Vieira

[Dr.Filth]

Keane's just a fucking thug who's got away with it for years because he plays for them. Just because he's honest about it doesn't make it right. I can't believe some of the people defending him on here.

Fuck off to OT if you love him so much.

[MLB]

Keanes first tackle on Haaland (where he embarrasingly mananged to hurt himself) was cowardly. The second was premeditated evil revenge. Some might look up to him for that and think he's the DB, i dont.

 

 

Agree with that. Keane is a little bitch, never mind all this hardman bollocks. If you deliberately set out to injure someone on a football pitch without any good reason you're a coward and a prick, simple as that.

[Kurt]

Agree with that. Keane is a little bitch, never mind all this hardman bollocks. If you deliberately set out to injure someone on a football pitch without any good reason you're a coward and a prick, simple as that.

 

Spot on!

[Stu Monty]

Agree with that. Keane is a little bitch, never mind all this hardman bollocks. If you deliberately set out to injure someone on a football pitch without any good reason you're a coward and a prick, simple as that.

 

And he's the only one doing it of course. And he didn't actually injure him and he never said he wanted to injure him as far as I remember.

 

The assult argument is a joke by the way lads. Dozens of players get assulted each week in that case. Latest was Toure.

 

Captian - That'll be be that brought up killing then, my apologies.

[Aaron Miller]

I don't go out to kill people, or stop them walking,

 

maybe you should've qualified what "hurt" meant. what you describe is part of the game. to me, when playing, trying to "hurt" someone means having them stretchered off...

 

I go out to fucking rock them to the bones,

 

that is perhaps the gayest thing i've ever heard.

[Paul]

Its like the diving debate, everyone does it and it does my head in when fans dribble on about cheating mancs/chelsea etc when we had Owen who was a master.

I have never seen Michael Owen execute what I would call a dive; that is, going down without being touched. What Owen does is an intelligent part of the game: draw the player in, move the ball quickly and win the foul/penalty. It's no different to what Didi does magnificently in the middle of the pitch when we're under pressure, or Shearer does with his back to goal and defenders are daft enough to get too tight to him when there's a kick from his keeper coming to him.

 

To me, a dive is what Viera did against Hamann at Anfield. Rooney and Van Nistelroy are also divers. The laws of the game require contact for there to be a foul; just because Michael forces that contact doesn't make him a diver. The onus is on the defender not to touch him. It's called clever football in my book.

[Stu Monty]

I have never seen Michael Owen execute what I would call a dive; that is, going down without being touched. What Owen does is an intelligent part of the game: draw the player in, move the ball quickly and win the foul/penalty. It's no different to what Didi does magnificently in the middle of the pitch when we're under pressure, or Shearer does with his back to goal and defenders are daft enough to get too tight to him when there's a kick from his keeper coming to him.

 

To me, a dive is what Viera did against Hamann at Anfield. Rooney and Van Nistelroy are also divers. The laws of the game require contact for there to be a foul; just because Michael forces that contact doesn't make him a diver. The onus is on the defender not to touch him. It's called clever football in my book.

 

V argentina. Zero contact to make him go down.

 

Aaron. Without wanting to sound condecending, people who don't understand the value of physicality in football should go and watch a different game. Tackling is as much an art form as shooting.

[cochcaer]

It was a pre-meditated attempt to seriuosly injure an opponent which has fuck all to do with sport or the art of tackling. Keane has always been a small man lacking in class.

[Stu Monty]

It was a pre-meditated attempt to seriuosly injure an opponent which has fuck all to do with sport or the art of tackling. Keane has always been a small man lacking in class.

 

Never said it had anything to do with the art of tackling that is a different issue i was discussing with Aaron "Hard tackles are gay" Miller.

 

So get it right and stop being a coch.

 

See what I did there, clever wasn't it ;)

 

 

By the way C, went to see the Bloc in Manchester on that NME thing and they were amazing mate.

[Brownie]

Never said it had anything to do with the art of tackling that is a different issue i was discussing with Aaron "Hard tackles are gay" Miller.

 

So get it right and stop being a coch.

 

See what I did there, clever wasn't it ;)

 

 

By the way C, went to see the Bloc in Manchester on that NME thing and they were amazing mate.

 

They are playing Manchester Uni in April - just went looking for tickets but no luck. Really really wanna see them asap.

 

I am shattered - just had a cup game that went to extra time and I can't move.

 

Made up for Morientes today, he's growing on me already.

[Stu Monty]

They are playing Manchester Uni in April - just went looking for tickets but no luck. Really really wanna see them asap.

 

I am shattered - just had a cup game that went to extra time and I can't move.

 

Made up for Morientes today, he's growing on me already.

 

Got knocked out the cup by a team two divisions above us today, they weren't much to write home about though. 3-1, and although I had a really good game the third was me failing to track my man (a cardinal sin that I am always bollocking people for).

 

The best bit is that I have a dead calf and have to go out to work in about an hour. Working 2300-0700 tonight then 2000-0400 sunday night at fucking middle-of-nowhere Edale (2hrs from my gaff!!).

 

It is higly likely I will fall asleep at the wheeel and go over one of the many cliffs on the way in the middle if the 20ft visablility fog.

 

The days off in the week seem less appealing at times like this.

[cochcaer]

By the way C, went to see the Bloc in Manchester on that NME thing and they were amazing mate.

 

Bloody closet Manc :P

[Vincent Vega]

Royston Keane is the cunt of all cunts who ever existed. Amen.

[Paul]

From today's Observer that picks up some of the points in this thread:

 

I'm the man - and don't you forget it

 

Captain fantastic

 

Tom Humphries

Sunday February 6, 2005

The Observer

 

In playing at home, John Aizlewood's enjoyable if masochistic pilgrimage through an English league season, there's a line that has always rankled. 'Thus Roy Keane, so thick that even other footballers must notice...' Admittedly the writer was describing one of Keane's more infamous moments, the initial tackle at Elland Road which would be the genesis of his blood feud with Alfe Inge Haaland. But still...

Perhaps the mood of the time excuses Aizlewood. He was writing a few seasons ago when it was still fashionable to caricature Keane as an all-drinking, all-fighting source of fodder to redtop newspapers. Perhaps. What seems certain, though, is that late in the day that perception has changed. It has taken 15 tumultuous seasons, but finally English football can enjoy and appreciate Roy Keane for what he is - the best value in a shiny bazaar filled with knock-offs and fake tat. If there is one player in the Premiership who offers 100 per cent every time he steps on to a pitch, it is Keane. It is odd that Keane's raging intensity still shocks and awes us. Ask Patrick Vieira. Ask Steven Gerrard. In recent weeks both have been taken by surprise and both have shrivelled in front of the furnace.

 

Last Tuesday night at Highbury was stuff for the career highlight reel. A long drumroll of hyped animosity between the hosts and their guests fed Keane's passion before he stepped in and seized the moment. Speaking to Sky Sports afterwards, he was still as pumped up as he had been when 'speaking' to Vieira beforehand. At 33, Keane remains one of the few players capable of taking a top-class fixture by the scruff of the neck and annexing all three points to his team. He remains the only player capable of dissolving solid matter with a single glare. There have been signs of his waning, but Keane has banished them before anybody plucked up the courage to ask him about them. His style has evolved in a way that suggests his intelligence has bought him a new lease on excellence. For Keane, this season will be divided into two segments interrupted by the bout of flu that kept him out of the first Arsenal game in October and, just as crucially, as it turned out, the limp defeat to Portsmouth in the next Premiership fixture.

 

Through late summer and through the gates of winter, Keane looked to be struggling. Since returning to the side he has whipped them and bullied them to the point where United's heroic pursuit of an implacable Chelsea side has become the most compulsive viewing in the Premiership. Keane's Lear-like rage, Ferguson's Punch 'n' Judy sensibility, Rooney's petulance. What drives him? In a word, home. The sense of loyalty, the desire not to let them down. He grew up in the heart of a close family in Mayfield, one of the tougher precincts in Cork, a town renowned for its second-city chippiness and its obsessive pursuit of sporting excellence. The environment of Cork, and specifically Mayfield, not only made Keane but informs his sense of himself to this day. If he felt that money and celebrity had altered him to the point where he was estranged from home he would know it was time to pack it in. He has always stayed true to the character who left a decade-and-a-half ago. When he arrived at Manchester United, flush with easy money (but less than he would have gained had he switched from Nottingham Forest to Blackburn), Keane bought and briefly drove a large red Mercedes with the personalised number plate Roy 1. Detecting that people were laughing at him, he soon replaced it with something more sober.

 

Famously, he almost got mired in Mayfield. Playing for an absurdly talented Rockmount team, Keane was smallest in stature and also the last one left when the scouts had finished their scavenging on behalf of English clubs. He sat down and wrote to all 92 clubs in the Football League. Now he's the last man standing. He won't go gently either. When he arrived at United Keane slipped, it seemed, into the slipstream of Paul Ince, who was at the time passing himself off as a colossus and encouraging people to call him Guv'nor. Ince moved on and there were those who feared that Manchester United would slip into decline. Ince got smaller. United got bigger. Last week Keane's own successor, Eric Djemba-Djemba, got tired of waiting and moved to Aston Villa. Keane won't yield, won't flinch. He's hard. The game itself doesn't weary him but as the years go by he seems harassed by the imminence and the inevitability of decline. He rails against it. His contract at United has 18 months to run and the cumulative toll of his injuries means the day before any game is an endless series of physiotherapists coaxing his body into co-operation. It would be easier to hide and to coast downhill into retirement, but Keane takes an almost religious reassurance from doing things the hard way.

 

It would have been easier, too, to play along with the happy imperfections of the Ireland camp in Saipan at the 2002 World Cup. He travelled home alone, though, and dealt with the aftermath alone. Having retired from international duty in such circumstances it would have been easier to stay retired. When Brian Kerr, a manager who reflects Keane's obsession for professionalism and perfection came along, though, Keane stepped back into the room and suffered the glares of Saipan veterans and quietly mended bridges. Training is as intense an experience for Keane as playing big games, and he will rant just as passionately at the imperfect set-up of an end-of-session seven-a-side as he will against a poor last-minute refereeing decision in a close game at Old Trafford. And like the greatest players, he finds ways of reinventing himself that will ultimately prolong his relevance within the game. Keane is no longer the box-to-box demon of a few years ago but his reading and distribution is even better. He controls games from deep now, and his passing over 15-20 yards does as much damage as his tackling. He has a quick and mordant wit, which he usually keeps sheathed. Commercially, he is more likely to do things that appeal to his brain or his humour than his wallet. In Dublin, the nurses in children's hospitals are accustomed to surprise visits from him and he is equally generous to charities raising money for the blind. Having settled down and shed a bothersome drink habit, he has emerged as a curiously old-fashioned figure. He has no shiny-suited agent, just the friendship and services of a top London solicitor, Michael Kennedy, who acts discreetly and well on the player's behalf. Keane's fifth child arrived just before Christmas and all are educated locally in keeping with his desire that they grow up in as ordinary an environment as possible. He has pre-ironic ideas of manliness too, a feeling of obligation and duty to his job and to his team that only seems to fracture when he detects the feeling isn't mutual. A constant theme through recent seasons has been his frustration in dealing with players who want success less than he does.

 

Keane is shy and enjoys reading. He takes a broadsheet in the morning and while other players, with United or Ireland, buzz around airport lounges on away trips he is invariably found sitting in a quiet corner getting through another chapter. Lest Keane come off as too cuddly, it's no harm to remember that he retains some kingsize flaws. A dislike of being portrayed as cuddly by journalists is one. Another is his obsession with privacy, which makes discussion of charitable work off limits, and manifests itself in a sharp distaste for the ostentatious charity of the celebrity world. In terms of temper he still has the ability to go from nought to 60 pretty quickly. Alan Shearer casually pushed the right button three seasons ago and found Keane's hands around his throat for the brief seconds it took the referee to end the deathly embrace with a red card. There is no let-up. Shyness and self-doubt and a mistrust of the glad-handing world around him are things that still torment him.

 

In Dublin this month the musical I, Keano opens. A parody on the most important event in the whole of Irish history, Keane's departure from Saipan, the show promises to be a cross between I, Claudius and South Pacific . There is no confirmation as to who, if anybody, will be singing 'I'm Going to Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair' , but we do know that the writers had originally thought to call the production McCarticus. Somehow, though, Keane just stood out as better box office. And, as the anti-hero turned hero, a better story too.

 

Tom Humphries is chief sports feature writer of The Irish Times

[Paul]

Bumped (to the bones).

[Anubis]

and this has been bumped because.....?

[Brownie]

and this has been bumped because.....?

 

Stu Monty's 'rocked to the bones' quote.

[Gav]

Bumped (to the bones).

 

Nice one Paul, I'd not read that Tom Humpreys article before -It could have almost been written by myself (well if I lerned to spell porperly)

[Paul]

and this has been bumped because.....?

 

It was being fondly remembered on the GF.

[theRedHorse]

Roy Keanes career was ended by Luis Garcia...

[Liam]

That was a very entertaining read... although my opinions havent changed on Keane.

[philyhamann]

Keane got sent off for diving once, hahahaha.

[Liam]

Keane got sent off for diving once, hahahaha.

 

Really?

[philyhamann]

Yes.

[TheDrowningMan]

Here is said dismissal:

 

Roy Keane sent off for Diving - AOL Video