Vastus teemale \'Manchester United\'
Rod Liddle: Farewell leaves a foul smell
“I’d waited long enough. I ******* hit him hard. The ball was there (I think). Take that, you ****.”
By the time you read this, Roy Keane will have fixed himself up with a very lucrative contract at another club, I suspect. If this were an honest, decent world, such a thing wouldn’t happen; he would be shunned by every football team from Inverness Cally to Torquay. In fact, if this was a decent world, he wouldn’t get the chance to sign for another club because he’d still be banged up and certainly banned from the game for life.
Sadly, though, we are dealing with professional football, rather than Narnia.
Mr Keane parted company with Manchester United on Friday, with or without bellowing his favoured, anatomically peculiar, riposte: “Stick it up your bollocks.”
Sir Alex Ferguson, a man perpetually afflicted by thick, dense, clouds of hubris, had finally had enough. A little while ago, Keane had done what we in the trade call a “Blunkett”, by which I mean that he had slagged off his colleagues in public one by one, rather than slept with Kimberly Quinn or bought some dodgy shares. That didn’t quite do it for Sir Alex, but subsequent acts of typical petulance and aggression seems to have pushed him over the edge.
And when I say it was late in the day, I mean about four years late in the day.
The story of what this thug did to Manchester City’s defender Alf-Inge Haaland may be well known, but the total lack of meaningful punishment still astonishes me. To recap, during a derby game at Old Trafford in April 2001, Keane lunged at Haaland with a despicable and cowardly challenge and smashed the Norwegian’s knee to pieces. It proved to be the last 90 minutes of first-team football Haaland ever played. Later, in his autobiography, Keane admitted that the assault was premeditated and had been motivated by a foul that Keane had perpetrated against Haaland some years earlier and which had backfired.
You might well wonder why the police failed to take an interest in the matter. If I did the same sort of thing to, say, Patrick Kielty or AA Gill, I would be charged with occasioning grievous bodily harm, no matter how passionately I attempted to justify my actions. In this instance, the police did nothing — because we’re dealing with Premiership football here, remember, and the top stars are bigger than the law.
More pertinently, perhaps, the Football Association — resolute and severe when dealing with the little clubs; spineless, self-serving and compliant when faced with the likes of Manchester United or Liverpool — handed out a fine of about 11 days’ wages and a five-match ban.
Nobody — except Haaland and me — seemed terribly bothered by this leniency. If you are as thick as a plate of mince and forget to take an FA drug test, you get banned for the best part of a season. Deliberately maim a fellow professional and then brag about it, you’re out for a month. But in the normal world, which is the greater crime? Even the Professional Footballers’ Association couldn’t get itself too worked up. The chairman, Gordon Taylor, seemed far more bothered about the tiresome prospect of Haaland suing Keane. “He’s been badly advised,” Taylor remarked of the midfielder’s decision to write about the incident, as if the real crime was in admitting the offence.
“Roy will return from his ban a better player and a better human being,” the former Arsenal player Paul Davis remarked at the time, with evident sympathy. Well, um, not exactly, Paul. What followed was a campaign of spite and vilification directed at the palpably decent and likeable manager of the Irish national team, Mick McCarthy.
Decent, likeable — and, you have to say, extremely successful. But Roy eventually got his way and McCarthy was out — and so too, now, are Ireland, from the World Cup. Mick subsequently guided a very average Sunderland team to the Premiership and only he and God knows how: I hope McCarthy allows himself a wry smile every now and then. One can assume, at least, that Keane’s next contract will not be at the Stadium of Light.
We don’t have the money for him down at Millwall, thankfully. And I daresay our training facilities would not meet with his approval. Where will he end up? By now, you may well have the answer. He is a very good footballer and, let’s be honest, in the amoral world of Premiership football that’s all that matters, isn’t it? At the time of writing the rumour mill is grinding away: it could be poor old Everton, it could be West Brom, it could even be as manager of Ireland, which should ensure that they fail to qualify for the next World Cup too (people management doesn’t seem to be Roy’s strong point, does it? And can you imagine the press conferences?) There’s even a rumour flying around that it might be Manchester City, given Keane’s long-standing friendship with Stuart Pearce. Apparently, it was Stuart who taught Roy never to “show pain”, because it’s a sort of weakness. What a perfect irony that would be. If you were a Manchester City supporter, how would you feel about that? If you were Haaland, how would you feel about that? All of a sudden, “stick it up your bollocks ” seems an eminently succinct, understated and appropriate response.
Rod Liddle: Farewell leaves a foul smell
“I’d waited long enough. I ******* hit him hard. The ball was there (I think). Take that, you ****.”
By the time you read this, Roy Keane will have fixed himself up with a very lucrative contract at another club, I suspect. If this were an honest, decent world, such a thing wouldn’t happen; he would be shunned by every football team from Inverness Cally to Torquay. In fact, if this was a decent world, he wouldn’t get the chance to sign for another club because he’d still be banged up and certainly banned from the game for life.
Sadly, though, we are dealing with professional football, rather than Narnia.
Mr Keane parted company with Manchester United on Friday, with or without bellowing his favoured, anatomically peculiar, riposte: “Stick it up your bollocks.”
Sir Alex Ferguson, a man perpetually afflicted by thick, dense, clouds of hubris, had finally had enough. A little while ago, Keane had done what we in the trade call a “Blunkett”, by which I mean that he had slagged off his colleagues in public one by one, rather than slept with Kimberly Quinn or bought some dodgy shares. That didn’t quite do it for Sir Alex, but subsequent acts of typical petulance and aggression seems to have pushed him over the edge.
And when I say it was late in the day, I mean about four years late in the day.
The story of what this thug did to Manchester City’s defender Alf-Inge Haaland may be well known, but the total lack of meaningful punishment still astonishes me. To recap, during a derby game at Old Trafford in April 2001, Keane lunged at Haaland with a despicable and cowardly challenge and smashed the Norwegian’s knee to pieces. It proved to be the last 90 minutes of first-team football Haaland ever played. Later, in his autobiography, Keane admitted that the assault was premeditated and had been motivated by a foul that Keane had perpetrated against Haaland some years earlier and which had backfired.
You might well wonder why the police failed to take an interest in the matter. If I did the same sort of thing to, say, Patrick Kielty or AA Gill, I would be charged with occasioning grievous bodily harm, no matter how passionately I attempted to justify my actions. In this instance, the police did nothing — because we’re dealing with Premiership football here, remember, and the top stars are bigger than the law.
More pertinently, perhaps, the Football Association — resolute and severe when dealing with the little clubs; spineless, self-serving and compliant when faced with the likes of Manchester United or Liverpool — handed out a fine of about 11 days’ wages and a five-match ban.
Nobody — except Haaland and me — seemed terribly bothered by this leniency. If you are as thick as a plate of mince and forget to take an FA drug test, you get banned for the best part of a season. Deliberately maim a fellow professional and then brag about it, you’re out for a month. But in the normal world, which is the greater crime? Even the Professional Footballers’ Association couldn’t get itself too worked up. The chairman, Gordon Taylor, seemed far more bothered about the tiresome prospect of Haaland suing Keane. “He’s been badly advised,” Taylor remarked of the midfielder’s decision to write about the incident, as if the real crime was in admitting the offence.
“Roy will return from his ban a better player and a better human being,” the former Arsenal player Paul Davis remarked at the time, with evident sympathy. Well, um, not exactly, Paul. What followed was a campaign of spite and vilification directed at the palpably decent and likeable manager of the Irish national team, Mick McCarthy.
Decent, likeable — and, you have to say, extremely successful. But Roy eventually got his way and McCarthy was out — and so too, now, are Ireland, from the World Cup. Mick subsequently guided a very average Sunderland team to the Premiership and only he and God knows how: I hope McCarthy allows himself a wry smile every now and then. One can assume, at least, that Keane’s next contract will not be at the Stadium of Light.
We don’t have the money for him down at Millwall, thankfully. And I daresay our training facilities would not meet with his approval. Where will he end up? By now, you may well have the answer. He is a very good footballer and, let’s be honest, in the amoral world of Premiership football that’s all that matters, isn’t it? At the time of writing the rumour mill is grinding away: it could be poor old Everton, it could be West Brom, it could even be as manager of Ireland, which should ensure that they fail to qualify for the next World Cup too (people management doesn’t seem to be Roy’s strong point, does it? And can you imagine the press conferences?) There’s even a rumour flying around that it might be Manchester City, given Keane’s long-standing friendship with Stuart Pearce. Apparently, it was Stuart who taught Roy never to “show pain”, because it’s a sort of weakness. What a perfect irony that would be. If you were a Manchester City supporter, how would you feel about that? If you were Haaland, how would you feel about that? All of a sudden, “stick it up your bollocks ” seems an eminently succinct, understated and appropriate response.
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