James Lawton: In the old days you needed real skill to foul

Thirty-odd years ago I was frogmarched into the dressing room of a Portuguese football team and shown what was claimed to be the handiwork of my compatriot Francis Lee, of Manchester City and England. It wasn't pretty. A red gash ran from the Portuguese player's thigh to below his knee. Some of his team-mates poked my chest and said I must expose the "assassin". When apprised of my experience, Lee's cherubic face contorted in outraged innocence.

At around the same time David Johnson, a striker of Ipswich Town, sheepishly revealed that during a game with the Roman club, Lazio, the most intimate part of his anatomy had sustained a wound that would take many painful weeks to heal. We all then lay flat on the floor as our coach was driven out of Rome's Olympic Stadium in a hail of missiles.

Somewhat grisly recollections, you may say, but perhaps a little perspective is required when analysing the headlines that greeted Monday night's Premiership game between Arsenal and Leeds when 11 bookings were delivered and two players sent off. "Now It's War," screamed one. "Leeds bruisers" announced another.

An old pro of that earlier era, having watched the game and then read the headlines, sighed heavily and said: "Things have changed a bit - in my day the idea was not to have an opponent sent off but carried off. What we had at Highbury on Monday night wasn't war but stupidity. There was no defence for the kind of stuff my generation got involved in. We said we were merely defending ourselves, and if you didn't get in the first blow, create a degree of respect, your career could be finished in one tackle and you would still have a mortgage to pay."

This particular old pro has long bemoaned the annexation of his game by businessmen, spivs, publicists, novelists who see in it a metaphor for the agonies of their youth, stand-up comedians, failed politicians and radio talk-show hosts. He does not defend the old violence, but says it was a fact of football life that had a certain brutal integrity. It also required a high level of skill.

Yes, skill. It was the proficiency of a black art. One of the ironies of that age of skulduggery was that the most accomplished villains were almost invariably players who could produce dazzling skill on the ball.

Confronted by the main culprits of of Monday night, the dismissed Lee Bowyer and Danny Mills, the old practitioners would have been stunned by both the naivety of their demeanour and the clumsiness of their execution. Bowyer made two overtly illegal tackles and then "snarled" obscene abuse at the referee. Mills kicked the ball against a fallen opponent. What we had, the old pro concluded, was more evidence of vastly rewarded professionals putting more into their posturing than their performance.

So had he been writing the headline it would have read: "Now it's Phoney War." He may have had Bobby Collins in mind. Collins was a small Scottish midfielder who played for Celtic, Everton and Leeds with huge talent and a ferocious cynicism in the tackle that still, 30 years on, means he is given a respectfully wide berth when playing Sunday football.

Collins taught the brilliant – but hated – Leeds team of Don Revie how to look after itself. His pièce de résistance was the "over-the-ball" tackle. This demanded exquisite skill and a complete absence of conscience. The ball was allowed to run into what amounted to a 50-50 tackle before the assailant played through it and into the shin of his opponent. As executed by Collins, the crime was rarely detected before the X-ray plates were inspected.

Collins's career was rather savagely foreshortened in a game in Bologna. His leg was broken terribly in an Italian tackle. Not only did he refrain from "snarling" his outrage, he scarcely uttered a whimper. As the old pro was saying, times have changed.