Wildfire of Roy's fury consumes path to throne of Man United's fallen empire

Pundit bombast belies missed chance to become sideline titan

- BY ROY CURTIS

LIKE wildfire across a meadow of parched, sunbaked grassland, the flame of Roy Keane's disgust has a tendency to surge and flare, consuming all in its furious path.

With Ruben Amorim's Manchester United clanking about in the iron chains of hopelessness, punditry's Archbishop of Angry will climb into his Sky Sports pulpit, an Old Testament preacher sermonising in high definition about the end of times.

Once again the fallen empire where his legend was forged has presented the Corkman with an open goal.

Long before its latest mortifying humiliation, the contradiction of nature's laws that was Wednesday's abject loss to fourth-tier Grimsby, this English sporting institution that evokes such passion - both fanatically supportive and caustically mocking - among so many in Ireland had adopted the irretrievably broken countenance of a house abandoned to the elements.

Like an individual who declines to visit a dentist at a toothache's first throbbing, United instead sat idly by as rot set in and an abscess took hold. Now, the molar is beyond salvation, the pain unbearable.

And the constant root canal of managerial change is impotent to ease the suffering.

This critically ailing superpower, one that shone as brilliantly as the North Star during the Gilded Age when Alex Ferguson sat upon the throne, finds itself reduced to a weekly social media punchline.

Comic relief for supporters of even the most troubled rival.

So Keane, understanding his audience and knowing precisely what they expect from him, will take his paymaster's fat wad of cash and willingly morph into a frothing caricature of his Saipan-era self.

FIERY

He will seethe and shake his head, his voice rising an octave as he fumes about Bruno Fernandes's body language, insisting that he wouldn't allow the Portuguese to take charge of the meat counter in whatever Lidl or Aldi serves the good folk of Mayfield.