Who are the greatest players in Manchester United’s history? The Athletic gave Andy Mitten the task of compiling his top 25, and we are counting them down this summer, in reverse order.
He explains his thought process here.
On April 21, 1999, Roy Keane gave the greatest performance from a Manchester United player I have seen in a live game.
Juventus away, the second leg of a Champions League semi-final, following a 1-1 draw at Old Trafford in which the Italians had been vastly superior. Juventus were the best team in the world then, the ones United wanted to avoid after knocking out Inter in the previous round.
When Zinedine Zidane put in an early low cross for Filippo Inzaghi to convert, Juventus were ahead, angering Sir Alex Ferguson, who wrote in his 1999 autobiography, Managing My Life: “Inzaghi was more alert and decisive than our defenders. We should be above surrendering goals like that.”
Speaking about that Juventus side years later, in a Philadelphia hotel for a fanzine interview which was supposed to take 30 minutes but lasted 90 and included two arguments, Keane said: “Juventus are the best team I’ve ever played against. They battered us at Old Trafford in the first leg. Ryan Giggs scored late on, but we should have been 2-0 down at half-time.”
“Juventus repeatedly ripped us open in the first half,” agreed Ferguson.
They had Zidane, Edgar Davids, Didier Deschamps, Inzaghi, Gianluca Pessotto, Angelo Di Livio, Antonio Conte and Paolo Montero, a Uruguayan centre-back Andy Cole said was the hardest defender he ever faced. When Inzaghi slid in ahead of Jaap Stam to double Juventus’ lead on the night in the 11th minute, it looked grim.
But Ferguson had not thrown in the towel. “I was numb, but I did not feel that the match was over.” Most did. Juventus were on their way to a fourth successive Champions League final. United captain Keane, from Mayfield, a suburb outside Cork, in the Republic of Ireland, was also having none of it.
“The most emphatic display of selflessness I have seen on a field,” said Ferguson, a man who had been involved in football for around half a century. “Pounding over every blade of grass, competing as if he would rather die of exhaustion than lose, he inspired all around him. It was an honour to be associated with such a player.”
Keane played it down.
“I don’t necessarily think that it was my best game, but people have since jumped on the bandwagon,” he told me that day in Philadelphia. “But I suppose if you look at the game, the fact we were 2-0 down and the opposition, you might see it differently.”
Keane supposes correctly.
First, he cut the deficit in the 24th minute, glancing a David Beckham corner past goalkeeper Angelo Peruzzi after a spell of pressure. Ferguson’s men continued to outperform their rivals in the middle of the pitch, Keane and Paul Scholes against Zidane, Davids and Deschamps.
Against Juventus in 1999, Roy Keane gave one of the great Manchester United performances (Allsport UK/Allsport)
Beckham crossed for United’s first two goals — the second after 33 minutes, another header, this time by Dwight Yorke.
A minute earlier, Keane was harshly booked for a late tackle on Zidane. It meant he would be suspended for the final should United qualify. Keane did not speak to Jesper Blomqvist, who played him the ball before the challenge, for the rest of the season. Blomqvist, rightly, maintained that it was not even a bad ball.
At half-time, it was 2-2 on the night and 3-3 on aggregate, with United having the advantage on the since-scrapped away-goals rule — and the momentum was with the visitors. They capitalised on that, battering Juventus in the second half to win 3-2, 4-3 on aggregate.
Bayern Munich awaited in the final at Barcelona’s Camp Nou.
Next day in Turin, members of a 4,500 away following, we devoured what we could from the Italian newspapers. Keane had so impressed that he was awarded a rare ‘8/10’ by the notoriously hard to please Gazzetta dello Sport. It was the greatest game I had seen.
How was it viewed in later years? Not to Keane’s satisfaction, anyway.
“It makes me sad when I see players, especially ex-players, looking for that bit of limelight,” he told me five years later. “Please god, don’t interview me in 30 years’ time and talk about Juventus in 1999. I hope in the next 30 years I might achieve something else in my life.”
After playing 480 games for United (13th in the overall list, between ace defender Arthur Albiston and ace striker Brian McClair) and scoring 51 goals, Keane left in late 2005 amid acrimony with Ferguson that has yet to heal. He went to Celtic, but football was taking a toll on his body after years of putting it on the line for Ferguson’s United and he retired from playing seven months later at age 34.
Before United, he had risen not from an academy system but from Irish second-tier side Cobh Ramblers to make his name under Brian Clough at a declining Nottingham Forest.
Keane was such a force that United had to break the British transfer fee and beat Blackburn Rovers to sign him in the summer of 1993, for £3.75million ($5m at today’s rates), ostensibly to replace a 36-year-old Bryan Robson. He joined a team that had just won the league for the first time in 25 years and, within a few seasons and having overcome a cruciate ligament injury, became its most important player and captain.
Roy Keane won seven Premier League titles with Manchester United (Richard Sellers/Sportsphoto/Allstar via Getty Images)
He was a box-to-box midfielder who spoke his mind, sometimes to his cost. He departed from Ireland’s preparations for the 2002 World Cup in Japan and South Korea after a frank expression of his views about how their camp on the Pacific island of Saipan had been prepared.
United fans loved him. Keane always got stuck in, though he was sent off three times in just 14 matches in 1995. He scored some big goals, such as the winner away in a 1993 Manchester derby as United came from two down to beat City 3-2.
He spoke sense and was right in 2000 to call out fans at Old Trafford who did not do enough to support their great team. His two autobiographies were unflinchingly honest bestsellers and he led United to nine major honours, making him the most successful captain in the club’s history.
He was always looking forward, and it is sad he and Ferguson, two totemic figures in United’s history, do not see eye-to-eye. Ferguson dedicates an entire chapter to Keane in his 2015 autobiography.
“Roy Keane was a player of energy, of guts and blood, with a fine instinct for the game and its strategies,” the chapter begins.
“He was the most influential presence in the dressing room in the time we worked together. Roy took a lot of the onus off me in making sure the dressing room was operating at a high level of motivation. A manager could never be dismissive of that kind of help from a player.
“But by the time he left United, our relationship had broken down.”
It is a shame there’s a “but”, yet there could be one for an aspect of the life of almost every player in this list.
The fact is, Keane was one of the greatest Irish footballers and one of the greatest and most uncompromising players to wear the shirt of Manchester United.
Catch up on the rankings
