Roy Keane: ‘I wouldn’t worry going into a tackle with Marc Overmars’

It is probably the most celebrated tackle in Irish football history, the crunching challenge on Marc Overmars which dumped the Arsenal man on the turf, seemed to rattle the whole Dutch team and certainly set the tone for a battling performance which would eventually see a 10-man Ireland beat the Netherlands 1-0 in a crucial World Cup qualifier at Lansdowne Road in 2001.

However, 16 years on, Roy Keane is still wondering what all the fuss was about.

“Let’s get this straight,” he says. “Overmars wouldn’t have been the toughest player on the planet. He was very, very good and very tricky but I wouldn’t worry going into a tackle with Overmars. I’d like to think I’d be slightly the favourite. If a player takes a bad touch and shows me a little bit of the ball, that was all part of my job. There’s no point in praising me for that. If I couldn’t dominate Overmars in a tackle, I should have been sitting in the stand.