Former Manchester United captain Roy Keane has accused manager Sir Alex Ferguson of putting his own interests ahead of the club’s and revealed that the Barclays Premier League champions threatened to sue him in 2008.

Keane, one of Ferguson’s greatest Old Trafford servants, clashed with the Scot in public after he criticised United in the wake of their Champions League exit in Basle this month.

Writing in his match column for the following home game against Wolves, Ferguson suggested his team were receiving undue criticism from ‘people we thought were on our side’.

Now Keane has hit back in remarkably ferocious style, revealing that he no longer has a relationship with Ferguson, refused a club invite to attend a 25th anniversary dinner for his old boss and claiming the 69-year-old is not the great servant to United people claim him to be.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Keane has also told how the club threatened to sue him after an interview he gave in 2008 in which he spoke about the controversial manner of his departure from Old Trafford in 2005.

The former Ipswich and Sunderland manager said: ‘People say Ferguson always does what is right for Man United. I don’t think he does. I think he does what is right for him.

‘The Irish thing (when Ferguson took on major United shareholder John Magnier over stud rights to the champion racehorse Rock of Gibraltar), I was speaking to the manager about this.

‘That didn’t help the club, the manager going to law against its leading shareholder. How could it be of benefit to Man United?

‘It wasn’t and we know what happened. What was all that about? It’s amazing what happens. I look back at my relationship with him and I wonder if it wasn’t about me being good for him and good for the club.

‘People say he stood by me in difficult times. But not when I was 34, not when I was coming towards the end. All of a sudden it was, ‘‘Off you go, Roy’’.’

Keane left United in November 2005, having fallen out of form and fitness and having criticised his team-mates so savagely in an interview for in-house TV station MUTV that the programme had to be scrapped.

Three years later, having talked about this for the first time, he received a letter from United’s solicitors requesting that he publicly apologise and retract his comments.

Keane believes this letter was sent at the behest of Ferguson and cites it as the reason he declined an invitation from club secretary Anne Wiley to attend a recent dinner held in the manager’s honour.

Keane added: ‘The way it ended, I couldn’t have gone and sat there like everything was great. He (Ferguson) would come and we all stand up and clap. I couldn’t have done that.

‘I’ve got a son and I always thought I’d go back and watch some games with him. Apart from two testimonials I have not been to the stadium. I count my blessings to have played for Manchester United. All my family are United fans and I have no bitterness towards Man United. Please make that clear.

‘But when you get a letter from lawyers representing the club through your letter box then you wonder what it was all about. I rang (chief executive) David Gill and said, ‘‘What’s this all about?’’

‘I would love to think that I was more than an employee at Manchester United but maybe, ultimately, I wasn’t.’

No longer involved with a club, Keane works as a pundit on Champions League games for ITV. It was while fulfilling these obligations that he clearly upset Ferguson in Basle, the United boss suggesting when told of Keane’s criticism that his former skipper had not found management easy himself.

Keane added: ‘Believe it or not, that didn’t really upset me. I know what he is capable of (saying) and Man United had just been knocked out of a Champions League group they should have coasted through.

‘I would say, though, that without players like myself, maybe he wouldn’t have such a good managerial record because players who go down the punditry road, it’s soon forgotten we put our bodies on the line for him.’

It appears, though, that it was Ferguson’s subsequent programme comments that caused him to speak out.

‘There was an angle there of trying to get the fans to look differently at me and I thought, ‘‘I can’t have that’’. I thought it was ridiculous. I can hardly do the TV wearing the United scarf and if me telling the young players to pull their socks up is such a hard thing to accept, I ask myself what kind of world we are living in. But I know how this works.

‘When I spoke to Alex about management before I left United, the two words he always used were power and control. He is trying to have power and control over me but I left Man United six years ago.

‘So I just thought, ‘‘You didn’t need to go there’’. But having said that, it didn’t surprise me.

‘Ex-players and even managers are like lapdogs, nodding their heads. My attitude is that, like everyone else, I am entitled to my opinion but it seems you can’t have a go at certain people.’

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/foo...#ixzz1h12Kn69s

Well done Roy - sacked in a shabby manner by Man Utd I'm surprised it's taken him so long to come out with some home truths about Ferguson. He's not a lap dog yes man like Gobby Gary Neville.

I like the way he's raised the Irish horse rustler episode that was a shabby state of affairs. There was also the murky business of his son's involvement at the club and dodgy payments. Shouldn't complaint though this sort of stuff takes his eye off the ball and can only be good for competing teams.