Unrepentant Keane should follow his own words of advice

"Another **** performance. We should have ******* won easily but we ***** about and when ******* Flo scored that was it. McAteer had been taking the **** all game, ran his ******* studs down my leg and then mouthed off. When I told him to ******* shut the **** up he mimicked some writing and said: "Put that in your ******* book". I'll get him. Patience, Roy. Right at the end I ran past him and caught the ****** in the side of the face. As I walked off, who should come trotting over but Mother ******* Teresa himself, Niall Quinn, acting the peacemaker for the ******* cameras. The gaffer sorted him out, gave him the full hairdryer treatment."

Taken from the expurgated paperback edition of "Roy Keane The Autobiography" – revised and fully updated. To be published April 2003.

Almost a year ago, Roy Keane was sent off for the 10th and until Saturday's swing at Sunderland's Jason McAteer, last time. It was eight miles up the road at Newcastle and in very similar circumstances; the match had been snatched from Manchester United's grasp, there was barely a minute left, and Keane, enraged by Alan Shearer's time-wasting, first threw the ball at the Newcastle captain and then swung a punch.

Two days later, Keane met Sir Alex Ferguson at United's training-ground at Carrington and said he wanted to retire. Just as he had done with Eric Cantona, another valuable, volatile member of United's squad, whom he understood on a deep level, Ferguson talked him round.

It is unlikely, but not impossible, that when United gather this morning to prepare for tomorrow's match with Middlesbrough, Keane will make the same offer. The only part of Ferguson's public comment at the Stadium of Light which proved wholly correct was that Keane would be "crucified" in the Sunday papers.

But in one of them, which featured a nine-page interview, he said he feared the emptiness of retirement which was brought home to him when Denis Irwin, another Cork man, but from the other side of the city to the bleak estates at Mayfield where Keane grew up, left Old Trafford in the summer. "I'm dreading giving the game up," he said. "I want to hang in as long as I can. Playing is the ultimate thing; there's no way to replace that and I'll miss the buzz, big-style."

The three-match suspension that will follow the elbow on McAteer, who had criticised his walk-out from the Irish training camp in Saipan, means he will miss the buzz of Elland Road on 14 September, plus the games against Tottenham and Charlton. Ferguson hinted that this might be the time for Keane to address the persistent hip injury which has been troubling him since the middle of last season with an operation. The United manager is unlikely to proceed with an appeal against Uriah Rennie's red card and his argument – that McAteer was not hit very hard – is, in any case, absurd.

The irony is that until he lashed out, Keane had again been the man of Saturday's match. As United squandered chance after chance he appeared increasingly frustrated at their inability to kill off a markedly inferior Sunderland side. When Phil Neville, who had already been booked, launched himself into another rash tackle, Keane raced over and laid into the defender, who answered back with a volley of his own. And yet, there he was, dismissed for ridiculous, unexplainable reasons. And, yes, he says, red cards do affect him. He does care, almost too much.

Usually, Manchester United have been the beneficiaries. When Paul Gascoigne received a booking that meant he would miss the World Cup final, he cried. When it happened to Keane in the European Cup semi-final in the same stadium, the Stadio delle Alpi, he drove United on to a 3-2 victory. "He seemed to redouble his efforts to get the team there," Ferguson recalled. "It was the greatest display of selflessness I have ever seen on a football field."

It set up United's decidedly fortunate victory over Bayern Munich in the final that Keane has cited as the moment when the hunger and desire started to seep from Old Trafford. When, in his words, the mansions and Rolexes began to seem more important and easier to come by than winning the trophy again. He has, in the past, vented his rage on Peter Schmeichel, Laurent Blanc and Juan Sebastian Veron and it is unsurprising that on United trips to Europe he is to be found apart from the team he leads. As Niall Quinn observed during the World Cup: "I've no personal relationship with Roy Keane and I never have had. None of the squad has." You could say the same for Manchester United.

In interviews given to support the book, Keane has almost gloried in the confrontations. Yesterday, he said Mick McCarthy, the Ireland manager, could "rot in hell" and that Alf Inge Haaland, whom he deliberately set out to injure in last year's Manchester derby and who has barely played since, had "got his just rewards".

Like Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, Keane's book rails at the "phonies" who surround him. Keane calls them "bluffers", men with no deep understanding of the game. Jack Charlton, Maurice Setters, Teddy Sheringham, and, above all others, McCarthy. Perhaps Keane, like J D Salinger, will regret his book. The Catcher in the Rye closes with the words: "Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."

Advice Keane, persecutor of bluffers and phonies everywhere, might have heeded.

KEANE'S RED CARDS

FOR MANCHESTER UNITED
April 1995 v Crystal Palace (FA Cup semi-final)
August 1995 v Blackburn
October 1995 v Middlesbrough
October 1996 v Southampton
April 1999 v Arsenal (FA Cup semi-final)
February 2000 v Newcastle
August 2000 v Chelsea (Charity Shield)
April 2001 v Manchester City
September 2001 v Newcastle
August 2002 v Sunderland

FOR REPUBLIC OF IRELAND
March 1996 Russia