5 worst fights to have broken out on a football pitch

#2 Lee Bowyer vs. Kieron Dyer, 2005

Fights on the football pitch between opponents remain thankfully rare, but fights between teammates ought to be rarer still. Evidently, nobody gave that memo to Newcastle United midfielders Lee Bowyer and Kieron Dyer when they clashed violently on the pitch during a game with Aston Villa back in 2005.

The Magpies were already 3-0 down and had been reduced to 10 men when the incident occurred; evidently, frustrations simply became too much for the players to take. According to Dyer, Bowyer had already become angry with him for not passing him the ball, and after Dyer apparently told him “the reason I don’t pass to you is that you’re f*cking sh*t”, the former Leeds enforcer exploded.

Bowyer strode over to Dyer and suddenly both men were tussling, tearing at one another’s shirts and exchanging punches. Eventually, Villa’s Gareth Barry restrained a snarling Bowyer, and referee Barry Knight had little choice but to send both men off. Dyer was hit with a three-match ban for his actions while Bowyer took a four-match ban as he’d already been sent off once that season already, and the moment that both men called “madness” went down in infamy.