The Manchester United captain spent Monday morning publicly accusing the former United skipper of fabricating quotes and telling outright lies about him. Keane spent Monday afternoon posting a drawing of a donkey on Instagram.
The caption read: "Too much attention makes a donkey think he's a lion."
The post, shared to Keane's 2.5 million followers without naming Fernandes, landed hours after the Portugal midfielder appeared on Steven Bartlett's Diary of a CEO podcast to respond to comments made by the 54-year-old on The Overlap earlier this month.
At issue is what Keane claimed Fernandes said after Manchester United's victory over Nottingham Forest. Keane stated on the podcast that Fernandes had told an interviewer he should have shot rather than pass — which Keane characterised as evidence that Fernandes was chasing his assist record at the expense of team-first thinking.
"How can your mindset be not to win the match but be about an individual record?" Keane said at the time. "He won't be winning trophies, not with that mindset."
The problem is that Fernandes said the opposite.
What the 31-year-old actually said after the Forest game was: "There were probably moments today when I should have passed instead of shot."
He was crediting his decision-making when passing, not admitting to withholding shots for personal gain.
Fernandes made that clear on Monday.
"What Roy Keane said is a lie," he told Bartlett. "Luckily for me, everything is recorded. Imagine if it wasn't. People will think, 'Bruno is the guy always trying to get the assist.' I accept his criticism. I accept that he might like me as a player or not, like me as a person or not. But what I don't like is that he puts words in my mouth that have not been said."
He also revealed he had contacted former United manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer to obtain Keane's number in an attempt to resolve the matter privately, before going public when that approach failed.
Fernandes ended the Premier League season with 21 assists — a new outright record, surpassing the previous mark shared by Thierry Henry and Kevin De Bruyne. He added a goal in United's final-day 3-0 win at Brighton to close out a remarkable individual campaign.
The Instagram post suggests Keane has no intention of stepping back.