Former Rangers goalkeeper Andy Goram’s brilliant story about Manchester United star Roy Keane snubbing him through his short spell at Old Trafford. Goram, who was a key figure at Ibrox in the 1999s, was a product of the culture of Ibrox and their support and clearly Ireland skipper Keane was not for recognising the former Scotland Internationalist when Sir Alex Ferguson signed him in 2001.
Speaking to the Anything Goes podcast in 2019, Goram opened up on fractious relationship between the pair in the dressing room at Old Trafford.
“We just never spoke. We had nothing in common. His beliefs and my beliefs are a mile apart.
“I met all the players in the dressing room, Steve McClaren took me around. I knew most of them, the Nevilles and all that, I played cricket with their Da.
“And it came to Roy Keane and you know, you shake hands. He just looked at me and I went, ‘There’s no point is there?’ And he went, ‘no’. And we never spoke for three months.”
In his autobiography, Goram went into a more detailed explanation about the experience with Keane and how their polar opposite beliefs led to them not exchange a civil word in their time together under Ferguson.
“Shark’s eyes. Dead, devoid of emotion, glaring at me. No handshake. Welcome to Manchester United. Roy Keane-style.
“The man who saw himself as the heartbeat of the Reds was giving me a message. He just looked right through me as the embarrassed Steve McClaren, the United No 2, tried to introduce the new on-loan keeper to his volcanic captain.
“From that second I knew there was no point in me making an effort with Keane. Roy had things he stood by, things that framed his life, beliefs he clung to with a burning intensity. Well, I had mine. What he did to me on that first morning at work at the most famous football club in the world didn’t faze me.
“He was a Celtic man, I was a Rangers man. He didn’t like me. End of story. Fair enough. After all, I’d done enough to make some Celtic fans dislike me in seven years at Ibrox.
“There was to be no handshake. Ever. The truth is we didn’t exchange a civil word in the three months I was at Old Trafford.”
Goram, who died in 2022, would leave Rangers at the end of the 1997/98 season after Wim Jansen’s side won the league and stopped the ten. Meanwhile, Keane would go on to retire at Celtic, albeit in an injury hit spell with the Scottish Champions.
Keane made just 13 appearances for Celtic, scoring once before he was forced to retire. It is a shame that fans were only limited to such a small amount of games watching Keane as games like this showcase how good a player he still was, even if he was in the twilight of his career. Keane would help Celtic complete a double that season with the League Cup and League, his last as a player.
Struggling to understand the relevance of this article… why would a supposed Celtic page be interested in posting extracts from the biography of a long dead, loyalist terrorist-supporting ex Rangers playing bigot?
It might make some sense if Goram had recently died, or if Keane was somehow relevant in current Celtic news, but neither apply here. Just more click-chasing p#sh from Lubo