Revealed: The truth of Roy Keane's feud with the Haalands

Departures at Manchester Airport, summer 2001. Alfie Haaland is on his way to Ohio, where a specialist awaits at the world-renowned Cleveland Clinic to perform surgery on a knee complaint.

A member of the public mutters something in his direction. It's football-related and presumably has something to do with the recent Manchester derby at Old Trafford.

The Manchester City captain turns. 'Yeah, I'll just get Roy Keane's studs out of my knee,' he says, still sore from the assault inflicted by his Manchester United counterpart in late April.

The surgery keeps him out for six months. Failure to recover fully from it effectively ends his career, Haaland playing just 48 minutes professionally across four substitute appearances before calling time.

Now Keane's ugly lunge, a straight leg spearing into the Norwegian and sending him cartwheeling, does not enforce retirement on its own. It harms Haaland's right knee and in Ohio, they operate on the left. A knee is dependent on the other one though and Keane hasn't helped matters. Haaland later puts having to hang up his boots months after that horror tackle down to 'a great coincidence', said with a large dollop of irony.

Keane's callous challenge halfway up Haaland's leg is retribution after four years of festering anger at the way the City man reacted to the United midfielder's own ACL damage in 1997. 'Take that, you ****,' Keane wrote of the tackle on Haaland in his incendiary autobiography.

A four-year feud at that point. More than long enough. But in this story, we are now 27 times around the sun. And the child born nine months before that balmy afternoon in Stretford, when the Keane mist descends and to hell with the wreckage, is bang in the middle of it all.

March, 2024. City 0-0