adminPeter Crouch was not built to react to the Milan midfielder’s late lunges and provocation, Rafael van de Vaart and Steven Pienaar too amiable or astonished to respond to his antics, the officials seemingly unwilling to properly clamp down.
However, in the Tottenham technical area stood a square-jawed, shaven-headed Scot, eyes burning, dentures grinding. Joe Jordan had spent nearly half a century in football refusing to take a backward step and he was not about to start now.
It is 12 years to the day since Tottenham enjoyed one of their finest European results by beating then Serie A leaders AC Milan in the first leg of their Champions League last-16 tie. All that most remember of the night, though, are the two clashes between a wild-eyed, tousle-haired 33-year-old and a bespectacled opposition coach on the cusp of his 60s.
Were it not for Gareth Bale singlehandedly destroying Inter Milan in the group stages, Gattuso v Jordan would probably be the defining image of the north London club’s superb debut Champions League campaign.
Goals and skill remain football’s chief draw, but there is an allure to an on-field scuffle, despite what pearl-clutching commentators may tell you as the scenes force you from your seat and draw you ever closer to your television screen.
What made the San Siro spat all the more mesmerising was the way it played out over the course of an engrossing 90 minutes and that it pitted the then poster boy for modern combative midfielders against a grizzled old pro who had once been the hardest man for Milan in an era full of them.
Sat in Sky’s studio in the San Siro on the night of the game, Graeme Souness, who knows a thing or two about getting stuck in on a football field, remarked that Gattuso had clearly “not done his homework” when he chose to take on Jordan.
Had he done, the Italian would have read about a man who grew up in a Lanarkshire pit village, learning to play on a local football field he called the Corn Patch. He would have learned of a player who was schooled by the likes of Billy Bremner and Norman Hunter in arguably the toughest changing room of them all at Leeds United in the 1970s. He may also have seen that in 2007, the Times named the Scot the 34th hardest man in football history.
A little closer to home for Gattuso, just two years prior to the game with Spurs, on the 110th anniversary of the formation of AC Milan, Jordan was named among the 110 most important players to appear for the club.
In truth, the Italian need only look at the images a quick Google search would offer; of the toothless grin Jordan earned by sticking his head in where it hurts during a goalmouth scramble in a reserve game early in his playing days. For much of his 11-year playing career in England, he was ‘Jaws’. In Italy, they called him ‘Lo Squalo’ (The Shark). – BBC Sport.
Online Reporter