Gibson: Sorry Roy, Fergie’s alright by me
By Brendan O’Brien
Darron Gibson and Roy Keane both left Old Trafford during Alex Ferguson’s time in charge of Manchester United, but the Derry man doesn’t go along with his Cork counterpart’s description of their old boss as ruthless.
The younger of the Irish midfielders made his debut for United in October of 2005, less than a week before Keane’s acrimonious departure, before ultimately following him out the exit door in January 2012 when he signed for Everton.
Highly-rated as a youngster with United, Gibson never lived up that promise and had fallen well down the pecking order by the time he left, but he had no desire to add to the criticisms aimed at Ferguson by Keane in his latest book.
“Different players have different views,” he said when asked about Keane’s description of Ferguson as ruthless. “Obviously Roy saw it a different way than I saw it. But Roy was there an awful lot longer than I was.”
He added: “Obviously Sir Alex brought me in and gave me a chance so I’ve a lot to be thankful to him for. Roy Keane was my idol growing up watching football. They were big influences on my career and it’s nice to be working with one now.”
For Gibson, it must be nice to be working with anybody that isn’t a physiotherapist. Only now does he feel fully match fit after a 10-month lay-off caused by the serious knee injury he picked up on Ireland duty late last year.
Roberto Martinez has taken a softly-softly approach to his return to arms, with the player featuring in only four of Everton’s 10 games thus far this season and with just six minutes of Premier League action in total, against Crystal Palace, banked.
Still, two 90-minute outings in the last two-and-a-half weeks, against Swansea in the Capital One Cup and Krasnodar in the Europa League, represents progress and he is adamant that it is performances not just appearances that are his focus now.
“It’s been hard. Coming back and having to fight for my place has been hard. I knew I would have to fight for it, but I didn’t realise mentally it would be so tough. But I’m gonna keep pushing, keep going until I’m starting.”
Martin O’Neill may well be more eager to thrust the midfielder back into the fray, given the absence of club team-mate James McCarthy from the Ireland squad to take on Gibraltar on Saturday and Germany three days later.
The Republic’s opening Group D performance away to Georgia was criticised heavily despite the win, but the side at least demonstrated a determination to play football on the deck again after the Trapattoni era and that should suit a man of Gibson’s talents.
That said, it is a two-game stretch that will ask very different questions of the players who will face a side of unranked nobodies at home before then taking on the world champions on their own turf.
“It might seem strange from your point of view, but not from our point of view. It is just two games and we have to get results from both games. We aren’t really thinking about one team being better than the other. It is about Saturday and then Tuesday.
“I’m sure we’ll do the same thing leading up to Saturday’s game as we will leading up to Tuesday’s game. We will go through how they play, how they defend set-pieces, how they attack set-pieces and we’ll deal with it the same way.”
Gibson will need little instruction on the Germans, who count his former United club-mate and goalkeeper Ron-Robert Zieler in their squad, given he watched pretty much every game of last summer’s World Cup.
And he availed of the opportunity to dig a little deeper a month ago when he spoke to another former United colleague, Darren Fletcher, about Scotland’s narrow 2-1 defeat to Joachim Low’s side in Dortmund.
“He said they can be beat,” Gibson of Fletcher.
“Maybe they just played well or Germany played bad, I don’t know, but we are going to go into the game focused and try to get something out of it.”
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