Manchester United are secretly hiding a second MUTV interview with Roy Keane in which he criticised Ole Gunnar Solskjaer with such venom that Alex Ferguson ordered it should never go out on air.

Ferguson ordered a cover-up and thought he had managed to keep it in-house until details emerged last night of a tirade every bit as inflammatory as Keane's diatribe this week about falling standards at Old Trafford and the questionable form of, among others, Rio Ferdinand, Darren Fletcher, John O'Shea, Alan Smith and Kieran Richardson.

Ferguson must have had a deeply unhappy sense of deja vu when MUTV's producers contacted him on Monday about Keane's caustic observations as the same happened midway through the 2002-03 season.

Although United finished as champions that year, they spent the first part of the campaign chasing Arsenal and Keane was unsparing in his criticism, accusing his colleagues of lacking the desire and talent to compete at the highest level.

This was the first time Keane named names and the worst abuse was directed at Solskjaer, who scored only two goals in his opening 20 league appearances that season. The Norwegian, a cult hero for the fans, was castigated for the number of chances he had missed.

On Ferguson's orders, the tape is now thought to be under lock and key at MUTV's offices.

On another occasion Keane is described as having "lost it" when he saw Ruud van Nistelrooy combing his hair before an interview with MUTV at the club's training ground. Keane launched into a furious onslaught against the Holland striker, littered with four-letter words. The gist of his complaint was that Van Nistelrooy should be concentrating on scoring goals rather than "fiddling with your hair" to look good in front of the cameras.

MUTV officials were taken aback by his aggressive behaviour and Van Nistelrooy was visibly shaken to be told in such uncompromising terms that his performances were not good enough.

The latest revelations will increase the perception of Keane as an increasingly disaffected figure at Old Trafford since the 1999 treble. Van Nistelrooy can be an aloof character in the United dressingroom but he has never faced allegations about a lack of effort or having jumbled priorities. Solskjaer is generally regarded as being one of the more likeable characters at the club.

In the same circumstances that led to Monday's Roy Keane Plays the Pundit show being pulled and the tapes subsequently burned, MUTV's producers were so alarmed by the explicit nature of the criticism directed towards Ferguson's players they felt they had no option but to contact the manager and the then chief executive Peter Kenyon.

Between them they ordered that the show should be replaced with a club-friendly alternative. It was stressed to MUTV staff, some of whom have received £5,000 offers from tabloid newspapers, that there would be a full inquest if the story got out, particularly if the transcript was leaked. Then, like now, there had been questions about the apparent decline of Ferguson's team and the manager was becoming increasingly edgy about what his players said in interviews.

Ferguson had already pulled the plug on a show with Dwight Yorke, with whom he had fallen out because of the frequency of his appearances on the front pages. It is not clear what Yorke said but Ferguson was annoyed enough to order it was not screened. The manager also paid particular attention to David Beckham's MUTV interviews, most of which were heavily edited by the player's representatives.

There is little doubt Ferguson is unimpressed with Keane's latest decision to go public and that, having clashed in the summer over pre-season training arrangements, their once impregnable relationship has eroded. But the fact that Keane has done this before and is understood not to have been disciplined undermines the theory that it might precipitate his departure from the club.

The alternative argument, one that would probably be endorsed by the team-mates targeted, is that Keane should have learned some diplomacy from his first experience of being gagged - an episode United believed would never come back to haunt them.

The club are acutely aware that Keane, 34, still wants a new contract and, if