ROY Keane is still nursing a bitter sense of injustice towards Alex Ferguson six years after he left Old Trafford and will not cave in to pressure from Manchester United to take a soft line on his former club as a TV pundit.

The Corkman received a legal letter from Manchester United's solicitors in 2008 asking him not to criticise the club.

But Keane, without a job and trying to maintain his profile, will call it as he sees it - even if it upsets Ferguson.who attacked his former enforcer in programme notes for the recent game against Wolves when he expressed disappointment about criticism “even from people we thought were perhaps on our side”.

“There was an angle there of trying to get the fans to look differently at me and I thought ‘I can't have that'. I thought it was ridiculous,” said Keane.

“I can hardly do the TV wearing the United scarf and if me telling the young players to pull their socks up is such a hard thing to accept, I ask myself what kind of world are we living in.

“I know how this works, absolutely. When I spoke to Alex about management before I left United, the two words he always used were power and control.”

“I understand power and control over people inside the football club, understand that 100 per cent. But not power and control of the people who have left the club.

“He's trying to have power and control over me but I left Man United six years ago.

“So I just thought, 'You didn't need to go there', but having said that, it didn't surprise me.

“If you want to question my mana

gerial record, listen, you could question every pundit's managerial skill in relation to his and we're all going to come up short.

“But I would also say that without players like myself, maybe he wouldn't have such a good managerial record because players who go down the punditry road, it's soon forgotten that we put bodies on the line for him.”

Keane has never hidden his feelings about accusing Ferguson of failing to stand by him following his abrupt exit from the club in 2005.

Keane also received a letter from United's solicitors asking him not to criticise the club after he gave an interview to a newspaper in 2008.

“People say [Ferguson] stood by me in difficult times,” he said.

“But he didn't when I was 34, not when I was towards the end and had a few differences with Carlos Queiroz.

“All of a sudden then, 'Off you go, Roy, and here's the statement we've done'.”

QPR manager Neil Warnock said Keane's remarks would fail to perturb his United counterpart.

“Do you think Alex Ferguson cares about Roy Keane, Joe Bloggs or even the Prime Minister?

“I don't think he'll have lost any sleep over it.”