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Graeme Souness

Even in the legalised GBH halcyon era of the 1970s and early eighties, English football knew no more vicious a would-be maimer than Graeme Souness. With the thick moustache and bubble perm regarded as mandatory at Liverpool at the time, he may have joined team-mate Mark Lawrenson (see no. 14) as a prototype for the Village People’s construction worker. But had you found yourself sharing a YMCA dormitory or navy bunk with Souness, you’d soon enough have swapped the warmth for a street doorway or Davy Jones’s locker, for fear of being on the wrong end of a studs-up leg-breaker in the middle of the night.

No one ever took such unsmiling satisfaction from endangering careers. His most infamous assault, late in his career for Glasgow Rangers against Steaua Bucharest, crystallised the purity of his malevolence. About the raising and spiteful stamping of his right boot onto the thigh of one Dmitri Rotario there was nothing unusual. What was so refreshingly novel was that Souness, whose reaction to this arrestable offence was to clutch his own leg in mock agony, was in possession of the ball at the time.

The best to be said of Souness’s commitment to violence is that it never lacked integrity. Just as with Roy Keane, who is excused an entry thanks to the accurate character reading he offered Mick McCarthy (see no. 31), he was too magnificent a player to need the brutality. There was no design or purpose to it whatever. This was the Edmund Hillary of football hatchet men: he sought to rupture cruciate ligaments because they were there.

Souness went on to earn his berth on Sky Sports, where despite the hot competition he shines out as a beacon of charisma-free witlessness, in the traditional manner. Only having repeatedly proved his uselessness as a manager, with Liverpool, Blackburn Rovers and Newcastle among others, was he deemed fit to point out their inadequacies to coaches in current employment.

Despite the rich catalogue of failures, his self-confidence remains as strident as it is misplaced. A few years ago I came across him in a bar during one of Tottenham’s then perpetual managerial crises, and asked if he fancied himself the guy to turn Spurs around. ‘Son,’ he said, leaning magisterially back on his stool, ‘the club I couldnae turn round has yet to be built.’

Inexplicably, this remains a judgement shared by no one else. Indeed, in a nice instance of life imitating art imitating life, Souness has come to emulate Yosser Hughes, with whom he famously appeared in a Boys From the Black Stuff cameo (excellent he was, too). Time and time again he has invited chairmen to ‘Gizza job,’ and been answered with a sarcastic chuckle. Although not, one suspects, to his face.