At a get-together to discuss a move from Nottingham Forest to Manchester United in 1993 Roy Keane tactfully let Alex Ferguson win their game of snooker. Had the midfielder been holding a cue during a reported row with the manager last month his intentions might not have been so mellow.

The estrangement between these individuals may explain the literal distance between them at the weekend. While the captain had a trip to Walsall with the reserves, the first team beat Urawa Reds in Japan.

Keane's exclusion has been put down to a hamstring problem and it never did seem possible he and his manager would deepen any division by admitting its existence. They need each other far too much for that. For two such short-tempered characters they have always been unexpectedly compatible.

In reality Ferguson and Keane deal with football and life in the same confrontational manner. Even during the dispute the Scot would have had no trouble in understanding the Irishman's viewpoint.

As Ferguson met Keane's alleged tirade about the presence of the squad's families in Portugal he must actually have had a twitch of sympathy for a competitor who could not bear such fuzziness and yearned only for a spartan training camp.

Accord might have approached perfection if the captain really did go on to call the tour of the Far East a waste of time, although Ferguson, now employed at the most debt-ridden club on the planet, could never be so openly contemptuous of a commercial exercise. The remarkable partnership between the manager and the veteran footballer will surely be resumed shortly.

Michael Ballack might eventually wind up at Old Trafford but Keane must still be a key figure in the year ahead. He always has been when the club is embattled, as he showed in what appeared to be a single-handed victory over Juventus in the Champions League semi-final. That all happened six years ago but only Wayne Rooney, with the energy of youth, played better in the 2005 FA Cup final than Keane, who turns 34 next week.

While it took Eric Cantona's talismanic panache to rid Old Trafford of its phobias about the league title, it was Keane who then went on to be Ferguson's delegate on the pitch. In their shared determination, attraction towards controversy and sporadic unreasonableness, they sometimes look like facets of the same person.

If the manager were to cut his captain from the line-up it would feel like an act of self-amputation. So flawless was the reflection of his own temperament that Ferguson went to extraordinary lengths to buy Keane.

Blackburn were flush with Jack Walker's cash while United were wedded to parsimony, yet he still persuaded his board to release a then British record £3.75 million fee so he could divert the midfielder from Ewood Park.

The alliance between Ferguson and Keane has generally been harmonious. In the captain's memoirs the invective is hoarded for Mick McCarthy and Alf-Inge Haaland. There is barely the hint of a grievance with the manager. Keane, having got himself into a dispute with a barman during a Christmas night out, depicts himself as the culprit when Ferguson was at his most antagonistic.

It is possible, of course, that the player thought it wiser to save any denunciations for his retirement but likelier that the two of them have genuinely worked well in tandem. Keane, indeed, has not even been a captain in the old-fashioned sense. He could never be mistaken for a shop-steward, relaying the grievances of the workers to the boss. There is more chance that he himself will give them a flea in the ear.

From time to time Keane even speaks as if he already had a desk of his own in Ferguson's office.

"We're not asking for miracles," he said in 2002, with the well-founded suspicion that a trophyless season was in the works. "We're asking them to do what they should be doing."

There is no other captain in the Premiership who would have detached himself to take such a tone towards team-mates. It was not an isolated occurrence.

"Rolex watches, garages full of cars," Keane once fulminated about United players for whom consumer goods were a more than satisfactory alternative to medals. Surely he was channelling Ferguson, whose working life began as a toolmaker's apprentice in a Clydeside factory.

At the end of the FA Cup final in May, it was natural for both of them to stand with arms folded, nodding towards the goalmouth and perhaps discussing the missed chances, while Arsenal waited to collect the trophy. There has been no other such alliance between manager and captain in modern times. The bond had better be as strong as ever in a season that may well put a terrible strain on United.

Guardian Service