Former Manchester United defender Mikael Silvestre insists Roy Keane's shock exit from the club in 2005 was a total 'disaster' and that it was not the Irishman's fault.
Keane controversially walked out of Old Trafford in November 2005 following a controversial in-house interview with MUTV where he criticised team-mates while analysing a 4-1 defeat by Middlesbrough - which Keane did not feature in.
The interview, which was never aired publicly, enraged boss Sir Alex Ferguson and his assistant Carlos Queiroz and led to a team meeting to where the video was shown to the squad.
Silvestre though, who did play in the Riverside Stadium loss, believes none of the players would have had an issue with Keane's words, with the former French defender admitting that 'people would be shocked' at things said in the dressing room, but that Keane was the exception as he never applied a filter to his words publicly.
Silvestre who played 361 times for United between 1999 and 2008 insists blame could have been put on MUTV for not having better judgement in interviewing Keane over the heavy Premier League loss.
'As players, we knew that Roy was always straight with us and he would treat everybody the same,' Silvestre said via sportbible. 'He said, "what I told the MUTV guys, I would've said to your face," so it [the MUTV interview] wasn't an issue for us.
'You could almost blame MUTV for putting him in that position, because if you know Roy, he's not going to hold back. It was a disaster in the end, but it could've been dealt in a much better way.'
Keane never played for United again after storming out of the meeting, shortly joining Celtic after where he finished his career.
But Silvestre insists he even tried to bring Keane back into the meeting before the club captain left without saying a word.
'I felt bad to the point that when Roy left the meeting, I was the first one to leave after him about a second later because I wanted to drag him back to the meeting,' he recalled.
'I didn't feel it was the right way to end things, so I followed him to the dressing room, but couldn't get a word out to make him change his mind to go back upstairs to the meeting. I just saw him get changed and then he left.'
