During their playing careers, Martin Keown acknowledges that Gary Neville would sometimes “rub me up the wrong way,” particularly when they were serving as England’s teammates and not simply in the well-known rivalry between Arsenal and Manchester United. The two men frequently faced off in pivotal Premier League and FA Cup matches when playing for the legendary Gunners and Red Devils teams of the 1990s and early 2000s. The national team experienced the same club rivalries, and when the players were called up for England service, the division between the camps was widely publicized. Keown acknowledges that the Arsenal players were annoyed by it and says the Manchester United players were a touch more haughty.
“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,” Keown wrote in his recently published autobiography, “On The Edge,” as reported by Mail+. We Arsenal players felt we should mix in with players from other teams, even if there was a part of us that appreciated their ability to stick together. Perhaps we lacked the conceit of the boys from United.
Dinner was at 7pm, but Gary Neville 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.’
According to Keown, Neville did a lot of little things that irritated him—some of which weren’t even that nasty or targeted at him—but they still went under his skin. The Neville brothers were extremely driven to perform to the best of their abilities. As soon as we warmed up, they would charge to the front of the group, and when the coach said, “Knees to chest,” they were almost unconscious. Fergie did a good job indoctrinating them, he added. ‘After the game, I made the error of walking into the United dressing room to congratulate them, after we lost the historic 1999 semi-final rematch at Villa Park. I turned around and left because Gary Neville’s celebration was so absurd—he was bouncing around like a crazy person.
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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