Gerrard/Keano:
"If you were looking for the player you would replace Keane with, it’s Gerrard, without question. He has become the most influential player in England, bar none.”
“More than Vieira?” “More than Vieira. Absolutely more than Vieira.”
“Why?” “I think he does more for his team than Vieira does for his. Not that Vieira lacks anything — he doesn’t. To me, Gerrard is a Keane; he is now where Keane was when Roy came to us in 1994. When the ball is in their penalty area, he is right there, round their penalty area; when it is in his team’s penalty area, he is back there. Look at the levels Gerrard has taken his team to this season and what he has done for the team. It has been quite phenomenal. I’ve watched him quite a lot, and everywhere the ball is, he seems to be there.
“You get the odd player who comes along from time to time who just elevates himself above everyone, and he’s elevated himself above all the Liverpool players, who themselves are not insubstantial. I think the boy is only 24 or 25. He’s got that unbelievable engine, desire, determination.”
Luis Figo moved from Barcelona to Real Madrid. . .
He laughs. “I think there’s a matter of 1,000 miles between Barcelona and Madrid. The 35 miles between Liverpool and Manchester make it a bit more complicated. Actually, quite a lot more complicated.”
Over-protection of Keano:
Shakespeare once wrote, “The old doth fall when the young rise”. Simple, but true. And what of Keane, the player who has best embodied Ferguson’s attitude on the pitch? They have been kindred spirits for more than a decade, setting ever higher standards for the team. When United players now say “that is not acceptable at this club”, they mean primarily that it is not acceptable to Keane and Ferguson. What is their relationship based on? Professional respect? How much personal affection? Keane speaks of “not wanting to let the manager down”. But how will the manager handle the player he most admires as the leaves turn to rust and begin to fall?
“I’m not sure I did the right thing with Roy this season,” he says. “I overprotected him. You can underestimate Roy Keane. We had a chat last summer, and obviously we discussed his situation. There were some problems, but it was his first year back after major hip surgery. What I said to Roy at the start of the season was, ‘We’ll monitor the situation, we’ll talk before games; certain games, we won ’t play you’.
“What happens? The ones I left him out of, we lost the points. Fulham, Middlesbrough, Leeds — three games, we got one point. If we’d won those games, we’d have eight points more. You know what I mean? “What we’re going to do with Roy next season, after he’s had a good rest this summer, followed by a good pre-season, we’re going to work on the basis of how he feels. Roy’s 33, but, Jesus Christ, there’s some players that are playing at 36 and 37 and doing well.”
And more on RK:
“He’s different because his expectations are different. They’re greater than everyone else’s. I mean, there are times after a game, we’ll be in the dressing room and he will put his hand up. ‘I was crap today’. And I’m there thinking, ‘Crikey, I thought you played quite well, but now I’m not going to say that’. But I would have been happy with how he played.
“You see the thing about Roy is, I can’t think of a game when he’s nae been an influence. There have been games when he’s produced a disappointing performance, but the aura, the presence, the influence, that’s still there. It affects the opposition. ‘Robbo’ (Bryan Robson) had that. Robbo was a Keane, a different mindset, but the same influence on the pitch.”
About Ferdinand:
“It’s dead easy to analyse our season, if you want to see it from Manchester United’s point of view. On January 17 we were four points clear of Arsenal; Rio Ferdinand decides to take his suspension, and from that moment everything changed.
“I wasn’t sure Rio should have done that. From the boy’s perspective, I can understand it. He wanted to move, because there was a helluva lot of pressure on him. The whole world seemed to be focusing on him. And once he began his suspension, it seemed to die down. So, in a way, it worked for him. He could get on with a normal life.
“In a selfish way, I would have liked him to have carried on. You would say, if he had not taken his suspension, we would have carried on fine until the appeal came up, and Rio would still be in your team. And I think we would still have been four points clear. I know football is not that simple, but for the first time in 10 years I was saying, ‘We have Bruce and Pallister again’.
“He and Mikael Silvestre were developing something together; composure, pace, aggression — it was good. I was quite pleased with that, and we had the best defensive record in the country. If you are strong defensively, you win leagues.” But Arsenal are unbeaten through a Premiership campaign, and the table, the final table, doesn’t lie. Ferguson’s pragmatism works like an antidote on the accusation. “If you go through the season unbeaten in the Premiership, you can’t be denied any credit.”