"The
Hit Parade"
Football
used to be full of honest fellas who'd kick you all day and drink with you
all night. Now, they'll dive to get you sent off and can't take a tackle.
When did the game change?
It is football's great paradox: it is a man's game, But also the beautiful game. For a century and a half, the two have nestled uncomfortably – silk and steel brain and brawn artistry and aggravation – yet their constant flux has been fundamental to the game’s all-consuming appeal. And over the decades, the personification of football’s rough edge has been The Hard Man.
From Wilf Copping to Tommy Smith, Giorgio Ferrine to Claudio Gentile, hard men have weaved themselves into the fabric of football from the moment 19th-century law formulator CW Allcock declared: “By all means, let us have hacking.” So hacking we had – and plenty of it – with the aggressors acting, in the words of Michael Parkinson, as “the salt in the stew”.
“These lads say to themselves, ‘I’m not going to be pushed about’, opined Vinnie Jones in his infamous Soccer’s Hard Men. “A lot of supporters look for that because they all want to be leaders themselves – they want to be the boss. Would you want Gary Lineker in the trenches with you or would you want Vinnie Jones? At the end of the day, you know Vinnie Jones will get out of the trench and run towards the enemy.”
The hard man will give
it and take it in equal measure without complaint, for among his peers, there
is an unspoken, almost biblical ethos: humility and honour are the creed.
“Get a whack and give a whack and, clichéd as it sounds, have
a beer afterwards,” says Mick Harford, who made a mockery of the archetype
that hard men played in defence or midfield during the 1980s and ‘90s.
“I was playing against Coventry once and big Sam Allardyce’s elbow
caught me a treat. The lights went out. I had 70 stitches and was in hospital
for four days. You could see my teeth through my lip. It taught me a lesson
– to look after myself. I bore Sam no grudge.”
It was no different back in the black-and-white 1950s. “In my day you
could get your bollocks kicked off,” recalls Bolton legend Nat Lofthouse.
“The difference was that then the defender who did it would walk around
the pitch with you afterwards and help you find them.”
Over the past decade, however, football has been so meticulously sanitised that the hard men have become almost extinct. Once upon a time, not so many years ago, the game was riddled with hatchet men and hard-cases. Try to compile a list of them now and you’ll struggle to find a first team. The game has clearly gone soft.
Last season included all manner of tabloid-fanned contretemps that would barely have registered in the past: the Bowyer/Dyer happy-slapping; Wayne Rooney’s three-match ban for putting his palm in Tal Ben Haim’s face; Blackburn becoming Public Enemies No.1-11 for a few over-zealous tackles. “Football’s a non-contact sport now,” smiles Ron ‘Chopper’ Harris, the legendary Chelsea enforcer of the 1970s. “I don’t think there are any tough players about these days. They’re all pussyfoots.”
If Chopper’s right – and wise men don’t argue with Chopper – how did it come to this? And why?
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