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Biggest tantrums
Football is an emotional game, and players can occasionally overstep the mark when the stakes are high (and sometimes when they’re not).
In this slideshow we pick out 12 of the biggest tantrums the game has ever seen, featuring birthday cakes, flip flops, car parks and South American golf trips…
12. Saido Berahino vs his club
It wasn't the most thrilling of will-he-won't-he transfer sagas, but Berahino's proposed move from West Brom to Tottenham had its fair share of twists and turns in summer 2015.
It's safe to say the striker wasn't best pleased when the transfer fell through on deadline day, with Baggies chairman Jeremy Peace the recipient of the youngster's ire on Twitter: "Sad how i cant say exactly how the club has treated me but i can officially say i will never play Jeremy Peace". As it happened, Berahino played for Albion just 11 days later – and by the time he did get a move, to Stoke in January 2017, Peace had already sold his Baggies stake to a Chinese consortium for a rumoured £175m.
11. Andros Townsend vs a fitness coach
Nobody wants to be an unused substitute in the Premier League, especially if you’re concurrently pushing for a spot in the England starting XI. That’s the situation in which Townsend found himself in 2015, with the winger taking out his frustrations on Tottenham fitness coach Nathan Gardiner after being urged to work harder in a post-game warm-down.
Manager Mauricio Pochettino wasn’t impressed and, in a bid to demonstrate his authority to the rest of the squad, promptly sold Townsend to Newcastle in the January transfer window.
10. Yaya Toure('s agent) vs a lack of cake
Most tantrums occur in the heat of the moment on the field of play, so Toure deserves credit for finding a way to kick off when he wasn't even at work.
"What happened at his birthday meant the club don't care about him," an outraged Dimitri Seluk, the Manchester City midfielder’s representative, told the media after the Ivorian was supposedly denied a cake to mark his 31st anniversary on earth.
There was more to the story than initially met the eye, though, with City later releasing a video of club staff presenting Toure with a cake on a flight to Abu Dhabi. Seluk's explanation turned out to be half-baked.
9. Mido vs his manager
As Egypt's star player, Mido did not expect to be substituted with 11 minutes of the 2006 Africa Cup of Nations semi-final. But that's the decision made by manager Hassa Shehata – who was proved right when replacement Amr Zaki, who later played in the Premier League for Wigan and Hull, scored with his first touch.
By then, Mido and Sheheta had almost come to blows on the touchline, and the Tottenham striker had lost the public vote. Egypt fans chanted "Mido out", albeit presumably not in English; the press called for Mido's expulsion from the squad, which was duly confirmed along with a six-month ban from his own country's FA.
8. Cristiano Ronaldo vs a team-mate
Ronaldo is one of football's most frequent tantrum-throwers, but he was probably justified in going off on one on this occasion. After giving Gerard Pique twisted blood down the left flank in a 2010 international friendly between Spain and Portugal, the Real Madrid man beautifully scooped the ball over the head of Iker Casillas and, seemingly, into the back of the net.
Before it crossed the line, though, Nani applied a needless touch with his head, thus prompting the linesman to raise his flag for offside. Ronaldo, it's safe to say, wasn't overly happy with his colleague.
7. Peter Odemwingie vs a non-transfer
Peter Odemwingie won 63 international caps, was transferred for an eight-figure fee, and scored top-flight goals in six different countries (Nigeria, Belgium, France, Russia, England and Indonesia). But most people remember him for 31 January 2013.
Then at West Brom, the striker was so desperate to move to QPR that he sped down the M40 to Loftus Road, the better to expedite the deadline-day deal. Trouble was, the clubs hadn't actually agreed to the transfer, so the red-faced player was refused entry and forced to try and find a parking space while the transfer collapsed. It wasn’t his finest hour.
6. Carlos Tevez vs warming up
For a man partly responsible for popularising the snood as an acceptable part of a player's wardrobe, Carlos Tevez seemed curiously unwilling to warm up one fateful night at the Allianz Arena. With Man City 2-0 down to Bayern in September 2011, Roberto Mancini told his Argentinian substitute to prepare for battle – but Tevez refused, apparently angered that the Italian had already introduced Nigel De Jong as his first replacement.
An outraged Mancini insisted Tevez – top scorer the previous season – would never play for the club again. For his part, Tevez shrugged off a club fine of six weeks' wages – around £1.2m – by disappearing to play golf in his homeland. But six months later, a rapprochement allowed Tevez to return - and help City to the Premier League title.
5. Sheikh Fahid Al-Ahmad-Al Sabah vs a decision
Manchester City's owner isn't the only sheikh to have had an influence on the global game. When France were awarded a goal during their World Cup tie with Kuwait in 1982, the Kuwaiti FA president Sheikh Fahid Al-Ahmad-Al Sabah launched a one-man pitch invasion to take up the issue with the referee.
4. Pierre van Hooijdonk vs turning up for work
Nottingham Forest striker Van Hooijdonk clearly enjoyed playing with Kevin Campbell, so the East Midlanders' decision to sell the former Arsenal man to Trabzonspor in 1998 was never likely to go down well with the Dutchman, who’d been told by the club's hierarchy that Forest would be strengthening their squad that summer.
Van Hooijdonk responded by going on strike, although he later expressed regret about his handling of the situation. He wasn’t feeling completely repentant, however.
“I should have waited until the end of August,” Van Hooijdonk later told FourFourTwo. “[But manager Dave Bassett] was a rat, a snake, and he still keeps saying things about me.”
3. Didier Drogba vs keeping it together
Referee Tom Henning Ovrebo turned down multiple appeals for a Chelsea penalty in their Champions League semi-final in 2009, with Andres Iniesta's late strike sending Barça through at the Blues’ expense.
It was all too much for Drogba, who angrily approached the official after the final whistle while wearing a pair of flip-flops – he had been substituted before the end of the game – and then telling TV cameras the entire episode was a "f***ing disgrace".
Drogba eventually recovered from the setback, scoring the decisive spot-kick to win Chelsea their first-ever European Cup in a shoot-out with Bayern Munich three years later.
2. Paolo Di Canio vs going quietly
Di Canio could feasibly have filled this list by himself, but the most memorable of the Italian's many tantrums was his strop while playing for Sheffield Wednesday against Arsenal in 1998.
A clash with Martin Keown earned Di Canio a red card, but that wasn't the end of the trouble: the striker responded by shoving referee Paul Alcock, earning himself an 11-match ban and £10,000 fine in the process. In fairness to the Italian, Alcock did go down extremely easily.
1. William Gallas vs calm acceptance
In February 2008, a late penalty from James McFadden salvaged a point for Birmingham against Arsenal, whose title chances were harmed by their failure to emerge victorious.
Seeing colleague Eduardo da Silva suffer a horrific injury in the same game certainly added to the emotion of the occasion, but the defender later admitted his reaction was a "mistake".
