Heroes & Villains, the Aston Villa fanzine
Heroes & Villains => Villa Memories => Topic started by: pooligan on July 23, 2011, 08:56:23 AM
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Which is the hardest Villa player you have seen? I can think of a few who were as hard as nails, players such as Vic Crowe,Dick Edwards,Dave Simmons,Sammy Morgan,Leighton Phillips and Andy Lochhead but the one who stands out for me above them all is George Curtis. I never saw anyone pick on this guy when he played for us.Not sure if it is true,but a Coventry fan once told me he played on with a broken leg once not knowing how serious the injury was.If true,would not surprise me.
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I remember when he signed for us at Christmas, a huge bloke who went in hard defending and also for our corners, they called him the pig because he grunted so much. A lovely bloke off the pitch too.
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Stuart Downing, the way he flew into tackles was terrifying. A real hardnut and Villa will be a softer touch without his steel down the left this season.
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Shun Teale is the first name that springs to mind.
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Macca for me, maybe it was his aura, he had a presence that bigger guys didn't necessarily have. You'd never see Vinnie Jones, Julian Dicks etc square up to God. He was a hard man, but gentle, fair and unaggressive, would not have meant he couldn't have handled himself if he needed to.
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Shaun Teale Man of Steel
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Lord McGrath and Teale were a tough pair to face. I always remember Garry Thompson was pretty hard as well.
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It's a sad state of affairs when the last name we can come up with stopped playing for us in 1996.
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Bouma and Olof were tough cookies to I reckon, maybe Carew also.
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It's a sad state of affairs when the last name we can come up with stopped playing for us in 1996.
Sad but true; we haven't really had a real hard man playing for us for some time
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Trevor Hockey and George Curtis.
Psycho Evans was also a beast.
Within the framework of the modern game, I guess Mellberg was hard, as was Boateng.
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It's a sad state of affairs when the last name we can come up with stopped playing for us in 1996.
Sad but true; we haven't really had a real hard man playing for us for some time
Bouma? McCann? Olly?
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Andy Townsend?
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McCann wasn't hard! He looked like a bloody badger!
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Bouma probably had the hardest head in football. Granite ffs!
I wouldn't say hard because he seems too nice, but Laursen had balls. He gave everything and literally would never pull away from a challenge or blocking a ball. He'd have blocked an express train to stop it getting in the net.
Teale, God, Dublin, Mellberg.
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Was Bouma's head harder than Boateng's?
I seem to recall Gazza trying to give him a forearm smash in a midweek match when we played Boro and the fat piss can ended up breaking his arm!
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Les Sealey, rest his soul, was apparently hard as nails.
on the pitch i would say Alan McInally or Martin Keown
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Neale Cooper.
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Hey Dave,you must have a great memory. I remember Neale Cooper but i can't remember him playing more than a handful of games.
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Of course there was Bruce Rioch as well, who was a b*st*rd on the pitch.
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Hey Dave,you must have a great memory. I remember Neale Cooper but i can't remember him playing more than a handful of games.
He hardly played but he was a mental case in all of them.
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Oh yes Neale Cooper was mental ok,i remember watching him in a Central League match and him dropping the nut on some guy and somehow staying on the pitch.
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Him and Stuart Pearce going into a 50/50. He wasn't the second to get up.
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Allan Evans for me but Andy Gray, Leighton Phillips, Ken McNaught, Peter Withe, Steve McMahon, Garry Thompson, Neale Cooper and Shaun Teale could all handle themselves. I still think the best thing I've ever seen on a football pitch was from Stuart Pearce though. Euro '92, Basile Boli, who was built like a heavyweight boxer dropped the nut on him. Pearce didn't flinch, wiped some blood off his cheek, looked at his hand with the blood on it and then looked at Boli in a dismissive way that said to me 'was that your best shot you pr**k?'
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Call me obsessed but I don't remember Sid pulling out of any tackles despite weighing barely nine stone in a soaking wet duffel coat
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George Curtis gets my vote.
I could only find this picture of him in a Villa shirt, which happens to contain a few others who could look after themselves.
Charlie Aitken, Mick Wright, Lew Chatterley, Lochhhead, Godfrey. In between 30 yard rocket shots and pin point passes half the length of the pitch, Bruce Rioch would be dishing it out too.
(http://ds.dial.pipex.com/bob.dunning/astonvilla.jpg)
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Love the photo ALITA, Good to see the likes of Bradley,Chatterley,Turnbull,Wright and Gibson again. Love the shirt to,its my favourite out of al the ones we have worn over the years.
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I've heard stories of George Curtis training on a gravel car park (not sure if it was Villa or Coventry he was with then) and thinking nothing of going into slide tackles and then just picking the bits of gravel out of his legs after training.
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Townsend was hard. Wouldnt have fancied going into a 50/50 with him.
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I remember a Scottish colleague telling me what a dirty bastard and good player Neale Cooper had been at Aberdeen so I was really disappointed in him during his time with us. To be fair to him he was playing .
under the disaster that was Only One King Billy, but I would have loved him to have severed more legs to help keep us up.
I agree with most of the above names, but pound for pound the most fearless player I can remember in a Villa shirt was Eamonn Deacy. 10 stone, will o the wisp, and he flew into tackles in the way that Cropley and Cowans used to. Like all truly hard players he could take it as well. One of my few happy memories of the Juventus game was of Eamonn splattering Claudio Gentile, who was the dirtiest player in the history of Italian football.
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I don't remember Cooper as being particularly hard. I would put him at the top of any list for player with the most poorly timed tackles though. Cooper would make Paul Scholes look like Downing at his wimpiest.
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Sid.
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I don't remember Cooper as being particularly hard. I would put him at the top of any list for player with the most poorly timed tackles though. Cooper would make Paul Scholes look like Downing at his wimpiest.
More or less finished Ian Durrants career for Rangers with one of the worst tackles you've ever seen. Being a dirty bastard and chopping skilful players doesn't make him a hard man, as you rightly say.
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I don't remember Cooper as being particularly hard. I would put him at the top of any list for player with the most poorly timed tackles though. Cooper would make Paul Scholes look like Downing at his wimpiest.
More or less finished Ian Durrants career for Rangers with one of the worst tackles you've ever seen. Being a dirty bastard and chopping skilful players doesn't make him a hard man, as you rightly say.
That was Neil Simpson. Ask any Scottish player of the time and they'd tell you Cooper was right up there at the top of the hard man list.
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A bit before my time but my dad always reckons George Cummings is the hardest we've ever had.
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Frank Barson is also one of hard man in the older days. But again we won't know as there is probably no video coverage of him in action.
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A bit before my time but my dad always reckons George Cummings is the hardest we've ever had.
As did my dad, Bill Shankley picked Cummings in his best ever XI and apparently he was the one full back that Stanley Matthews couldn't play against. "Dance all you like Stanley but come anywhere near me I'll put you in the stands" was allegedly his opening line to him.
In my time Bruce Rich - hard with a fair bit of nasty about him, and George Curtis - just hard.
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Looking back at great hard tacklers....Earl Barret, not what I remember as a particularly hard player but his tackle on Cantona in his Leeds days at VP with Cantona attacking the Holte End is the most fulsome tackle I've witnessed, perfectly executed with velocity and accuracy and enough force to win the ball cleanly and leave Cantona shocked, winded and out of sorts for much of the remaining game.
It was just perfect.
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McGrath.
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It can be easy to mix up a hard player from a dirty player. The likes of Chopper Harris and Graeme Souness used to be called hard but they were just downright dirty. I remember 70s Villa players like Godfrey, Lochhead and Morgan being particularly hard but the toughest but clean player I've seen at Villa was Shaun Teale. When he tackled you, you knew about it!
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It has to be George Curtis for me by a million miles, he apparently used to tweak the noses of players he thought weren't giving their all in games !
He had his nose broken and split all over his face in the early stages of the 3-0 win at Notts County in the Third Division by Tony Hateley, but despite constant recommendations to leave the field and even be substituted (including by Hateley himself), he totally refused to come off.
He then refused to have his nose operated on until we were mathematically sure of promotion, even though he suffered severe breathing problems.
Can you imagine a player today doing that ?
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Imagine a back four with George Curtis, God, Shaun Teale and George Cummings and Frank Barson as defensive midfielder. That would make Arsene Wenger happy :)
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Shaun Teale and Allan Evans for me
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I don't remember Cooper as being particularly hard. I would put him at the top of any list for player with the most poorly timed tackles though. Cooper would make Paul Scholes look like Downing at his wimpiest.
More or less finished Ian Durrants career for Rangers with one of the worst tackles you've ever seen. Being a dirty bastard and chopping skilful players doesn't make him a hard man, as you rightly say.
That was Neil Simpson. Ask any Scottish player of the time and they'd tell you Cooper was right up there at the top of the hard man list.
It was definately Simpson who did Durrant. Rangers signed Cooper from us. If they had bought Neil Simpson after that tackle his reception from the Rangers fans would have been worse than Mo Johnston's was.
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McGrath.
Yeah, Macca was the hardest by far.
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Didn't Boateng get elbowed in the head leaving his assailant clutching his arm in agony? Wasn't he also assaulted by Gerard (or Murphy?) at Anfield with a leg-breaker tackle where his shin bent and he got up and walked away?
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Alpay?
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Didn't Boateng get elbowed in the head leaving his assailant clutching his arm in agony? Wasn't he also assaulted by Gerard (or Murphy?) at Anfield with a leg-breaker tackle where his shin bent and he got up and walked away?
Ya.(a) Gazza and (b) Gerrard...who was sent off.
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Didn't Boateng get elbowed in the head leaving his assailant clutching his arm in agony? Wasn't he also assaulted by Gerard (or Murphy?) at Anfield with a leg-breaker tackle where his shin bent and he got up and walked away?
Ya.(a) Gazza and (b) Gerrard...who was sent off.
With Gerard Houllier lambasting Boateng for play acting on the touchline. GH later apologised after seeing the incident on TV, which was fair enough.
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1 - George Curtis - played for 89 minutes with a broken nose at Notts County. Hard as nails. Known as the Iron Man when at Coventry.
2 - Andy Lochhead - I saw him look round to see if the ref was watching at York one night before whacking their centre half in the nose. An article in the paper after we lost to Spurs in the 1970-71 League Cup Final refers to Lochhead 'flattening Jennings and Collins' before hitting the ball towards goal. Jennings and Collins were not small players. Lochhead used to give centre halves a real hard time and was a delight to watch.
3 - Mike Pejic - never saw the best of him but I remember him getting hold of Jimmy Case round the throat when he played for Everton. A very tough full back who players would think twice about before trying to take on.
4 - Neale Cooper - Got viciously booed in the friendly at Celtic Park. I asked one of the Celtic fans why they had booed him and he said that Cooper was 'the dirtiest bastard in Scotland'.
He was another player that we never saw the best, or worst, of.
5- Trevor Hockey - did a good job for us in those dark days. One of the most menacing looking of players.
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URL=http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/840/villa6970.jpg/](http://img840.imageshack.us/img840/1324/villa6970.jpg)[/URL]
You wouldn't mess with some of these.
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(http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/6955/zzzpele.jpg)
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(http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/6955/zzzpele.jpg)
Pele and George Curtis....fucking hell, no wonder Pele had an erectile problem :o
nice cutting DCF
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