Clough was right to be hard on me, says Keane

ROY Keane will return to Nottingham Forest tonight admitting “the best manager” he ever played for was right to come down hard on him.

Keane will walk back into the City Ground convinced Brain Clough’s spirit still keeps a watching eye over the club he guided to the pinnacle of European football.

The Irishman spent three of his formative years working under one of the most celebrated managers of his or any other generation, and is eternally grateful for the education he was given, even when that meant finding himself on the wrong end of Clough’s famously withering rhetoric.

But as during his hugely successful time with Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United, Keane has few complaints about the code of discipline which operated there.

He said: “What you have to remember about Alex Ferguson and Brian Clough, to be fair to them, people talk about that side of it and they were very hard, but also very fair.

“Hard and fair is fine with me. Cloughie and Alex Ferguson were very hard with me, but I have to say when I look back now, generally they were fair with me as well, and that’s what I try to do with my own players.

“Don’t get me wrong, we are all different. It depends what time of day you might catch somebody. You might catch somebody on a bad day.

“But I look back at Brian Clough, particularly when he questioned a lot of my stuff – I had one or two incidents with him and I look back now to when he sent me back from Jersey for a drinking incident, and he was spot-on.

“He was just being fair with me. I was no angel.”

Keane, who declined to elaborate on why new signing Pascal Chimbonda was missing from his team at Tottenham on Saturday – the full-back is understood to have been dropped after turning up late for a pre-match walk – retains a huge warmth for both Clough and Forest.

But he admits he is not quite sure what his former manager would think about him having launched his own career in management.

He said: “I don’t know. I was young, I was raw in my time at Forest.



But he was a genius, an absolute genius, and certainly the best manager I played under.”

Keane put the finishing touches to his preparations for the game as West Ham defender Anton Ferdinand underwent a medical on Wearside with a view to completing an £8 million move from West Ham.