“Don’t worry, I’ll find you!”
Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher’s back-and-forth exchanges, since they both came to Sky Sports, have often been more entertaining than the games on show. Whenever he is not on duty, too, you can bet Roy Keane will be watching closely.
Last season, as the Premier League resumed after a pandemic-related pause, Neville and Carragher joined us on The Football Spin for a chat, and they both had their fair share of Keane stories.
When Neville joked that he was going to keep a low profile whenever Liverpool claimed the 2019/20 league title, Carragher joked, “Don’t worry, I’ll find you!”
During their joint appearance on The Football Spin, Carragher and Neville spoke about how Keane peppers them with messages during big broadcasts, even when they are live on air.
“Roy’s doing good,” says Carragher. “He’s been on the football show a few times.
“We’ve been on a few more times than him, and we know when we’ve started the show well because, two or three times now, we’ve both got texts off Roy. That’s whether he’s happy or not happy with what we’ve said, early in the show, in the first hour or so. That’s quite entertaining, actually.
“Sometimes when the camera comes on us, we’re looking down at our phone and we’ve been caught out a few times. A lot of the time, that’s a text off Roy – whether he’s not happy with something we’ve said or something a guest has said! He’s still making his presence felt, no doubt.”
No better man than Roy Keane and what we wouldn’t give to see some of those text messages.
As that 2019/20 season resumed, Neville believed there was definitely room for a United midfield with both Pogba and Bruno Fernandes in it.
“If they’re played in a system where… ” Neville begins, before Carragher cut in with:
“If Pogba didn’t have to work hard!”
After a mock eye-roll, Neville continues, “In the last interview we did, Jamie said Paul Pogba wouldn’t make the Liverpool midfield, which was embarrassing!
“I think they both can play together and they’ll both have to be given the freedom to play. You would have said this sort of thing 15, 20 years ago – ‘Can they play in the same team together?’ Systems are more fluid now; football is more fluid.”
“To me, I would say that if those two players couldn’t work together in a midfield three, with a more defensive player in with them, Olé would take that as a reflection on himself. He can absolutely make that work.
“I saw a team at United that had Scholes, Tevez, Rooney, Ronaldo and Giggs in it that won the European Cup. Sometimes Owen Hargreaves came in, or Ji-Sung Park, but in the big games you had Scholes in midfield with Michael Carrick… if you’ve got really good players, they should be able to play together.”
At the end of that response, Neville jokingly thanks Carragher for being silent.
Carragher just smiles. As a former Liverpool player, he had greater prizes on his mind.
You can listen to the full interview on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcast, or Spotify.
