The glorious 1999 season had a bittersweet ending for Manchester United captain Roy Keane.
Keane led United to an elusive treble that season - a feat yet to be achieved by any other English club side, as they won the Premier League, FA Cup, and Champions League in the same year.
The influence of Keane in midfield was undoubtedly a major reason for the success enjoyed by Manchester United in 1999, but he has come to look back on the end of that season with regret.
Though Keane put in arguably his greatest ever performance in a United shirt in the second leg of that year's Champions League semi-final against Juventus, he picked up a yellow card in doing so, which saw him suspended for the final against Bayern Munich.
On this day in 1999, Roy Keane sparked a memorable #mufc comeback away to Juventus... https://t.co/2UVNEjtDkL
— Manchester United (@ManUtd) April 21, 2015
Incidentally, he likely would have missed the final anyway, having picked up an injury in the early stages of the FA Cup final days previously which forced him off the field.
The first silverware came with the Premier League trophy, sealed in a dramatic final-day victory over Tottenham, with the FA Cup final following a week later, and the treble still very much up in the air.
Writing in his autobiography One, Peter Schmeichel - who stood in for Roy Keane as captain for the European Cup final - remembered an incident in the days following the Premier League victory which threatened to sour the good mood as United edged ever closer to an historic success.
Peter Schmeichel on Roy Keane in 1999
Schmeichel said that the team were allowed a day off after winning the league, to celebrate their success before looking ahead to the two massive games ahead that would define their season.
The United squad took to a pub in Manchester to celebrate, under "strict instructions to behave themselves."
Schmeichel revealed that captain Keane arrived a little worse-for-wear, and was subsequently stitched up by a scheme from a tabloid newspaper to cause trouble:
Roy did not appear to have got the memo when he turned up at the pub where we gathered in Deansgate, the last to arrive and very drunk.
As soon as he stepped through the door, Gary Neville said to me, 'Oh God, look at the eyes, this is trouble.'
In the next pub, Roy got into an altercation with a bloke and two girls. It was a stitch-up by a tabloid newspaper, with photographers waiting outside. We phoned Ned Kelly, our chief of security, who arrived quickly and calmed everything down. I went straight home. There was no point in staying out.
The club's press team and security worked hard to calm the situation, but it did not help that there was a media day scheduled for the squad in the days following the incident in Deansgate.
When manager Alex Ferguson found out about the incident, Schmeichel said he was fuming, not least because the squad had not immediately reached out to him:
The next time we were in was a press day. I'd never seen so much media at the Cliff and they weren't there to talk cup finals.
The manager got us in the dressing room and was absolutely furious with us. With us! First for letting something happen, second for calling Ned instead of him.
That was not a great day. The media event was a disaster. Here we were on the brink of history and all they wanted to speak about was Roy. We said nothing.
Luckily for Manchester United, it did not derail their coronation as treble champions. They would beat Newcastle United 2-0 in the following week's cup final, before winning the Champions League final in dramatic circumstances days later.
It remains an unmatched feat in English football but, for captain Roy Keane, those final few weeks of the season certainly had a bittersweet feel.
SEE ALSO: Alex Ferguson Felt "Ludicrous" 2013 Red Card Cost United The Champions League
