Former captain was an Arsenal nemesis during his playing days and was appalled at how little United did to try and stop them on Sunday
: Getty Images/Robbie Jay Barratt
From this Friday, on Amazon Prime, we will be able to watch 99, a three-part documentary series on Manchester United’s Treble. Everyone who was there seems to be involved, giving their memories of a hectic few days in May, 25 years ago. Except for one glaring absentee. According to the show’s producer – a certain David Beckham – Roy Keane refused to participate because he prefers not to look back on a time that, due to his enforced absence from the Champions League final that was the culmination of the historic threesome, is shrouded in personal trauma.
Mind, you would have thought he’d be used to that by now, given his job these days seems to consist of nothing but embracing misery. Almost every game on Sky sees the former United captain fuming about the state of the club where he won so much. And here on Sunday afternoon he was again, obliged to analyse a critical moment at the business end of the Premier League season. The disappointment for him was that United were only peripheral to it. And the further bad news was that the side who are still in contention, intent, as his colleague Peter Drury put it, on going all the way, are Arsenal.
Yes, it is the very team that, when he led United to victory after victory, most raised his hackles, against whom he embarked on a one-man campaign of terror, who are in with a chance of lifting the title. And to rub salt in his ever widening mental wounds, the wretched news after spending the afternoon in the Sky studio at Old Trafford was that his old team did so little to stop the old enemy progressing.
“I bet Arsenal could not believe how bad United were,” he said after the visitors had won 1-0. “Whatever bit of possession they had, they wasted. Remember the great players they have had here, then you see this. The lack of quality, people making mistakes, falling over, no one making demands of each other, no one calling each other out. That United team there…”
And he paused for a moment to find the appropriate words as he shook his head.
“So bad.”
: Manchester United/Ash Donelon
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