The Best Modern-Day Hard Man Is…

John Nicholson

Excuse the homo-erotic subtext to this question but, where have all the hard men gone?

It’s not long since almost every top club had at least one hard man; one man who could frighten the crap out of opposition players with a mixture of intimidation, aggression and the occasional outburst of undiluted violence all mixed up with rugged tackling and crunching headers.

Football, like the English language is constantly evolving, and in recent years seems to have evolved to exclude the hard man from the game. Here’s my question; is it a good thing? Am I the only one to miss him?

The best hard men were not simply psychotic nutters who went around stamping on people, mthough they were that as well, no, the most effective hard men were physically strong, excellent ball winners, and good passers. Their job was to break up play, and protect the flair players from being kicked to death by the opposing centre-half.

In the olden days the best example of a hard man was Ron Harris. If you never saw him, Chopper was extraordinary. He’d shock any young fan of today’s game. His job was simply to hurt the opposition’s best players – anything football-related after that was a bonus, but not strictly necessary. Early on in the 1970 Cup Final, he stamped on Eddie Gray’s calf to reduce Gray’s effectiveness. It worked. Job done.

But I was never a fan of the Chopper-style hard man. Too often he ruined the game by maiming the players you most wanted to actually watch.

However, the 70s were full of hard men like Larry Lloyd, Tommy Smith and Norman Hunter, who, along with being ruthless tacklers, were also good distributors of the ball. They didn’t usually just deploy violence for its own sake, it usually had purpose and application. The principle of instant karma was always a popular one in 70s football; you hurt my tricky winger, you get a kick in the nads.

These were more visceral days – any player who was weak minded or physically lightweight was shown no mercy. It’s surprising no-one died.

Which brings me to Souey. Grame Souness was probably the most skilful hard man ever to walk a football pitch. He was an extraordinary, attacking midfielder, the like of which we will never be allowed to see again.

At times he mowed into players with a ruthless malevolence which was both utterly exhilarating and totally sickening in its sheer, raw violence. I once saw him in 1974, during his reign of terror at the Boro, taking revenge on a hapless defender for some perceived injustice.

As the player booted the ball away, Souey ran full speed into him, his boot up at thigh height. He stamped right down the bloke’s thigh, down past the knee, down the shin and stamped on his foot in one, king-fu inspired movement. Naturally, his victim fell to the ground in pain, but rather than leave the scene of the crime quickly, Souey leaned over him and screamed abuse in his face. Even by the standards of the day, this was extreme behaviour.

I have to say, the fans loved it. It might be morally wrong, and these days it’d bring the full weight of the law on and off the pitch into play. He’d be hauled up in front of the world’s media and castigated for his irresponsible behaviour. But these are different days. At the time, we loved it; all of us. Were we all thugs back then? Sometimes I do wonder.

In the 80s Souness continued his assault and battery style of playing at Liverpool and later, Rangers, while Vinnie Jones began his reign of bollock-grabbing insanity. The true inheritor of Chopper Harris’ slash and burn approach, his Wimbledon days will never be forgotten as a period of unremitting, ugly, but rather successful, thuggery.

But as hard as Jones undoubtedly was, easily the hardest player in the 80s was South Yorkshire’s finest, Billy Whitehurst. Alleged to have beaten the s**t out of Jones while they were both at Sheffield United, Billy is also supposed to have earned money while at Oxford doing bare-knuckle fights with local gypsies! Now that is f**king hard. You’d not catch John Terry doing that now would you, more’s the pity.

By the time Billy quit in 1993, the hard man was already in decline but ‘Razor’ Ruddock was still elbowing people senseless, and Stuart Pearce was still out there, playing with a broken leg and doing full-body tackles on anyone who stood still for long enough. Who didn’t love Psycho?

And then there was Roy Keane. In his pomp, Keane was one of the finest exponents of the hard man tradition. Sent off for vicious hacks and knee-breaking stamps, he brilliantly mixed his violence with high-voltage football skill of the highest order.

At his peak he was an irresistible force of nature. Mad, bad and dangerous to know, love or loath him, he was always compelling to watch, and he was crucial to Manchester United’s dominance and success.

His confrontation with Paddy Vieira in the tunnel a couple of years ago was possibly the last old school hard man moment. It was, in all senses of the word, great. Am I wrong to feel that? Maybe. But I do feel it.

I know in these more gentle football days of high skill and fast pace, the hard man is seen as an anachronism, and anyone who admits to a joy in seeing a bit of ruthless on-pitch aggression is seen as a retard, especially by younger generations of fans who have grown up with a different tradition of football. Perhaps society and sport is keen to be more sophisticated in the 21st century. Maybe play-acting and feigning injury have replaced the hard man. Times change…maybe it’s for the better, maybe it’s not.
I don’t see the Ben Thatcher-style forearm smash as part of the great hard man tradition. That smacked more of the over-reactions of a weak man. Anyone can just whack the living s**t out of someone, but the top notch hard- an knew how, when and why a player needed ‘livening’ up.

The hard man role – in the way we understood it in years gone by – has been made impossible by the outlawing of most forms of tackling, and the instant red cards given out by refs for players who sneeze too violently, let alone those who tackle someone around the neck with their muscular thighs.

In the Premiership, the art form barely exists at all, and where it does, it has had to change and adapt to the new football environment.

If I was to ask you for a list of hard men today you’d be hard pushed to make it a long list or draw it up very quickly. Take a player like Didier Drogba. I suspect he’s as hard as nails, but because of all the play-acting and wussy behaviour, you can’t call him a hard man. No hard man would ever pretend he was hurt when he wasn’t, nor would he show it if he was – that would be to show weakness. The Drog fails on all those counts.

A player like Paul Dickov is a tough little b***ard and like a lot of very small men could start a fight in a monastery, but he’s not a hard man in the Keane or Souness tradition.

Brian McBride, who shares his name with the boss of Amazon.co.uk – which incidentally is another place you can buy my book Footy Rocks – is a true hard b***ard centre-forward. When viciously elbowed by De Rossi in the USA v Italy game during the World Cup, he didn’t flinch, even as the blood streamed down his face. He stood there, dazed but resolute. We need more men in the game who can take a whack and not weep about it. McBride looks like the sort of tough-assed Irishman that gave the NYPD such a fearsome reputation in the 30s. Thick-necked and made of granite, McBride is as hard they come, but he doesn’t play the hard man on the pitch. He is just innately tough, he’s not an inheritor of the hard man tradition.

Liverpool’s John-Arne Riise took a good nutting last week and didn’t go down, revealing unexpected hard man qualities in doing so. But he’s not a player who uses that in his game as a rule.

So who does that leave? Richard Dunne and Andy Todd are tough sods, as is Scott Parker, but for me, the only true inheritor of the mad, hard b***ard role, the man who you’d least like to get the wrong side of, is Everton’s Tim Cahill.

Cahill has an assassin’s cold, dark, black eyes. His unusual Samoan/Irish parentage in itself sounds like a genetically tough-assed recipe.

He’s nasty, aggressive and though a bit of a short arse, is as physically strong as anyone who plays the game. He’s all muscle and he’s got the look of a feral dingo. He walks the line in most games and uses his aggression to progress Everton’s midfield attacking options incredibly successfully.

Like loads of Aussies, he’s competitive to a point where it hurts, and he hates losing. In his first season at Everton he was top scorer and he’s got five already this season – his good form is in no small measure responsible for Everton’s success.

In an earlier era, Cahill would have played more like Souness, and would have been encouraged to do so by Moyes, who likes the physical game. But maybe because he can’t play that way, we actually see the best of him, and because of that, football is the winner.

His game relies on controlled aggression, fierce determination, excellent timing and great positioning for all those late headers in the box he’s made his trademark. If he was busy kicking lumps out of everyone, the more skilful side of his game might be lost, and that would be a shame.

The old school hard men days will never return, but while there are players like Cahill around, in some way, the tradition is continued. Fair f***ing dinkum mate.

I must have downloaded atleast 7-8 GB of football videos/compilations. I simply love watching them, players smashing in goals with the bohemian rhapsody playing in the background.

I am a lazy guy and there were days when I used to well have a kind of “starting problem” to haul my ass up to the ground. Then I used to listen to this compilation. It was named “Totti & Cassano”. The video used to barely show the excellent football played by the Giallorossi but the song “Rock you like a Hurricane” by the Scorpions was enough to get me off my feet.

Now we return to Antonio Cassano. Boy genius turned Super Brat.

The story of this lad is a very interesting one. He had a poor childhood. He was born in Bari, an unknown Italian town and he grew up playing street soccer. His talent was eventually spotted by a scout from FC Bari and a couple of years later, AS Roma come sweeping in with a multi-million offer of ridiculous of proportions for a boy so young. Cassano wins the Giallorossi fans over and becomes the darling boy of Italian football.

Club Captain and the King of Italian football, Francesco Totti took Cassano under him and they forged one of the most formidable striker forces in Italy. They played scintillating football together and became close friends.  Come fame, come money; most people in life get lost and Cassano was not a saint either.Money and fame come at a premium. And for this poor kid, they did come too quickly. He dressed extravagantly, he played extravagantly and he lived like a millionaire on a  holiday. Fame soon got to his head and he behaved like any player would. He turned up late for training, was drunk and partying  most of the time. His relationship with Totti was deteriorating and eventually broke up when Cassano dint turn up at some family occasion of Totti’s.  Then Cassano decided he wanted to further enhance his reputation as the bad boy when he refused to sign a contract extension and poor Roma were forced to sell him for a cut-price 5 Million dollars to Real Madrid. What happens to high profile players after they transfer to Madrid – they dont win anything ever again and their careers go on a downward spiral. So destiny took its path and here we arrive at a Cassano, who has sobered down, realised his mistakes. And to make him realise his mistakes, it took Real Madrid, Fabio Capello and 720 minutes on different benches across Spain.  Lets see the new Cassano now in this exclusive interview:

The big news – in more ways than one – centres around the weighty figures of both Toni Cassano and Ronaldo. It was revealed that the Italian attacker was so hacked off at his continued absence from the Real Madrid starting line up that he stood face to face – well, face to chest – with Fabio Capello after the game and blew a gasket.

“I deserve to be in the team,” he squealed at his somewhat surprised manager, “have you know shame! It’s a disgrace. I saved your arse at Roma and this is how you repay me!”.

There has to be just a little bit of sympathy with Cassano’s position. He was one of the best players in the club’s preseason where appeared to have bucked up his footballing ideas up considerably. He even managed a goal in last week’s Ecija cup game. However, like Beckham, Cassano has become a victim of Capello’s desire to play with six defensive players and only one proper forward – Van Nistelrooy.

Another very unhappy bunny at the club is Ronaldo – who has been a regular bench partner of Cassano over recent weeks. Interesting, it isn’t clear whether they have to sit on opposite sides to avoid tipping it up and sending Reyes flying into the air.

lol  

Duo’s arrival is tip of the iceberg

http://www.teamtalk.com/football/story/0,16368,2483_1573708,00.html

TEAMtalk feels the unsettling arrivals of Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano at West Ham are part of a much bigger picture.

It was touted in some quarters as West Ham’s answer to the coup which brought Ricky Villa and Ossie Ardiles to Spurs back in the late 1970s.

Five weeks on, the arrival of Argentinians Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano threatens to break one of football’s proudest clubs.

West Ham have lost their last five games, including two in the UEFA Cup against Palermo.

They have not scored while Tevez has been on the field and Mascherano was dropped last weekend.

The club lurches from defeat to board meetings as takeover speculation mounts.

Like a good old pro, and the decent person he is, manager Alan Pardew attempts to steady the ship.

Then comes the ultimate proof of West Ham’s folly in the words of Argentina coach Alfio Basile, who said: “I hope they leave the club as soon as possible. They are half-hearted and I’m worried about that.”

If Tevez and Mascherano are ‘half-hearted’ – and Basile knows them better than most – then the decision to bring them to the Premiership in the first place was half-baked.

It is football’s ultimate marriage of inconvenience.

And a salutary lesson of what can happen when clubs are tempted by the lure of foreign money and the promise of opportunists who know the price of everything to do with land and location and nothing about the value of an old and revered football institution.

After all, the Israeli businessman linked with the bid to buy the Hammers, Eli Papouchado, admits he knows nothing about football.

“I don’t even know how many players there are in each team,” he says. “But I do understand that in every business transaction there is a real estate opportunity.”

It was as honest and direct as it was scary for English football.

Whatever you say about Roman Abramovich, he has thrown himself into the running and the tradition of Chelsea. He turns up at just about every match, his delight at his huge investment obvious in his pumping fists and broad grin.

For Abramovich, Chelsea is a whim which turned into a hobby which turned into a passion.

For the men at the gates of Upton Park football is a business vehicle, pure and simple. It is there, not to swell their hearts, but their bank accounts. They do not care about tradition but the pounds that roll in. They do not see fans among the Upton Park faithful, they only see potential clients.

Tevez and Mascherano did not arrive at West Ham from Brazilian club Corinthians because Pardew saw the need for a flamboyant striker and an accomplished defensive midfielder. Pardew had built a balanced squad, one which had reached last season’s FA Cup final and qualified for Europe. Pardew certainly did not need them but just caved into the temptation of having at his disposal two World-class stars.

The Argentinians came in a move apparently engineered by prospective buyer Kia Joorabchian.

Rather than the excitement and kudos which accompanied Keith Burkinshaw’s capture of Villa and Ardiles all those years ago, these Argentinians brought with them bewilderment.

How exactly do you get two World Cup stars for nothing?

There is an old adage that if things seem to be too good to be true then they usually are and at no time has anyone been convinced that they actually wanted to play for West Ham.

The suspicion is that they were part of a grander plan, the catalysts in the takeover shenanigans, West Ham merely a stepping stone on their path elsewhere.

Meanwhile, their presence does as much for West Ham harmony in the dressing room as a grenade with the pin taken out.

For now Pardew battles on, maintaining he has never threatened to quit, insisting his priority is “getting West Ham up the Premiership table”.

West Ham has flourished under Pardew. It was the ideal example of an English club; traditional and produced its own set of players from an academy among the best in the game itself. It played an attacking 4-4-2 and Pardew’s idea was to make West Ham play entertaining football for the fans. But make no mistake, as long as the current predators are around, the threat to a club rooted in the community, with an academy system the envy of the game and a history boasting Bobby Moore, Martin Peters, Sir Geoff Hurst, as well as Frank Lampard, Joe Cole and Rio Ferdinand, is real.

English football should ignore it at its peril.