Hardest Men In Football Since '74

[lady-isobel-barnett]

Here http://www.footandba...he-modern-era/?

 

Personally I think "Hardest" has got confused with "Dirtiest". I think we all know top players that were rock hard but weren't filthy players. And conversely really dirty players that weren't all that hard.

 

I'm not sure if it's ironic or not but of all the players cited here, sleekit and dirty as he was, the one adjudged to be the hardest was arguably the best ball player. .

[Blues Brother]

Wow!

some nice examples of downright thuggery there

[Jaggernaut]

Tommy Smith of Liverpool should surely be in there. I remember posting an interview with him on ptfc.net; it was absolutely hilarious how he was slagging off modern players for being nancy boys and more interested in make-up than football. Can't find it anywhere, but this isn't bad:

 

 

"Take that bandage off. And what do you mean your knee? It's Liverpool Football Club's knee." Bill Shankly to Tommy Smith.

 

And, you know what, Smith took off the bandage. It was another game, another world, another universe when Tommy Smith, born April 5, 1945, was playing for Liverpool. They were a second division outfit when he started at 15 on the ground staff, doing jobs for Harry the Paint and digging Mr Shankly's garden.

 

By the time he finished, after 632 appearances, he had collected four first division championship medals, two FA Cups, one European Cup, two Uefa Cups, one European Super Cup, a World Youth Cup and a reputation for being the most fearsome creature that had ever roamed the earth, with the exception of an aggrieved tyrannosaurus.

 

Some men have trophies in their cabinet. With Smith you would expect to see bones.

 

"It's as if I was going round committing murders," he said, smiling dangerously from his armchair in his spruce and modest home in Blundellsands. (No bones to report, but maybe they are not on display.)

 

"I never started a fight in my life, truly and honestly. I didn't go round knocking the hell out of people and I've never been sent off in football for a bad tackle. The only leg I ever broke was when I was 15 against a lad who played for Newcastle. Forgotten his name, but I sent him a card.

 

"The other tackles I put in were for the ball and if that meant hurting people in the process, well, so be it. It means next time I went in for the ball, he wasn't there. I'd warned him. It was football. It was a game for men, not kids."

 

When Shankly said Smith wasn't born but "quarried", he was speaking a deep, comic truth. Smith was about as slow as a lump of granite but, by god, what a rock of defence in those Liverpool teams. We Arsenal supporters used to shiver with terror at the thought of him tackling Charlie George. More to the point, so did Charlie George.

 

"I did warn players. When Jimmy Greaves came out at Anfield one time I handed him a piece of paper. He said: 'What's this?' I said: 'Just open it.' It was the menu from the Liverpool Infirmary." But he is right. He was sent off only once (for dissent) and booked three times in his entire career. There is no residue of bitterness against him among other great professionals of the era.

 

Bobby Charlton remembers him as "hard but fair" with a smile. When Smith suffered a heart attack in his garden last June, the visitors, messages and phone calls flooded in. Nobby Stiles, Norman Hunter, a letter from Michel Platini. Later, 46,000 people rose to him at Anfield, welcoming him back to the place that he has never really left.

 

"It was unbelievable. I was so emotional. I couldn't think of anything to say. Then someone said: 'Are you fit enough for a fight, Smithy?' I took the microphone and said: 'If anyone fancies their chances I'll see them outside the main entrance afterwards'." He laughed, then added: "It's brilliant that the supporters are still part of me."

 

Of course they are part of him and he of them. Those were the days when the football club was your life. His father died when he was 14, and first Bill Shankly, then Bob Paisley and Joe Fagan assumed the role of the father figure. It was a tough old life at the beginning, running so short of money that the council paid his mum £1 a week for his food, having two smashed teeth pulled out by a dentist known locally as 'Baker the Butcher', sneaking into Anfield when the gates opened near the end of matches to watch his hero, Billy Liddell.

 

That was the quarry in which he grew up. That formative geology explains everything. Resolution, toughness, heart were all there, waiting to be exploited and inspired by Shanks, the manager he still calls 'The Boss' (as well as "that f****** little Scots so-and-so").

 

Shankly was unimpressed by injuries. "Run it off" was the creed of the time, be it a knock or a broken leg. So when one of Smith's legs was opened up from knee to ankle, revealing a glistening white shinbone, during a Cup-Winners' Cup tie at Anfield against the Swiss team, Servette, the victim's first response was to just carry on. But so aghast was the reaction of opponents and the referee, he was reluctantly led away by Fagan for treatment.

 

He was taken off to the treatment room, which is where his troubles really began. "There was an old saying at Liverpool, if you were going to get injured do it before half-time because in the second half the doctor was pissed. He came in and the first thing he said was: 'Go and get Tommy a large brandy will you. And get me one as well.' He drank both of them, by the way, and then he said: 'I've only got six stitches.' So he put them about an inch apart, which didn't look right to me, and said: 'How do you feel?' I said: 'How do you think?' He wrote something down. I said: 'What's that?' He said: 'It's a prescription for penicillin. I think you're going to need it."

 

This too:

 

Mersey's Man of Iron

 

Tommy Smith is tough. He was a terrifying footballer for Liverpool, at a time when his city had little else left. Now every day is a fight against crippling injuries. But angry fans still urge him to go in hard, on prima donna players and the money men buying up sport

By Cole Moreton

Sunday, 23 March 2008

 

His eyes narrow. "You see me sitting here relaxed as hell," says Tommy Smith, "but don't get on the wrong side of me. I've got a bad side, know what I mean?"

 

Oh blimey, yes. They called him the Anfield Iron when he was a hard-as-hammers defender for Liverpool, during the football club's greatest years. "Tommy doesn't tackle opponents," said his manager, Bill Shankly, "so much as break them down for resale as scrap." With thick black Seventies hair and bandito moustache he was like a super-fit heavy out of Life on Mars, terrifying the opposition and "battering" anyone who challenged him in nightclubs (there were quite a few).

 

But the 'tache has gone. The hair is white. This is a 63-year-old man with osteo- and rheumatoid arthritis, two plastic knees, a replacement hip, a new elbow, a dodgy shoulder and a possible liver problem. Oh, and he had a six-way heart bypass last year. "Yes," says his wife Sue, smiling after telling him off for spilling his cup of tea, "the Iron Man has got a bit rusty."

 

He has to laugh, of course he does. It is laughable that an image born 40 years ago on the terraces still wraps itself around a poorly man close to pensionable age, living quietly in the seaside suburb of Blundellsands. But mention his name in Liverpool, and people who never saw him play – and some who don't even follow football – still say, "Ooh, hard man. Don't cross him."

 

He feels crossed. So does half his city this weekend, because Liverpool FC is in a mess. The two American tycoons who bought the club a year ago have fallen out. Tom Hicks and George Gillette have "restructured" the finances to pay for a new stadium, leaving Liverpool £350m in debt with annual interest payments of £30m. Both have been fiercely criticised by fans. Gillette has received death threats, and there were reports of the financial crisis in America putting new pressure on them. A finance company from Dubai is lurking, and some believe a sale may even happen before the end of the season.

 

So Liverpool will face rivals Everton a week today not knowing what the future holds. If a bank like Bear Stearns can implode, fans worry, so can over-ambitious football clubs.

 

"We haven't got a clue how much the club is going to be left in the mire if these two Americans don't get it sorted out," says Smith. "I would hate to see Liverpool fold. The supporters aren't afraid to tell these people, 'You're cocking it up.'"

 

Some fans have already had enough. They have just announced the formation of a new club called AFC Liverpool, following the model of those started in protest at the way Manchester United and MK Dons are run. A spokesman said ordinary fans had been priced out of Anfield. "A whole community is being denied the opportunity to grow up in the match-going culture."

 

Smith, who was born and raised within a mile of Anfield and joined the ground staff at the age of 15, agrees. "The money makers and those who are out to make their crock of gold have seized power," he says in a new autobiography, Anfield Iron (Bantam), published tomorrow. "Grossly inflated admission prices" have made the sport "increasingly elitist", he says. "The elderly and those on low incomes could once afford to watch top-division football. Not any more."

 

Is he impressed by AFC Liverpool then? Nope. "They might be shouting down the wrong hole, I'm afraid. The Americans won't give two hoots."

 

Outside Liverpool, why should any of it matter? Because no other big club has made so much of representing its community. That makes the Anfield crisis feel symbolic of what's happening to football as a whole: a growing estrangement between the fans, with their irrational devotion, traditions and memories of past triumphs, and the new foreign owners looking to turn all that into hard bucks. It goes beyond football, too. "Money more important than people? That's not us," said a caller to a radio phone-in as the car crept through the rain towards Smith's house. "Liverpool is being betrayed!"

 

It was unclear, for a moment, whether the caller meant the club or the city – but, for some, the two are synonymous. When the docks were closing, jobs were being lost and riots were brewing in the Seventies, the success of the team in red was a distraction and a source of pride, for half the city at least. The closeness endures. Just.

 

Tommy Smith was the tough guy at the back who made 638 appearances and scored a mighty header when Liverpool won the European Cup for the first time. It's just a game, of course, but in Liverpool along the way it became loaded with sentiment and symbolism. Smith played the first time they ever wore the famous all-red strip. He was there when the continuity announcer first played "You'll Never Walk Alone" – sung before and during every game since. He played with Kevin Keegan and Pele and was voted one of the 100 best British footballers of the 20th century.

 

The son of a foreman in the docks, Smith understands what Liverpool FC means to working people; but he doesn't think Hicks and Gillette do. "These are just two fellas who are very well off, trying to get more money for themselves."

 

The most he ever earned as a basic wage was £150 a week. The most he made in a year was £30,000 when Liverpool won the European Cup in 1977 and he was made an MBE. Now he writes for the Liverpool Echo and makes after-dinner speeches. He knows that the main role of a knackered old pro is to have a bash at the young ones. "Do you think this lot could play in the Sixties and Seventies, with all that mud? They play on a bloody bowling green with a balloon. We had a bloody cannonball!"

 

The rules have changed. "You're not allowed to tackle anybody," he says. "That might have been a problem for me." That's an understatement, from a man who admits to telling opposing strikers, "you go past me and I'll break your effing back". He once handed Tottenham star Jimmy Greaves a piece of paper before a game. It was a menu – from the local hospital. "What would I do with Ronaldo [the current Manchester United idol]? Run at him. Say, 'Why don't you piss off back to Portugal? You won't get kicked there, but you're gonna get kicked today.'"

 

Referees launched a campaign last week for more respect from petulant prima donna players. Chelsea's Ashley Cole was slated for refusing to turn round when being booked. Smith can hardly join in the condemnation: furious, he once kicked a ref in the leg. Astonishingly, he was booked only twice during his whole career and sent off once.

 

Some fans didn't realise he was different off the pitch, he says: not a mythical beast but a reasonable man who got married early to a girl he met when he was 16. "I'd go out for a meal with Sue and some fella would challenge me." What would he do? "Go outside and knock the shit out of him." Not just in Liverpool. "It happened in Spain, in the Netherlands ... all over."

 

Stars of the Seventies were often asked to name their toughest opponent. Frank Worthington of Leicester said: "My ex-wife." (But then his book was called One Hump or Two?) Smith should have said the Department of Health and Social Security.

 

"When I retired the doctor said, 'You've got the knees of a 75-year-old man'," he says. Half of all professional footballers retire with osteo-arthritis, the cartilage in their knees worn away. Smith claimed disability benefit. But then he took one last penalty.

 

It was before the 1996 FA Cup Final. "Drugged up to the eyeballs" and in pain, he hobbled across the turf and took the shot. But a benefits inspector was watching. A tribunal slashed his payments. "I couldn't believe they would do that," he says. "I was getting money for charity. I only kicked the ball once."

 

Some said the inspector was an Evertonian. The DHSS, bizarrely, insisted he preferred rugby league. But in his book, Smith gleefully recounts how a fan approached him two years ago with "good news" about the man: "He died last week."

 

Now he is back on the top level of benefit (about what Ronaldo earns in a twitch of his hips). There's no doubting him, after what happened in his garden last summer. "It was like somebody'd got their hands on me heart and was pulling it apart."

 

He takes 10 tablets a day. Bits of him are made of plastic and metal. "You wanna see the bloody things go off when I go through the airport." Maybe he is as tough as they say. "After all that's happened, I do appreciate just being alive. You're not expecting the Iron Man to start complaining, are you? I've got a reputation to live up to. Now then, son, do you want another cup of tea?"

[cyprusjag]

My own favourite Jags A "hard man" was big JD aka Jimmy Davidson. A strong commanding centre half who could play a bit

[lady-isobel-barnett]

Tommy Smith of Liverpool should surely be in there.

 

I'd assume Smith would've been in the pre '74 list, Jaggers. I'd be shocked if he wasn't.

 

Great article, tho'.

[Partick Panther]

Anyone who saw Dave MacKay play would agree that he was ahard but fair player in his day. Just ask Billy Bremmner!!!

[Blackpool Jags]

A great Jag who, imo, was very hard but fair and who could definitely play a bit was Ronnie Glavin. He shat it from no man. If Ronnie said it was pancake Friday, it was. But, thankfully he was renowned for his skill, goal scoring ability and powerhouse shooting. A massive favourite of mine was Mr Glavin.

[Willjag]

Fantastic articles Jagernaut. Thanks for posting!

[Partick Panther]

The Baillieston Boy "Alec Forsyth" was a dead set Hard and Fair Man on the park that's why Tommy Docherty signed him for Man Utd!

[kni]

Tommy Smith played for Liverpool until 1978 and was in the European Cup wining teams of 77 and 78 with Souness. He should qualify for the last easily. Ron "Chopper" Harris made over 650 appearances for Chelsea from 1961 to 1980. Norman "bites yer legs" Hunter played for Leeds up to 1976.

 

There were a lot of Italian and Spanish thugs "playing" in the 1970s. Juventus, Inter Milan and even Barcelona were particularly dirty away from home.

[uberteeb]

I'd have Gattuso in there before a few on that list.

 

Vieira was hard as nails as well without being outright dirty.

 

I can't really think of any proper lunatic hardmen for Thistle in the past 25 years, Pitbull was probably the most solid though.

[kni]

I'd have Gattuso in there before a few on that list.

 

Vieira was hard as nails as well without being outright dirty.

 

I can't really think of any proper lunatic hardmen for Thistle in the past 25 years, Pitbull was probably the most solid though.

 

McCoist said that Gattuso could start a fight in a telephone box.

 

Alan Dinnie was a hard. IIRC Chic Charnley got over 20 red cards in his career!

Edited October 25, 2013 by kni

[uberteeb]

Chico was a hot head and semi-lunatic but he isn't the kind of player who I would put in the category of 'hard', suppose it depends how you define it.

[jagfox]

Billy "Aber" Abercrombie was a hard man for St Mirren but by the time he came here his career and personal life were on the slide due to alcoholism. Never saw it, but his assault on Wylde was meant to be horrific. I guess it is a thin line between hard man and thug

[Jaggernaut]

Not a "hardman", but I can't remember Boab McCulloch ever shrinking out of a tackle. Not ever.

[jagfox]

Andi Goikoetxea of Bilbao and Spain. A couple of high profile brutal challenges on Maradona and Bernt Schuster. Became known as the Butcher of Bilbao. Story was that he kept the boot from the Maradona assault in a glass cabinet in his home

Won 40 Spanish caps and the league and cup with Bilbao in the 80s, so he could play a bit too.

[jagfox]

Big Gordon Rae was a brickwall for the Jags despite being here at the tail-end of his playing career.

[lady-isobel-barnett]

Anyone who saw Dave MacKay play would agree that he was ahard but fair player in his day. Just ask Billy Bremmner!!!

 

Dave MacKay was the about the best example of a hard man but fair I could come up with. Anyone who didn't give him respect would have to have been an out and out nutter. Sounness was hard but dirty. Guys like Johnny Giles and rather sadly Bertie Auld, both very good ball players, were just plain dirty..

[Alan100]

I was lucky enough to see Tommy Smith, Dave McKay and Norman Hunter play. Smith was winding down his career at Swansea City when they played Spurs in a League Cup match. His tackle on Ossie Ardiles was that late, it would have been worth a booking in the next game. Needless to say Ardiles didn't kick a ball all night after that.

I was living in Derby when Norman "Bites yer Legs" Hunter and Francis Lee got involved in a bit of afters in a match between derby and Leeds, and continued after being sent for first use of the soap by the ref. Neither took a step back.

No Terry Hurlock or Roy Keane? Peter Storey and Peter Simpson at Arsenal were tasty as well. All teams need an enforcer if they are going to be successful.