Football Hard Man: Red Card Roy
“Football is not like it used to
be,” so says the old man that props up every bar in every boozer in Britain.
“There are no characters anymore, no hard men.”
The old man at the bar will then bore
you with stories about footballers like Norman Hunter, Graeme Souness or Billy
Bremner, but if you want to learn about a hard man with character, then you need
to know about Roy McDonough. Officially England’s hardest ever footballer, with
a record of 22 red cards.
A biography about Roy titled, Red Card Roy, subtitled ‘Sex, Booze and
Early Baths – The Life of Britain’s Wildest-Ever Footballer’ has just been
released. As well as the red cards, Roy’s
career saw him play more than 650 games for seven league clubs, score 150
goals, sink thousands of beers and sleep with 400 women. All while wearing a
full-on growler of a moustache.
“There are no real hard men anymore,”
says Roy, sounding like the old man at the bar, as he is being driven down the
M25 on the way to another book signing. “Roy Keane was the last true hard man
in the Premier League. There is no one like him anymore.”
When Roy McDonough talks about hard
men then you should listen. This is a man who karate-kicked current Stoke City
manager, Tony Pulis, to the floor in an FA Cup game, verbally sparred with his
then teammate and now Everton manager, David Moyes, and had a continuing battle
with current Sunderland manager, Martin O’Neill, when he was managing Wycombe.
He didn’t just fight against
players either. “During one game for Colchester United against Walsall,” Roy
shouts just before he disappears into the Dartford Tunnel. “I got arrested and
put in the nick for swearing at a fan in the crowd who was giving me stick.”
Roy first got his marching orders
when he tried to strangle the referee in a schools’ cup final at the age of 16.
This didn’t stop him signing for his local team Birmingham City though, and moving
onto Walsall and then Chelsea. “I’ll tell you something kid,” he says in his
thick Brummie slur. “Walsall’s a better run club than Chelsea.”
Roy’s bitterness towards Chelsea is
understandable as he never played a game for them, which meant that to fill the
time when he should’ve been playing matches, Roy instead started to get more
serious about drinking and womanising.
It was Roy’s move from Chelsea to
Colchester that saw him settle into his true vocation as a footballer. He was
now a hard-core drinker. Or, to put it into Royspeak: “It was lower division
party time.” He introduced the ‘six by six’ rule, which meant that every player
had to down six pints after the game before the coach left at 6pm. Some feat considering
the game finished at 4.45pm. The drinking got that out of control that as part
of a new fitness regime Roy promised the physio he would cut down to just 70 pints of beer a week.
There wasn’t just booze and early
baths though, there were also lots of women. When Roy was playing for Exeter
City he describes himself as becoming “The Third Division’s answer to Michael
Douglas.” He was with a different girl every night of the week, not bothering
to learn their names just knowing them by the days of the week they would meet.
He even found time to run off with the groundsman’s wife when he went back to
Colchester as player-manager.
Roy’s party piece was drinking a
pint of lager whilst standing on his head. He would do this most nights of the
week, as there were a lot of parties when Roy was around. Contrast this to Alan
Shearer who celebrated his only Premier League title by going home and
creosoting the fence.
Next time the old man at the bar
wants to tell you a story, tell him the story about Roy McDonough instead, it
should shut him up for a few minutes at least. And for that, Roy McDonough,
lower league football legend, we salute you!
EN
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