Hard-knock life

When Chelsea's Frank Leboeuf spoke out last week about violence in the English game he incurred the wrath of many of England's hardest hard men, including Stuart Pearce and Steve McMahon, who more or less told him to go back to where he came from.

Jimmy Greaves's response though, in his column in The Sun, beat all. "I would love to take Le Powderpuff, sorry Leboeuf, back in time and stand him in the tunnel alongside Don Revie's Leeds team. It would not be so much a case of the blue flag flying high as the brown shorts falling low. Can you imagine what Jack Charlton, Norman Hunter and Billy Bremner would have made of this bloke?" "If he had been one of my old Chelsea team-mates, we would have pinned him down, dressed him in a skirt and dumped him on the King's Road," he concluded. Isn't it a pity such a voice of reason and restraint is seldom heard on television anymore?