In a rather casual and relaxed training session for Real Madrid yesterday, the rugged and hard-tackling Danish midfielder Thomas Gravesen decided to practise his long-forgotten rough tackling and took out his teammate, Brazilian striker Robinho.
Robinho, being as flimsy as ever, didn't take the tackle well. He decided to honestly tell Gravesen what he thought and Gravesen, being as tough as ever, also decided to have an honest discussion, with the two players only millimetres apart. And it didn't surprise anyone that the verbal jarring soon turned into physical altercation, with the two players pushing and shoving each other. Luckily, there were soon separated by their intervening teammates.
Eventually, coach Fabio Capello decided to sit down the two players and ordered them to watch the remaining of the training session at the side of the pitch.
(Moral of the story: If you want to have an early shower after a tough workout in scorching heat, get into a fight.)
Feuding among teammates is not uncommon in the sporting world. In an English Premier League match between Newcastle and Aston Villa in April 2005, Lee Bowyer and Kieron Dyer were so mad at each other that a fight eventually broke out.
Problem was, Bowyer and Dyer were teammates of Newcastle, and their altercation took place after they had fallen behind to the visitors 0-3.
While FIFA President Sepp Blatter lamented the number of red and yellow cards shown in the World Cup matches, the referee that day had no choice but to send both of them off, deservedly so.
And not only teammate on a football team would be feuding with each other. In 2003, Oakland Raiders veteran Bill Romanowski sucker punched rookie teammate Marcus Williams in a training session due to an alleged verbal abuse. Although monetary damages had been awarded to Williams subsequently in a law court, Williams suffered a broken eye socket and soon had to retire from football.
In 2002, Barry Bonds and Jeff Kent, the two star players of the San Francisco Giants, decided to settle their nth argument in the dugout during a game, and the skirmish was caught by the TV crews. Bonds and Kent had been at odds with each other for a while, and at the end of the season, Kent decided that "enough is enough" and signed with the Houston Astros.
However, the most tragic (some say the creepiest) feuding among teammates took place in 1982, in the Ferrari Formula One team.
At the San Marino Grand Prix, Canadian Gilles Villeneuve and Frenchman Didier Pironi received the team instruction to slow their cars down, as the pair were literally miles ahead of everyone and had no need to push hard. Team leader Villeneuve duly obliged, having been a loyal second man to then team leader Jody Scheckter in 1979 when Scheckter won the World Championship, which Villeneuve could have won easily had he not followed his team leader in so many races that season, as per team order.
However Pironi, the supposedly second man to Villeneuve, was having none of it, and decided to overtake Villeneuve and won the race. Feeling betrayed, Villeneuve was conspicuously sullen on the podium, and vowed that he would never speak to Pironi again for the rest of his life.
Many thought that time would resolve their dispute, but Villeneuve had no time. In the final qualifying session for the next race, the Belgian Grand Prix less than two weeks later, Villeneuve crashed fatally in a last ditch attempt to better Pironi's time.
In the absence of Villeneuve, Pironi took over as the number one driver for Ferrari, and looked certain to win the Championship. But it turned out that more tragedies would follow him like a shadow.
First, in the Canadian Grand Prix only a month after Villeneuve's death, Pironi stalled his car on the starting grid and Riccardo Paletti, a young Italian driver in an Osella, crashed into the back of the Ferrari at full speed and would subsequently die. It was the first Formula One race held on the circuit after being renamed as Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, in honour of the feisty French-Canadian.
Less than two months later, Pironi himself would have a horrific accident while practising for the German Grand Prix, and the injuries suffered were so serious that he would never race in Formula One again. Eventually, he would lose his hard-earned but comfortable lead in the Championship, and his life in a power boating accident in 1987.
(Moral of the story: Don't mess with your teammates. Otherwise he/she/it will come back haunt you in whichever way imaginable.)
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