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The Devil Saw Red

Mark Thomas

Monday, December 5th, 2005

1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 To some his status legendary
This nothing more than puffery
Like the Baby and Mother Rosemary*
They forgive his acts of diablerie
Pure hatred for an old adversary
To inflict such an horrible injury
From which there was no recovery
In revenge for an act imaginary
Never was there a simple apology
From a man so vile and cowardly

Notes

This poem refers to Roy Keane’s feud with Manchester City’s Alf-Inge Haaland. Keane’s grievance against Haaland was based on the fact that, in an earlier attempt to injure Haaland, in 1997, Keane had snapped his own cruciate ligament and been out of the game for months.

Here was how Keane got his “revenge” in 2001:

“I’d waited almost 180 minutes for Alfie, three years if you looked at it another way. Now he had the ball on the far touchline. Alfie was taking the piss. I’d waited long enough. I (expletive deleted) hit him hard. The ball was there (I think). Take that, you (expletive deleted).”

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* Reference to Rosemary’s Baby, the Roman Polanski movie, in which Rosemary gives birth to the devil’s child. The analogy being the natural instinct of Rosemary (Manchester United fans) as a mother to love her own child despite the reality of what that child actually is (Roy Keane).

Source: http://footballpoets.org/poems/the-devil-saw-red/