admits Gary Neville used to ‘rub me up the wrong way’ during their playing days, not just in the famous Arsenal vs rivalry, but especially on England duty together.
The two men played in the great Gunners and Red Devils sides of the 1990s and early 2000s, regularly clashing in huge games in the and .
Those club rivalries did spill over into the national team as well, with the split between the camps well known when the players were called up for England duty.
Keown admits it frustrated the Arsenal players and suggests the Manchester United contingent were a little more arrogant.
In his new autobiography ‘On The Edge’ Keown wrote, via : ‘At England camps, all the United players would sit together and they’d come down early for food, so they often didn’t feel fully integrated with the rest of us.
‘Though part of me admired how they stuck together, we players felt we ought to mix in with players from other clubs. Maybe we didn’t have the arrogance of the United boys.
‘Dinner was at 7pm, but and his followers would always be down 15 minutes early. By the time the rest of us arrived, the United players were two-thirds of the way through their food. You were lucky to see them for more than ten minutes before they were back up to their rooms.’
Keown says there were lots of small things Neville did that wound him up, some not directed at him or even that bad, but just got on his nerves.
‘When we warmed up, the Neville brothers would go straight to the front of the group and when the coach said, “Knees to chest,” they were nearly knocking themselves out, such was their keenness to do everything to the nth degree. Fergie indoctrinated them well,’ he said.
‘After we lost that infamous 1999 semi-final replay at Villa Park, I made the mistake of going into the United dressing room after the game to congratulate them. Gary Neville’s celebration was so outlandish — he was jumping around like a lunatic — I turned around and went back out.
‘Gary did rub me up the wrong way with small things. When we travelled abroad with England, there was no assigned seating on the plane and Gary was always first on so he could take the seat right at the front with the extra leg room, even though he was far from being the tallest.’
The former Gunners centre-back did try and get his own back, though, and Neville found out about an attempt to penalise him for foul throws, although Keown denied it.
‘On the pitch, whenever we played United, I would seek out the referee and point out that Gary was taking an illegal throw-in, with one hand behind the ball and the other to the side, rather than one on each side,’ he said.
‘It drove me mad and I recently asked two top former referees for their interpretation of the throw-in law to see if he had been cheating all those years. One said yes and the other no, so maybe I should just get over it.
‘At one England get-together, Gary approached me and said somebody at our club had been complaining about his throw-ins and did I know who it was. I said I had no idea…’
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