Keane was on punditry duty for the game.
Roy Keane and Cristiano Ronaldo shared a pitch-side moment ahead of Manchester United versus Liverpool on Monday night.
Ronaldo dropped to the bench for the Premier League clash, while Keane was on punditry duty at Old Trafford.
The former teammates shared a few words ahead of kick-off.
Roy Keane and Cristiano Ronaldo share pitch-side moment.
Keane, Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher were previewing the match for Sky Sports between Liverpool and Man United when Ronaldo came over to the trio.
The Portugal captain first spoke with his former teammate Neville before sharing a few words with Keane.
“You have a good colour, where have you been?” Ronaldo asked the former Man United captain.
“You’re on the bench,” Keane replied.
Cristiano Ronaldo gatecrashes #MNF whilst Roy Keane is talking about him 👀 pic.twitter.com/FIxOX0YRS8
— Football Daily (@footballdaily) August 22, 2022
“What do you want me to do?!” Ronaldo said.
“Get into the team!” Keane said, before wishing his former teammate well as Ronaldo returned to his warm-up.
“I was totally blanked!” Carragher joked. Ronaldo brushed past the Sky Sports pundit after greeting Neville and before speaking to Keane.
Keane and Ronaldo.
Keane and Ronaldo were teammates at Old Trafford between August 2003, when the Portuguese forward first arrived at Old Trafford, and November 2005, when the Irishman left the club.
In his second autobiography, Keane spoke about his first impressions of Ronaldo and praised the former Real Madrid forward.
“I liked the lad straightaway. He had a nice presence about him, and a good attitude,” Keane recounted in The Second Half.
“What impressed me most was that he’d been given the option of staying in Lisbon for another year, on loan, but he said no; he’d come over to Manchester straightaway. I thought it was a good, brave decision – because he was only seventeen.
“After the first few days, watching him train, my reaction was, ‘This lad is going to be one of the world’s greatest players.’ I didn’t say it publicly, because I’d always be wary of building a player up too early – or knocking him down.
“He looked like a player. You have to look the part, and he did. Zidane looked like a player – and Ronaldo looked like a player. The shape, the body language – they were there. A bit of arrogance, too. But he’d a nice way about him; he was very likeable. We forget that he was very heavily criticised when he first came on the scene.
‘He was going down too quickly when tackled, his final product wasn’t good enough. But – again – he was only seventeen, a kid. I was playing youth football for Rockmount, in Cork, at that age. He was amazing. He was immediately one of the hardest-working players at United. Most of the players I knew worked hard, but Ronaldo had the talent on top of the work rate.”
Related links.
- Roy Keane creases up Jurgen Klopp with classic call-back remark.
- Erik ten Hag makes tough but necessary calls as Cristiano Ronaldo and Harry Maguire dropped.
- “He was brilliant” – Gary Neville on the most underrated player in Premier League history.
Rio Ferdinand speaks about why Manchester United won’t let Cristiano Ronaldo leave the club this summer.
