Recalling Utd’s sorry Boro thrashing that sparked Keane’s infamous TV interview

“I've seen that happen before with Rio,” Roy Keane said over footage of Ferdinand posing as a smug Victorian gentleman having his wallet pinched by Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink.

“The defense is poor. Just because you get £120,000 a week and play well for 20 minutes against Tottenham, you think you're a superstar.”

The decision by MUTV, Manchester United's in-house media channel, to ask Keane to 'Play the Pundit' after their 4-1 defeat at Middlesbrough in October 2005 would prove to be one of the ill-conceived decisions in football history.

Keane, injured at the time, attacked his teammates with the subtlety of a Brian Blessed whisper.

“He should have saved that,” said the Irishman about Edwin van der Sar's attempt to prevent Middlesbrough's first goal. “That was salvageable.”

“He is a lazy defender who deserved to be punished. He didn't do his job,” Keane noted of Kieran Richardson, who picked a splinter from his backside and uncharacteristically slid off the fence.

Perhaps the most pointed statement, which would have sold like hot cakes at the time if it had been printed on T-shirts and sold outside Old Trafford, was: “I don't understand why people in Scotland are so excited about Darren Fletcher.”

“There was always a chance it would come to this,” Gary Neville said in 2018, recalling the day the United stars gathered with Sir Alex Ferguson and his staff to watch Keane's hastily pulled interview.

It was an attempt to clear the air. You somehow felt that throwing a box of live hand grenades into the room would have had a better chance of achieving that.

Keane stuck to his guns, especially when Van der Sar noted that Keane might have used a different tone. All hell was unleashed.

Ferguson wrote in his autobiography, “What struck me about him that day as I was arguing with him was that his eyes began to narrow, almost into little black beads.

“It was scary to see. And I'm from Glasgow.”

“By the way, that meeting was horrible… it was horrible, let's be clear. It's not funny. Honestly, it was terrible. You couldn't say anything,' Marcel thought.

There would be no way back for Keane. He was fined £5,000 and had his contract torn up just weeks later. His relationship with Ferguson has never healed, with both men presumably happy to take their differences to the grave.

Yet the match that pushed Keane to the brink has suffered collateral damage from his explosive departure from Old Trafford.

It might have been peak Middlesbrough under Steve McClaren; an expensively assembled team, often less than the sum of its parts, putting in a fine performance against someone from the Premier League elite – seemingly on a whim.

Two goals from Gaizka Mendieta, supplemented by strikes from Hasselbaink and Yakubu, effectively knocked United out of the title race before the clock went back.

Although United were truly dreadful that night in the North East, their shortcomings were accentuated by an opportunistic Middlesbrough who did not deserve to have their performance sidelined by soap opera Stretford.

Yet their opponents were in the midst of an extended funk at the time

United were at perhaps the lowest point of the Premier League era – under Ferguson, anyway – when they traveled to the Riverside Stadium over Halloween weekend.

United had finished third in consecutive seasons, 15 points behind Arsenal in 2003–04 and 18 points behind Chelsea in 2004–05.

Add to this the fallout from the Glazer takeover, which had taken place six months earlier, and the mood around Old Trafford was toxic. Chelsea were once again in the lead and questions were asked about Ferguson's ability to revive United's fortunes.

In Middlesbrough it took two minutes for the gloom to deepen. Mendieta left United reeling when he collected a pass from Emmanuel Pogatetz and fired his shot past Van der Sar.

The goalkeeper was celebrating his 35th birthday and when he lifted himself off the pitch, he looked as if he would rather be back in the dressing room eating a cake of excrement.

Boro's second also asked questions of the birthday boy. Once again Mendieta was involved, firing a 50-yard pass across the pitch towards Hasselbaink, who robbed Ferdinand of his soul before tucking the ball past his compatriot.

Ferguson, alarmed by United's lack of creativity, replaced Phil Bardsley with Richardson. Within minutes he had been awarded a penalty for a foolish struggle that suggested the youngster had mistaken the Riverside for Tiger Tiger.

Yakubu crossed over the I's and the T's. Back in Manchester, one assumes Keane was busy polishing his Gurkha knife.

You would have expected Ferguson to have turned on his players at half-time, but if their second-half performance was any indication, the hair-drying facilities in the away dressing room left a lot to be desired.

Yakubu made it 4-0 for Mendieta, and a late header from Cristiano Ronaldo did nothing to detract from Boro's victory. It left United 13 points behind Chelsea and loomed into the distance as Jose Mourinho's side disappeared from view.

Four days after the defeat, United were beaten by Lille in the Champions League and some players were left torn by the incensed support from the ground. Ferguson blamed his injured captain.

“You can expect that from the nature of the man, that is the personality he has,” he wrote about Keane's departure in his 2013 autobiography.

“But the reason was that I had to explain what happened. It happened so quickly. He criticized his teammates. We couldn't release that video. It ended with two young players being booed in Paris [in the game against Lille] on Wednesday.”

Keane has spoken of two regrets from that time: apologizing and that the show never aired.

Speaking in Limerick in 2017, he said: “I wish they would play this video, it's propaganda, 'we had to destroy it'. How do you even destroy a video? I left with my head held high, my actions were fine, I always felt that my intention was to do the best for Man United.”

Many United players have defended Keane in the years since. Wayne Rooney wrote in his Sunday Times column: “Roy was probably too critical of his team-mates, but I watched the video and there's nothing wrong with it at all.

'He said players can't pass the ball ten yards and they play for Manchester United and that's not good enough. Well, he's right.”

Even Fletcher, who felt the lash of Keane's iron tongue, later told the UTD podcast: 'It's something that's been bothering me for a long time, the fact that Roy Keane didn't like you and didn't rate you.

“But for me it was the exact opposite. I knew Roy Keane really liked me.

“He challenged me and was 100 percent hard on me, but that was his way of turning me into a Manchester United player. The personality and the leader I became came from that foundation and that education.”

The nuclear fallout overshadowed one of Middlesbrough's best performances of the modern era – but how could it not?

Especially when this Halloween horror show would be the straw that broke Keane.

By Michael Lee