Free The Second Half by Roddy Doyle, Roy Keane

game, we’d moved up to second, behind Chelsea.
    I scored in our next game, a win against Birmingham. It was my fiftieth League goal. Scoring a goal – the best feeling ever. The jubilation. It was nice to remember where the back of the net was. We beat City and Portsmouth. We were still second.

    We’d had to qualify for the Champions League group stages, because we’d finished third in the Premiership the season before. We got past Dynamo Bucharest, when I fractured my ribs. We were drawn with Sparta Prague, Fenerbahçe and Lyon. I didn’t play in either of the Fenerbahçe games. This probably marked the start of my accepting that I wouldn’t be playing in every game. I was part of the squad rotation, and it took a bit of getting used to. I was fine about missing certain games, but not the big ones. We ended up second in the group, behind Lyon, although we’d drawn with them away and had beaten them at home. But Fenerbahçe beat us 3–0 in the last game, so we finished two points behind Lyon and drew Milan in the next round.
    They beat us twice, 1–0. In the home leg, Roy Carroll couldn’thold on to a shot. It wasn’t a bad, bad mistake, but Hernán Crespo got to it; like all good strikers, he was sniffing out the chance. He scored again in the second leg. Milan were a top team then. There was no shame in going out to a team that had Nesta, Maldini, Pirlo, and Kaká in it.
    We weren’t quite there yet; we’d slipped behind – just a bit. The panic button would have been pressed if Fenerbahçe had knocked us out, but not Milan.
    Bill Beswick made the point: ‘Sport is all about disappointment.’ It’s about dealing with the disappointments. It’s not the highs. There are so few of them. It’s the defeats, the injuries. Great careers carry massive disappointments. It’s how you cope with them. You have to look forward, home in on the positives. Take the positive out of every negative. Look to the next game.
    But it’s difficult. It was one of my biggest weaknesses. Dealing with the disappointment, and the self-loathing that comes with it. I didn’t get over it quickly. I couldn’t. I’m not sure that the greatest sports psychologist in the world, working with me twenty-four hours a day, would have had much of an impact.
    But I am open-minded about sports psychology. Bill worked at Sunderland when I was manager there. But it was always optional. I think that’s very important. Whether it’s yoga or diet, it shouldn’t be like school. The message at United was always that Bill was there if we wanted him.
    I would speak to Bill about the sending-offs and the rage, and he’d say, ‘Your first target is to stay on the pitch for ninety minutes.’ I appreciated that; it was common sense. It was one of the best pieces of advice I’d been given. I’d been advised before to count to ten. That was never going to work for me. ‘Just a second, I’m angry – one – two—’ So Bill’s advice was good, very practical. And towards the end of my career, he nudged me towards ideas that were helpful.
    I watched the 2005 Champions League final in Dubai, at about two o’clock in the morning. It was the mad game, AC Milan against Liverpool. I never had a hatred for Liverpool, although I wasn’t exactly jumping up and down on the balcony when they won. I remember thinking, ‘Milan, you fuckin’ idiots’, when they threw it away.

    We had a dip in form in the League – two draws, two losses, two wins. If you know you’re not going to win the League, you lose your edge a little bit. It went back to the first game of the season, when Chelsea beat us. They went from strength to strength and we were always just behind them. We finished third, behind Arsenal. Chelsea had won a record number of points and were already the champions when they came to Old Trafford. We had to applaud them on to the pitch. I didn’t like that. I’m not a big fan of that ritual, even when other teams had to applaud us. The applause