I said, ‘No, it’s for the best.’

And, actually, it
was
for the best. Whatever happened or was said afterwards, the timing was right. We’d come to the end.

But I still don’t know exactly why it happened. If the manager thought I’d been out of line with the villa incident, or the interview, he surely could have said to me, quietly, ‘Look, Roy, be careful – you stepped out of line there, boy. You’re out of order.’ He’d done that before, when I’d been drinking or I’d been arrested, or after I’d committed a bad tackle, or when I’d chased the referee Andy D’Urso, There’d been times when he’d take me aside and say, ‘Hey, you fuckin’ crossed the line there’, and he’d have a go at me. I was his captain.

I think back to Portugal and I wonder ‘Was it that?’ The whole thing might have been a bit awkward, but I’d been looking after my family. It was no big deal. It was only a villa, the house we were going to stay in. As team captain, I’d always pushed for team spirit. Family get-togethers, the Christmas dos, match tickets for families – I’d sorted all that. Myself and my wife would go out of our way for any of the players, particularly the foreign lads.

Then there was pre-season, and Carlos not wanting me back
after I’d hurt my hamstring, and throwing the bib at me. Was I missing something? Did Carlos see me as some sort of threat? And, if so, did the manager feel he had to back him up? Carlos had been away at Real Madrid for a year, and then he came back. He might have felt that I was a bigger presence in the dressing room. But I didn’t go looking for that status; it comes with games, appearances, trophies. It just comes your way. But when Carlos came back, he might have felt, ‘Mmm, what’s this guy about?’ Even though I’d worked with him previously and got on well with him. But I was intelligent enough to know that if the manager felt that this was between myself and Carlos, then he’d have to back his number two.

I knew when I got into the argument with Carlos, when I said, ‘Do you make love to your wife in the same position?’, I knew he wouldn’t like it. To be honest, I didn’t use the words ‘make love’; I think I said, ‘When you shag your missis, do you change positions?’ I think some of the lads were going, ‘Fuckin’ hell, where did that one come from?’ In the heat of an argument, you go, ‘Here, you fucker—’, and say things you might not normally say. And why did I bring up the horse syndicate with the manager? I’d like to know. But I wasn’t going to sit back and be passive. You know – you fight your corner.

I’ve thought since that I should have insisted they show the interview on MUTV; I should have checked if I could do that, legally: ‘Show the video. ’Cos you’re tarnishing me. You’re making out I’ve said something really bad. And I haven’t.’

Apparently, I described Kieran Richardson as a lazy defender. But Kieran Richardson isn’t a defender. Some players, out of position, defend lazily; they don’t get back quickly enough. So the comment was taken out of context. I signed Kieran later, when I managed Sunderland. I was critical of Darren Fletcher. Apparently, I doubted why people in Scotland raved about him.

I might have said something like that, almost tongue in cheek. Sometimes you’re rated more highly in your own country than you are in any other. I always rated Darren and I used to push him. I think the lads I was really critical of were the ones I rated. ‘I think you’ve got a chance of being a top player – I think you could do better.’ There’s always a compliment in that. The players I didn’t want to speak about, they were the ones who should have been worried. I went to Old Trafford not long ago; United played Liverpool in the League Cup. The first player to walk over and shake my hand was Darren Fletcher. Darren knew that I would have backed him to the hilt.

A lot of the comments I’ve been expected to defend over the years, I’m not actually sure I made them. I’m supposed to have said about Rio Ferdinand, something like, ‘Just because you’re paid a hundred thousand pounds a week and play well for England doesn’t make you a top player.’ But I don’t believe I ever said that. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned a player’s wages in any interview, in my life. And, again, when we had that chat in the dressing room, Rio and Fletch were there, and they were the two I was supposed to have hammered. Fletch took me the way he knows me. And that was – I meant well. And remember, I said it all in an in-house studio. Could they not have just edited the stuff they objected to? If they thought it was so bad that it had to be destroyed, why were they fining me £5,000? Why weren’t they going, ‘A week’s wages for that. You’re bringing the club into disrepute.’ Or, why didn’t they just say quietly, ‘We’re not going to use it’? I think the video – the interview – was just an excuse.

It’s been said that I brought up the Rock of Gibraltar affair, the manager’s legal dispute with the horsey crowd – Magnier and McManus – at the same time that he showed the video to the other players in his office. But I didn’t. I’d had that conversation a couple of months earlier, in private. Somebody I met in
Ireland had told me to tell him, ‘You are not going to win this.’ I mentioned it to him. And I told him I didn’t think it was good for the club, the manager in a legal dispute with shareholders. I felt I was entitled to say that. He was just a mascot for them. Walking around with this Rock of Gibraltar – ‘Look at me, how big I am’ – and he didn’t even own the bloody thing.

I’d done an interview on MUTV earlier in the season, and I’d mentioned that, come the end of the season, it might be time for me to leave. This was after the Portugal incident. That might have annoyed the manager. He’d said before that when players got to thirty-two or thirty-three he’d discuss their contracts at the end of the season. He’d said it in a radio interview; I remember I was driving when I heard it. That irritated me a small bit. Because other older players had signed deals well before the end of the season, in the past. I felt as if I was back on trial.

As for the idea that I thought of myself as the manager, it was nonsense. I knew my boundaries. I came into work every day and I did my best, and that included pushing the players. That was my job. Leading by example. I think it was one of my strengths. Pushing people, and patting them on the back. I was the captain; I managed the dressing room. It was the job. When you become a manager and you speak to other managers, one of the first things they complain about is lack of that leadership out there among players. Nobody’s taking the lead roles. They want the manager and the coach to play the game for them. I didn’t. We had a good dressing room and we sorted out the problems; we tried to make the manager’s job easier for him. I worked with top players – Ronaldo, Scholes; Laurent Blanc, when he came to United. I knew how to treat these men, how to speak to Laurent Blanc, a player I had massive respect for. Or Darren Fletcher, a young Scottish lad; or John O’Shea, a young lad from Ireland. I knew how to speak to people, in different ways. The Dutch
boys – the arrogance of some of them. But I got on well with them. And we were winning trophies. There were good characters in that dressing room. Ferguson was clever enough to know that, whenever I was gone, there’d be enough senior players and leaders still there; it wasn’t going to crumble.

Chelsea were strong at the time. They’d won the Premiership the season before, 2004–5, and that was going to continue; they were looking even stronger. Ferguson might have been looking at the team, and thinking it needed a drastic change. He was rising to Mourinho’s challenge. But when you’re a player and a team like Chelsea come on the scene and – this is a personal point of view – you’re thirty-three or four, you start to think, ‘I’m past it. I’m not like the player I was.’ But Ferguson wasn’t an ageing player. He’d just have seen it as a challenge.

Things were changing. Rio had come to the club, and Ronaldo and Rooney – all decent lads, top players. But the game was changing slightly as well. I would make a point about the lads being on their phones and their PlayStations: ‘Come on, lads. This is a dressing room, you know.’ Maybe that was me being an old fuddy-duddy – I don’t know. They were younger than me. I knew I wouldn’t miss the players that much when I left. I’d miss them, but there was no one in there who’d make me go, ‘Oh, he was one of my best pals.’ Those men had left. It’s what happens with football clubs. Different characters come and go.

My leaving the club, the way I look at it now, it was definitely for the benefit of Manchester United. If the manager and Carlos felt that I was up to whatever they thought I was up to, if there was that awkwardness, then it was best for everybody that I go. And let me suffer the consequences. Let me cry in my car for two minutes. If it benefited Manchester United, so be it. I think it was for the best. Not from a football point of view, the playing side of it; I could still have contributed. I could look after my body. They
knew my body as well as anybody; I would have played fewer games. But from a club point of view, if they felt I had crossed that line – and, again, I don’t think I did – then it was for the best; forget about payments and statements.

When the paperwork had finally been sorted and I’d given back the car – this was three months after the last meeting, so I got an extra three months out of it; I drove some fuckin’ miles in that car; every little victory is vital – I went to see the manager and Carlos, and I apologised.

But now I kind of wish I hadn’t.

Sometimes you feel a justified anger; sometimes you feel you’ve done something wrong. I apologised: ‘Listen—’ But afterwards, I was thinking, ‘I’m not sure why I fuckin’ apologised.’ I just wanted to do the right thing. I was apologising for what had happened – that it had happened. But I wasn’t apologising for my behaviour or stance. There’s a difference. I had nothing to apologise for.

There probably isn’t a good way to leave a club. But is it always the player’s fault? It can’t be. A lot of people left United on bad terms. Good players – Beckham, Van Nistelrooy, plenty of other names. Deep down, I might have accepted that it was not going to end well. Whether it was the video, or if we didn’t have any trophies at the end of the season, or if my contract wasn’t renewed – it was coming to an end. I was getting older. But I think the best way the manager could have dealt with it, given his experience and man-management skills, would have been to take me aside, and go, ‘Listen, Roy, we’re having issues with you. But keep your head down, play a few games and, come the end of the season, we’ll say that it was best for you to go.’ Not in mid-November, when I’d been injured, and I couldn’t play for another team until January. It wouldn’t have been champagne
and ‘Ah, he’s leaving’, but they would have shown a bit of class. But they didn’t show it.