Former Blue Pablo Couñago has hit back at his one-time boss Roy Keane for his comments in his new book, The Second Half. Keane was highly critical of the 35-year-old Spaniard in the chapter about his time with the Blues, branding the striker “dead lazy” and revealing that he almost attacked him after a game.
Couñago, who is currently playing for his ex-Town team-mate Shefki Kuqi’s side FC Honka in Finland, sent TWTD a message to pass on to Blues supporters.
The love and respect I feel for ITFC and its fans is something he [Roy Keane] will never feel.
I always tried my best with the Blues, I felt so loved there, Ipswich is and will always be in my best memories.
I could say lots of awful things about him but I don't feel right speaking about him, I feel sorry for him. That's why whatever he says about me I don't take offence, even though he's not telling the truth about me.
It seems like he needs to criticise players, managers and directors to keep selling books as he is not able to do anything else in football. It is a very sad ending for a person that was so big as a player.
As I told him once, I think he is a complete mess as a football manager. As he has said in his book, he wanted to hit me, but behind his appearance there's a coward.
I just hope he can find happiness in his life as, in my opinion, being that miserable must be very mentally draining.
With my best wishes to the ITFC family!
Coincidentally, Pablo spoke to TWTD last week for a forthcoming Ex-File. Asked about Keane he said: "When you are a player and go into management it changes a lot.
"I didn’t know Roy Keane as a player, obviously I knew what he did as a player, but as a manager I think he is the kind of person that thought everyone had to play hard and run, and just do as much as you can.
"I think in football that is important but when you are running like the other team and fighting like the other team the one that is going to win is the one who is cleverer with and without the ball.
"He is the kind of person who thinks he knows everything and he was never going to understand anything about what other people told him, about how we could improve another way.
"When such difficult characters go into management you have to do whatever they say or life is going to be difficult.
"He won everything as a player but when he tried to do it as manager there was nothing, he will have a chance to be a manager in the future because of what he did as a player, but not as a manager.
"After the Ipswich job he didn’t get another job for a while because the other clubs start to know what you are like, and I don’t think he will get success in football as manager because he’s not that kind of character. He’s better as an assistant because he doesn’t have to do anything and he can be kept to one side.
"When you are in football you have to do as much as possible and I always tried to do as much as I could but for me people that don’t have respect in football or have respect for you, you don’t mind if they are bigger than you or smaller than you.
"Ipswich was like a big family and there was a good atmosphere around the training ground and he changed that. There wasn’t that feeling, a good atmosphere to work in, a good atmosphere of happiness.
"I think back on the time I spent with him at the training ground, it looks sad, it looks really different and he changed things and they didn’t work.”
Couñago was sent on loan to Crystal Palace, then managed by his former Blues boss George Burley, in August 2010.
"It was a difficult moment for me because [Keane] was trying to get me out of the club,” he recalled.
"I don’t know if it was because he didn’t want me to have that good relationship with the fans, because he said to me he never understood the relationship I had with the fans, why they sang my name, why they loved me. I think it annoyed him.
"It was a big surprise for me, how it looked like he was jealous of that. For me it was like ‘what’s going on here?’, someone like Roy Keane, one of the biggest names in Manchester United history, and now he is getting annoyed because the people like me.
"In that time he was saying so many things about me, that I was training badly, that I wasn’t professional and I never said anything about that because I have respect for football. But he said things about me as a player that I didn’t like, but I had to understand them because he was the manager.
"When I heard him saying things like I wasn’t training properly and I wasn’t professional, that hurt me a lot because it wasn’t true. But I didn’t say anything bad because I’m not that kind of person, I always felt frustration because it was difficult for me.
"He was the kind of person who could have everything and was never going to be happy. They look so big and strong standing there but really they are weaker than anyone.”