EX-MANCHESTER United ace Ole Gunnar Solskjaer has said players WANTED team-mate Roy Keane to moan at them.
He claimed they’d be worried if Keano didn’t tear into them – as you feared he thought you were finished.
Ole, 51, explained: “The day Roy stopped moaning at you, you knew you were in trouble. It meant he’d given up on you.
“He never stopped shouting at me, so he saw something in me.
“When I saw him stop shouting at certain individuals, I used to think, ‘You’re finished, you’re done’. And they usually were.”
Ole said that he and Roy, 52, are still pals and that he enjoyed his backing when he was recently managing the Old Trafford side.
He added: “My relationship with Roy has turned out really well.
“When we played we used to have a few fights. He demanded 100 per cent every single day.
“He pushed the players and wanted to count on his team-mates all the time.”
Hot-tempered Keano has a long history of run-ins with former footballers and bosses, both from his playing days and now as a telly pundit.
That includes clashing with team-mates like Gabriel Heinze, who claimed that he was sparked out by his skipper shortly after arriving at the club in 2004.
He said: “The first thing you hear in English or in another language are bad words.
“He (Keane) was looking at me and he says to me: ‘F*** off!’ And I knew that was a dirty word.
“I stood up and the guy comes over to me. C’mon, I was only a kid. So I repeated it back to him, I said ‘f*** off you!’ Then I don’t remember anything else…”
Roy also had an infamous hotel bust-up with keeper Peter Schmeichel in front of late legend Bobby Charlton.
‘Tension’
Speaking about it on the Overlap Live show, he admitted: “When I was injured and I came back Peter didn’t want to give me the captaincy so there was a bit of tension between us.
“Good tension. We don’t like each other but I’m glad you’re my goalkeeper, you know what I mean.
“We were on pre-season, drinking as usual until three or four in the morning I said something to Peter and he was waiting for me outside of the room. I went back to Nicky Butt’s room for a club sandwich, really exciting stuff. There was no women or heroin, it was a club sandwich.
Short scrap
“I came out of the room and Peter’s waiting and he says, ‘I’ve had enough of you!’ I remember I was coming round and I was thinking, ‘You’ve had enough of me? Let’s get it on.’ Obviously we had a fight. It seemed like ages, but I’m guessing it was like two or three minutes.
“[Alex] Ferguson pulled us when we got back to Manchester. He was mad and said, ‘The two of you are a disgrace to the club and you’re going to get fined.’ He says Sir Bobby Charlton was on the same floor as us and said we were a disgrace, I was thinking, ‘He could have broke the fight up!’”
Other high-profile scraps the Cork-born ace has had were on the pitch with Alan Shearer, Patrick Vieira and Alf-Inge Haaland, dad of Man City goal machine Erling.
He’s also had run-ins with fellow Irish internationals Jonathan Walters and Jason McAteer, who last year called for him to settle their feud with a boxing bout.
And Keano fell foul of previous managers as well with Sir Alex Ferguson booting him out of United after he ranted on telly after a defeat when he was out injured in 2005 – three years after he walked out on the Ireland team at the World Cup in Saipan after a row with Mick McCarthy over poor training facilities.
