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'My hand was really sore and one of my fingers was bent backwards': the day Roy Keane gave Schmeichel a black eye

It's the most anticipated sports biography of the year and already some juicy snippets from Roy K...



'My hand was really sore a...
Soccer

'My hand was really sore and one of my fingers was bent backwards': the day Roy Keane gave Schmeichel a black eye

It's the most anticipated sports biography of the year and already some juicy snippets from Roy Keane: The Second Half have been leaked.

The Mirror's David McDonnell already has an advanced copy and revealed a flashpoint between the former Ireland and Manchester United captain and a team-mate who he is known to have had tensions with - Peter Schmeichel.

That fight left Schmeichel with a black eye. While the first rule of Fight Club is not to talk about Fight Club, that obviously doesn't apply to Roy Keane in this tell-all. Here's his version of events.

"I had a bust-up with Peter when we were on a pre-season tour of Asia, in 1998, just after I came back from my cruciate injury. I think we were in Hong Kong. There was drink involved.

“There’d been a little bit of tension between us over the years, for football reasons. Peter would come out shouting at players, and I felt sometimes he was playing up to the crowd: ‘Look at me!’

“He was probably doing it for concentration levels, but I felt he did it too often, as if he was telling the crowd: ‘Look what I have to deal with’.

“He said ‘I’ve had enough of you, It’s time we sorted this out.’ So I said ‘Okay’ and we had a fight. It felt like 10 minutes. There was a lot of noise – Peter’s a big lad.

“I woke up the next morning. I kind of vaguely remembered the fight. My hand was really sore and one of my fingers was bent backwards.”

Keane then tells how the fight, which was refereed by Nicky Butt, woke up Manchester United legend Bobby Charlton. 

“The manager had a go at us as we were getting on the bus, and people were going on about a fight in the hotel the night before. It started coming back to me – the fight between me and Peter.

“In the meantime, Nicky Butt had been filling me in on what had happened the night before. Butty had refereed the fight. Anyway, Peter had grabbed me, I’d head-butted him – we’d been fighting for ages.

“At the press conference, Peter took his sunglasses off. He had a black eye. The questions came at him ‘Peter, what happened to your eye?’”

“[Schmeichel] said ‘I just got an elbow last night, in training’. And that was the end of it.

“The first day back at the training ground, the manager pulled myself and Peter into his office.

“He knew exactly where we’d fought – I think he mentioned the 27th floor. He told us that we were a disgrace to the club, and that we’d woken Bobby Charlton up, that Bobby had come out of his room and seen us.

“Peter took responsibility for the fight, which was good. I admired him for it. But Sir Bobby could have tried to break it up.”

It wasn't the only fight Keane had with a Man United team-mate of course. One of the players he did like - Andy Cole to be precise - once told Off The Ball that he witnessed a scuffle between Keane and Gary Pallister in Marbella, an anecdote you can read about here.

In the excerpts revealed by McDonnell, Keane also talks about his thoughts on Rio Ferdinand's missed drugs test.

He also opens up about a pre-season row with his former manager Alex Ferguson and his assistant coach, Carlos Queiroz that set in motion his departure from the club.

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