Darron Gibson made his professional football debut for Manchester United in a League Cup game against Barnet in October 2005. Less than a month later his fellow Irishman, Roy Keane, 15 years his senior, left Manchester United after a glittering career to spend the final year of his career at Celtic.

Keane also left under a cloud.

Although a young United side dismantled a Barnet team who had their goalkeeper sent off after just two minutes, their return to league action that weekend saw the Red Devils suffer a humiliating 4-1 defeat to Middlesbrough which left United in seventh place and their form slumped to only two wins in their last seven games.

That week, Keane was scheduled to appear on the club’s in-house TV channel MUTV, but the drop in form turned the fairly routine interview into a outburst of anger. The United captain laid into his fellow teammates as well as some of the young players coming through at the club in an interview described almost unanimously by media outlets as ‘explosive’. So explosive was it that Alex Ferguson and Chief Executive David Gill had to personally stop the airing of the clip on MUTV and show a youth academy game instead.

Some of the details did find their way to the public’s ears, though. Keane named several players in his rant against the club’s failings. Rio Ferdinand, Alan Smith and Edwin van der Sar were all criticised by name. Kieran Richardson was even described as ‘lazy’ by Keane.

It was understandable in its way, though. Keane was the captain of a team that was underachieving to the greatest degree since the Premier League began. After six titles in eight years between 1996 and 2003, United hadn’t won the league for the past two seasons and looked unlikely to win it come May 2006 at this point, too.

Keane wasn’t used to such a dearth of success at the club, and United’s last league title now seemed like an age ago. The arrival of Jose Mourinho and Arsene Wenger’s invincible side had put United on the backfoot, and the winners of the past two titles looked more modern outfits than Ferguson’s Red Devils. The only trophy United had won since their last league title was the FA Cup in 2004, when they beat Millwall in the final.

It was fairly natural for Keane, the lion with the thorn in his paw, to lash out. These were unprecedented times for Premier League-era Manchester United, and as a result, Keane’s rant was an equally unprecedented reaction.

Over a decade later, there are shades of Keane’s harshness in Darron Gibson’s outburst to a group of Sunderland supporters whilst the Irish international was, by his own admission, ‘off his face’.

There are huge differences. Keane was the captain of one of the biggest clubs in the land and one of the most successful in English footballing history. He was a player who had been signed for a British record transfer fee, and after winning seven Premier League titles in his first nine years at the club, he certainly had all the ammunition to claim that he was worth every penny of the £3.75m it took to take him away from Nottingham Forest. United were clearly underperforming and also in danger of being knocked off their perch by Chelsea and Arsenal, both of whom were sophisticated London clubs who both seemed to have very bright futures ahead of them.

Gibson, by contrast, plays for Sunderland, whose abject performances in last season’s Premier League saw them relegated without putting up too much of a fight. His side may have underperformed, but the reality is that it wasn’t possible to perform all that much worse than they had done for the previous decade of bottom half finishes, finishing only as high as 10th under Steve Bruce.

Gibson’s rant looks like Keane’s only in so far as they were both unhappy at the commitment of their teammates. The Sunderland man’s own commitment to the cause is called into question by the fact he was drinking heavily just after a big defeat in a pre-season friendly less than a week before their season opener. The former United captain, too, probably looked less than committed when he walked out of the club to sign for Celtic just weeks after his tirade. Clearly, though, they differ in most other ways.

But where there is one more final similarity is in the fact that they both seem to be right about their teammates to some degree. Sunderland’s poverty of passion last season is an obvious target of Gibson’s ire, but Keane has been proven right by the passage of time. Although Ferdinand and Van der Sar were criticised, Keane never labeled them as bad players. Not in the way he did with Kieran Richardson, and not in the way he ranted about his side’s youth team graduates – possibly including Gibson himself – who ‘when they sign the contracts, they think they’ve made it.’

Darron Gibson is hardly cut from the same cloth as Keane. He is not as accomplished a footballer, nor is he even a top flight footballer these days. And whilst it’s clear that football is about more than the proverbial passion and heart that Keane showed in abundance throughout his career, it’s also true that without those things, you don’t have a hope. Especially in a league as tough and as long as the Championship.