Manchester United hero Roy Keane has never been one to pull his punches.
The ever-popular former captain was equally as fearsome and no-nonsense on the pitch as he has been during his post-playing career as a pundit. Just ask ex-Manchester City midfielder Alf-Inge Haaland, or anybody who has been on the receiving end of one of his sharp-tongued rants from the studio.
It was that same cavalier attitude that made him such a devastating player, as well as getting him into one or two bust-ups along the way. Even his own teammates were not safe, as Peter Schmeichel might testify.
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Between his £3.75million arrival from Nottingham Forest in 1992 and that acrimonious departure more than a decade later, there are enough glories and controversies for Keane to write a book or, in his case, two with double literary offerings from the hard-nosed Irishman hitting our shelves over the years.
In the rather conventionally named Roy Keane: The Second Half, the content from cover-to-cover is anything but, released in 2014 and sold on nitty-gritty details from an infamous falling out with Sir Alex Ferguson, which resulted in him leaving Old Trafford for Celtic in 2005 - plus many other tales on and off the pitch.
Countless more had already been told in his 2002 opener, which drew wide controversy for his words on Haaland and their feud. But there was one glaring omission.
Perhaps due to the timing, with both men still plying their trade at that time, Keane glossed over his old frenemy, Schmeichel, in his first book, which not so much raised eyebrows as dropped jaws with the dust yet to settle on a high-profile bust-up with Mick McCarthy at the World Cup in 2002 that led to him jetting home before a ball had even been kicked.
By the time his second autobiography had dropped, an old school tear-up with Schmeichel - held in a quaint Hong Kong hotel rather than beneath the Las Vegas backdrop befitting for such a heavyweight showdown - was pretty much fair game. If not a hazy memory, it has to be said.
When looking at these incidents from afar, between Keane and Ferguson, McCarthy, or Haaland for that matter, it would be easy to sit back and arrive at the conclusion that "bad boy" Keane had reacted and blown his fuse in the moment. But as Keane and former United teammate Gary Neville discussed on their wonderfully insightful Overlap episode, that was not his modus operandi or the igniting factor.
In reality, these bust-ups had been brewing for some time. They erupted to Mauna Loa levels.
Once again, that is very much what happened when Keane and Schmeichel decided to square up and settle their differences on one pre-season tour. Well, after Nicky Butt had filled in the missing details as referee.
"The good thing with me and Peter fighting that night - and it was his fault as he held his hand up and apologised - was that it was all fine. We were grown men in pre-season with a bit of tension in the group, which can happen. At the time, we were young men all playing to get into the team and for a contract. Peter wanted a fight."
Keane was rather measured when detailing that tear-up with Neville on the The Overlap, but snippets taken from his second autobiography were anything but, shedding light on what he claims had happened before, during and after their ding-dong tussle on the 27th floor of an unspecified hotel in South Asia.
"I think we were in Hong Kong... There was drink involved," Keane explained. "Myself and Nicky Butt had a night out and we bumped into Peter at the hotel reception desk. It was about two in the morning. We said a few words to one another, a bit of banter, a bit of stick. I went up to Nicky's room for some room service, had a sandwich, got up to go... Peter was waiting for me, outside the room.
"He said; 'I've had enough of you. It's time we sorted this out'. So I said; 'Okay'. And we had a fight. It felt like ten minutes. There was a lot of noise. Peter's a big lad."
That was that, as they say, but mystery surrounded the ins and outs for years in the immediate aftermath, initially resulting in some hairdryer treatment from their legendary manager - while Schmeichel was still sporting a black eye and Keane nursing a sore finger from the hand throwing.
As the story goes, United promptly headed to their next destination with Schmeichel donning sunglasses. As luck would have it, those two were paired together for a press conference upon landing - with Keane still not too sure about the finer details from room-service rumble!
"Nicky Butt had been filling me in on what had happened. Butty had refereed the fight. Anyway, Peter had grabbed me, I'd head-butted him, we'd been fighting for ages. At the press conference, Peter took his sunglasses off. He had a black eye. The questions came at him.
"'Oh, Peter, what happened to your eye'? He said: 'I just got an elbow at training'. And that was the end of it. The tour finished eight or nine days later and nobody said anything - none of the staff, nobody. My hand recovered and Peter's black eye had faded."
Well, it was not quite the end. Ferguson pulled Keane and Schmeichel into his office upon their return to the UK for some Fergie time and the classic hairdryer treatment. Schmeichel took responsibility for the night in question, but the origin of their fragile relationship has not exactly been pinpointed, although there are one or two theories with some more plausible than others.
As the saying goes, there are usually two sides to every story. However, with Schmeichel yet to tell his in such the same detail as Keane (with a little help from Butt), that has magnified the intrigue. Getting the lowdown on player fights strikes a chord with supporters as it brings them that bit closer to what really goes on behind the scenes and what, at times, underlines the almost primitive nature that is, or at least was, professional sport.
You can imagine it happening each and every season on training grounds up and down the country, perhaps even sometimes over the most simple and futile things. But this was not your everyday scrap.
"I had a fight with Pally [Gary Pallister] in Marbella," revealed Keane on the Overlap episode. "I was with Pally a few weeks ago, great guy! It [the fight with Schmeichel] had been brewing like it had been with Fergie. It does not just kick off. There's tension there."
Tension and trophies. For all the drama that conflict (physical and otherwise) between two key players might have created - not to mention ones with booming and seemingly clashing personalities - it never did get in the way with United utterly dominant in their collective time at the club, and for the foreseeable future after.
For six years, between Keane's arrival to Schmeichel's departure, they strode out the dressing room as teammates on 199 occasions, culminating in four Premier League titles, three FA Cups and the 1999 Champions League during a truly historic season in which they got their hands on the lot, including each other.
"I vaguely remember Bobby Charlton opening the door and seeing me and Peter; I bet he was thinking f*****g hell! But I think we won the league that year, so it helped." Help it certainly did, with drinks downed following that night at the Nou Camp tasting sweeter than the ones which had fuelled an infamous punch-up only months earlier.
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