For many of us, football is the beautiful game. You may find a buzz in a thirty yard screamer, a last minute winner, or perhaps making the right back look a fool with some silky trickery.
On the other end of the spectrum, the buzz of the game may arrive in the form of a two footed challenge or a 11 v 11 brawl at full time. As Roy Keane put it, sometimes he just needed to “smash into someone.”
The Irishman as perhaps the epitome of the ‘hard man’ character, let’s find out who closely followed his ethos.
5. Jaap Stam
Brought in by Sir Alex Ferguson in 1998, Stam enjoyed three successive titles at Manchester United.
Contrary to the delicate football hailed by his predecessors in Amsterdam, Stam was always up for a tussle. Even if that was to be with one of the Premier League’s other notorious hard men in Duncan Ferguson…
4. Duncan Ferguson
Claiming he feared he had killed the burglar he caught in his Merseyside home and then having to resuscitate him, Ferguson was a man to avoid on and off the pitch.
Playing for Everton and Newcastle in the top flight, ‘Big Dunc’ quickly became known as one of the league’s most violent players.
Jimmy Bullard shared the fear held by most. He said in an interview he’s “not scared of anything but Duncan Ferguson.”
3. Joey Barton
Whether it was on the training pitch with his own teammates, on a match day or in the streets of Liverpool, Joey Barton always seemed up for a fight.
The young boy from Knowsley didn’t take long to reveal his tempestuous nature when he sparked a full team brawl at twenty years old in a pre-season friendly.
Facing suspension for battering City teammate Ousmane Dabo, stubbing a lit cigar out on a youth player’s eye at a Christmas Party and even seeing 77 days behind bars, Barton has to be considered one of the Premier League’s biggest hot-heads.
2. Roy Keane
Despite being renowned as one of the Premier League’s greatest central midfielders, Roy Keane is also renowned as one of the dirtiest.
In his 15 year spell in the Premier League, Keane saw 7 red cards, with some of them emanating as the most recognisable the league has seen.
It may be the stamp on current England boss Southgate, throwing a punch at Alan Shearer or the vengeful horror challenge that ended the career of Alf-Inge Haaland.
1. Vinnie Jones
The vanguard of the infamously nasty FA Cup winning Wimbledon side, Vinnie Jones wasn’t as concerned about the football as he was a scrap.
Holding the record for the quickest booking in a football match, an absurd five seconds, Jones was always going to be the perfect fit to present the ‘Soccer’s Hard Men’ video. Featuring archived footage of him and some of football’s other ‘hard men’ to inspire youngsters coming through, Jones saw a 6 month ban for “bringing the game into disrepute.”
With many fans today being critical of the soft nature the game seems to be adopting, do we reflect on these characters with nostalgia and a desperation for them to be replicated or is it in fact progression that we are managing to keep these disturbingly violent and threatening players off of the pitch?
