Roses are red, violets are blue, you pass to me, I pass to you. With Valentines Day upon us the Cutter goes all doe-eyed at seven football partnerships so special they really should have got a room…
Ian Rush and Kenny Dalglish
Liverpool have been blessed with a number of scintillating double-acts grabbing the goals and glory down the years: Hunt and St John; Keegan and Toshack; the short-lived Suarez and Sturridge.
Nothing though comes close to these pair of star-crossed trophy-haulers. The perfect balance of arch-predator and artful visionary they fired home an amazing 50 goals between them in 1982/83. They never S.W.A.L.Ked alone.
David Beckham and Gary Neville
Best mates off the pitch this beauty and the beast pairing played hundreds of games together before they even reached the Old Trafford turf forming an understanding of each other’s game that became instinctive. Once partnered in the first team they locked the United right hand side down tight for a decade with Neville becoming the best over-lapping full-back of his generation and Beckham more than willing to dig in with defensive cover.
Mario Gotze and Marco Reus
Products of the Borussia Dortmund youth academy these long-standing BFFs took the Black and Yellows to a Champion’s League final in 2012 playing the kind of harmonious interplay only brothers from another mother can produce.
When Reus was cruelly injured just prior to last year’s World Cup Gotze unveiled a shirt with his best chum’s name on it as Germany paraded the trophy. Now separated by nearly 400 miles of German countryside you just know each have visited Moonpig.com this week.
Xavi Hernandez and Andres Iniesta
An infinitely classier version of the Chuckle Brothers these tiki-taka twins have spent a career playing ‘to me, to you’ as they bewitch and bedazzle opponents and the watching world alike. The miniature maestros redefined football and created an entirely new aesthetic. The rumour goes that their diet is terrible because they can’t stop passing the salt back and forth to each other in the club canteen.
Andy Warboys and Bruce Bannister
This classic big man/poacher combination Bonnie and Clyded their way through the lower divisions for Bristol Rovers in the early seventies scoring a shed-load of goals and earning the nicknames Smash and Grab. Thirty years on and they remain firm friends. Sweet.
Russell Osman and Terry Butcher
As pretty much any episode of Jeremy Kyle illustrates all too plainly romance can sometimes be very ugly indeed and it doesn’t get much uglier than these two bruisers who formed a formidable human wall for Ipswich during their glory years. The usual elegant ball-playing centre-back coupled with a hard-tacking beast didn’t apply here. Both were brick outhouses who took it personally that someone was daring to approach them with a football.
Shevchenko and Rebrov
A test-tube relationship formulated in the laboratory of the mad genius Valeriy Lobanovskyi this Dynamo Kyiv duo formed a phenomenal strike-force that tore apart Europe in the nineties. It was a clinical, mathematical love affair but no less potent for it and their subsequent individual struggles at Chelsea and Spurs only emphasise in hindsight their rare beautiful chemistry.
