Roy Keane saw two Man Utd stars smoking in toilets at half-time of Premier League games
Roy Keane caught two of his former Manchester United teammates smoking in the toilets at half-time of Premier League games, and his reaction was priceless.
Keane, 53, was known for his no-nonsense approach to the game during his time in the Premier League with Nottingham Forest and Manchester United.
During his 12-year tenure at United, Keane won 17 major trophies, including seven Premier League titles, four FA Cups and a Champions League.
His game was based on leadership and discipline, something he explained he took to extreme levels, during his 2013 book ‘The Second Half’.
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“The dietitian decided I was eating too much red meat,” Keane said. “I needed to cut back and eat more vegetables.
“I came home and went on the new diet, but typical me, the man of extremes, I went too far. My body fat went down to 3 or 4 per cent. I went too skinny.
“Mike Stone, the club doctor, did some blood tests. My iron levels were gone. I had no iron in my system. Mike told me I had to go back to eating red meat.
“I was gutted that I’d missed the game [against Arsenal], and all the fighting that went on in the tunnel afterwards.”
The Irishman also revealed that he and teammate Ryan Giggs went to a clinic in Italy during the off-season and did not eat for several days after recommendations from a doctor.
“I look back to the end of my career and I took diets to the extremes,” Keane told Off The Ball several years back.
"I remember I went to a detox in Milan, and I heard that they don't feed you for four or five days.
"I said, 'Surely they offer you a pizza or something?', they don't feed you for four or five days.”
But despite his tough public persona, Keane would sometimes let his teammates off with things that they shouldn’t have been doing due to their cultural differences.
The former United skipper claimed: "Fabien Barthez and Laurent Blanc used to smoke together in the toilets, at half-time. They were French – they smoked. If it had been a couple of Irish lads, I’d have been shouting at them: Yeh dirty b*****ds – get out!"
Keane claimed that he’d quit smoking at the age of 11 when speaking on The Overlap in 2024.
He explained: “82 World Cup, amazing. I remember we used to play football after the games in the evening. In 1982, I would have been 11.
"I was with my friends and we were playing football and we'd have the odd cigarette when we were about 11. [We were] playing and they went: 'Are you having this?' And I remember going: 'I'm giving them up. I'm giving them up. I want to be a footballer. I'm giving them up, lads'."
Topics: Roy Keane, Manchester United, Premier League, Football, Ryan Giggs
Luke Davies