THATCH
OF THE DAY

No 4 Tommy Smith, Liverpool FC 1962-78

Tommy Smith.

What can we say about Tommy that hasn't already been said?

With his pock marked face, fleshy hooter and Super Mario moustache, he could easily have played a villain on Thames TV's hugely successful (and contemporary) cops 'n' robbers series The Sweeney.

Tommy was so tough he's now virtually crippled after playing on with injuries that might have finished other men's careers.

As he once cheerfully admitted in a TV interview: "Oh aye, the doc would give us pain killing injections just before we went out on the pitch. They killed the pain like, but they also stopped us feeling how much damage we were doing to ourselves."

Tommy belonged to that not-so-small band of 1970s hard men for whom the phrase 'defending the goal area' was synonymous with 'common assault'.

Seeing your favourite player being tackled by Tommy Smith was like seeing your favourite pet run over by a steam roller - deeply upsetting but grimly fascinating.

In short, when Tommy tackled them, they stayed tackled.

It's often said that the modern game is much faster than 30 years ago. Time plays tricks, and perhaps Tommy and his contemporaries Norman Hunter and Ron 'Chopper' Harris were a lot slower than they seemed. But they were hard men at the time and when you watch the footage again they're STILL hard men.

Nowadays red cards (where a player is dismissed from the field for the remainder of the match) are handed out like sweets at a kids' party. In those days you virtually had to murder someone before you even got a cautioning yellow (actually the offender's name was just scribbled down in the ref's notebook, hence the term 'a booking').

I remember a few years later at the 1982 World Cup Finals in Spain, watching a baby faced, skinny young Maradona almost kicked to pieces by an Italian defender who rejoiced under the name of - wait for it - Gentile (pronounced Gen-tee-lay). Maradona had virtually no protection from the referee at all, and at that time two-footed tackles from behind were perfectly legal.

It was left more or less to the referee's discretion to decide if a challenge was dangerous. In the 1970s most British referees would have been aged around 40 to 50 and therefore had either been in the army in World War Two or been a child during The Blitz. In either case, their definition of what constituted danger would be very different to that of an average citizen today.

Two decades earlier in 1958 there was a famous incident in an FA Cup Final where Manchester United's goalkeeper caught the ball on his line, and was then shoulder charged into the net, still grasping the ball, by Bolton's Nat Lofthouse. The referee gave the goal without even batting an eyelid. To an American Football or Aussie Rules player this would have been all in a day's work. To an English goalkeeper it came as a bit of a surprise.

Now we've gone to the other extreme of over-protection of players and unseemly displays of handbags at dawn, bitch slapping and feigned injury to get opponents sent off. A common technique is to respond to an adversary's petulant push as if you had been hit by a right hook from Lennox Lewis.

In Britain we used to claim that this was a 'continental' (ie foreign) habit. Today the English Premier League is full of foreign players, but the British players cheat just as cheerfully and skilfully.

There was no point trying to con a referee in the 1970s because they wouldn't call the trainer on unless they could see blood or a bone sticking through your sock. Now whole seasons turn on how skillful a player is at making his penalty area dive look like he'd been fouled.

Progress? I don't think so Tommy.