FEW things have more power to inflame and enrage large numbers of people than a cartoon depiction of the prophet Mohammed — but noticing Robbie Savage’s name on the opposition team sheet is perhaps one of them.

Robbie regularly wins “Name The Premiership Player You Would Most Like to Beat To Death With A Shovel” competitions. His closest contender is usually the modest and level-headed Craig Bellamy. Previous winners have included Vinnie Jones, Pat Van Den Hauwe and John Hartson. The eagle-eyed among you may have spotted a theme.

Robbie, so it is said, has never been sent off, despite the plainly martial element of his game. This is a modern myth. I swear I have seen Savage being awarded the red card and then walking, badger-mouthed and growling, towards the touchline. But commentators still trot it out whenever he decapitates an opposing player: “Oooh, that was a bit high — surely a yellow card at least? He’s never been sent off, you know.”

I reckon he’s been sent off about 87 times, but, due to some Mephistophelian pact, the memory of each dismissal is wiped from the public mind by the next Saturday.

Robbie’s latest contretemps was a double-header with Rio Ferdinand, the Manchester United defender and part-time professor of Lucasian mathematics at Cambridge University. Bout number one occurred during the Carling Cup semi-final between Blackburn and United as the players were walking off at half-time. Rio is, in truth, a fairly simple soul and it is not difficult to reconstruct his thought processes in those moments before the brawl, the cogs inside his cerebral cortex turning at a speed imperceptible to the human eye. “Look,” he must have thought, “there’s Robbie Savage! Surely nobody will object if I hit him?” A not unreasonable supposition. Certainly the referee seemed to think it was fair enough and Rio wasn’t punished.

During the Premiership match a week later Rio adopted an ambitious two-part game plan, which was: a) to maim Robbie Savage as often as possible; and b) to gift the opposition more goals than Sol Campbell was doing at Highbury. He was pretty successful on both counts. Rio ended the game a shade early at the invitation of the referee; Robbie was stretchered off, grinning from ear to ear. It was all very entertaining. Robbie could be later heard sniggering about the whole business on a BBC radio programme.

I have to admit that, unlike many supporters, I rather admire the long list of gobby, psychopathic Welshmen who have adorned the top tier of English football for the best part of a century. I have many happy memories of watching that great lunk of Welsh mutton, Trevor Hockey, hacking out at all and sundry, not to mention Terry Yorath putting a crafty boot in here and there. Certainly, in the great pantheon of football’s villainous stereotypes, I far prefer gobby, psychopathic Welshmen to, say, snivelling, cheating Frenchmen. I suspect that if Arsenal had held their noses last summer and bought Savage (or, for that matter, Tim Cahill) they would not have found themselves close to mid-table in the Premiership and summarily evicted from every other competition. They lack steel — but more than this, they lack that spark of malice that can bond a team together and is so entertaining for the rest of us. Mr Wenger can whine about being “bullied” by the likes of Bolton, Blackburn and Everton; he can even wear one of the anti-bullying wristbands sported by wet and sanctimonious children. But on the football pitch, there’s nothing wrong with a bit of rigorous, well-focused bullying of the sort meted out by messrs Savage, Cahill and Kevin Davies. These days you just blow on Arsenal and they fall apart and queue up for counselling sessions.

And of course the howls of anguish when Savage walks on to the pitch very quickly change if he happens to be wearing your team’s colours. And no matter what team you support and no matter how gilded and illustrious the names of your elegant former international midfield strategists and inside- forwards, my guess is that you revere the famous, unreconstituted thugs even more. At the old Academy of Football (a slight delusion, this, but we’ll let it pass for the moment), Upton Park, the names of Billy Bonds and Julian Dicks are spoken of with a more unquestioning love than those of Moore, Peters and Hurst. At Spurs they still carry a torch for Dave Mackay and at Chelsea for the loveable Ron ’Arris. Down at the Den, our list of gilded, elegant and illustrious international maestros is brief, but there’s no doubt Harry Cripps is remembered with more fondness than the exquisitely talented Eamonn Dunphy, and Terry Hurlock far more fondly than Teddy Sheringham. We undoubtedly adored Dennis Wise while he was there and may even glance wistfully towards Coventry, where he is hauling them single-handedly up towards the playoffs.

Savage — and Hurlock, Cahill etc — can, as the football pundits say by way of mitigation, “play a bit, too”. But their real strength is in understanding the psychology not just of the game, but of each individual player taking part. They can sniff out weakness and fear from a hundred yards and then exploit those deficiencies for all they are worth, often changing the course of a match in the process. That’s what we love them for.

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