Roy McDonough holds a footballing record unlikely ever to be beaten. Playing in the rough and tumble of the lower leagues in the seventies and eighties he was shown the red card an astonishing 22 times. For Roy the early bath was an occupational hazard. Though he insists the litany of brawls and flying elbows that makes up his disciplinary record was entirely a function of self-defence.

“I ain’t being funny, it was self-preservation,” he says, speaking at his home on the Costa del Sol. “I never set out to hurt anybody. Never once entered my head.” He pauses for a moment.

“Well, except that time with Tony Pulis, the Welsh t---.”

His altercation with the now Middlesbrough manager came when Roy was playing for Southend. He and Pulis, then an uncompromising midfield enforcer with Newport County, had squared up in the previous league game, a face-off during which, Roy claims, Pulis had spat at him. In the dressing room before the rematch, Roy had warned his manager Bobby Moore that there may be trouble ahead.

“I said to 'Mooro': ‘He’s going to get one, the gobby Welsh get’. And Mooro – who was an absolute gentleman – said: ‘Roy, son, don’t let me down. We need 11 out there. Whatever you do, please stay on the pitch’. I said: ‘you can trust me boss’. I was out there for all of seven minutes. Opportunity came too early. The ball was about neck high, and I kung-fu kicked him. Even in them days, when you could pretty much get away with murder in the first 10 minutes, I had to go. Lucky I didn’t take his head off. Mind, it was worth every penny of the £100 fine.”

It is safe to say that they do not make them like Roy McDonough anymore. As he enjoys a second career as a salesman of Spanish property, Roy’s tales of punch-ups and pint-swilling are another world from our current sanitised football climate. It is unlikely, for instance, in these days of sparkling water, cryotherapy units and mobile phone cameras, that any current player would become renowned for an ability to down a pint in six seconds while standing on his head. But that was Roy’s party trick.

McDonough was on the receiving end of rough treatment, too credit: Empics Sport

“I remember going to Chelmsford cricket club one summer in the late eighties with Perry Groves and the Arsenal boys and Tony Adams getting me to show him how to do it. A tip if you’re trying this at home: it’s easier with Guinness for some reason.”

So technicolor are Roy’s tales (as Southend’s moustachioed centre-forward, for instance, he claims to have earned his nickname of “The German Porn Star” by sleeping with more than 400 women, “though they didn’t get much sleep”) that when the journalist Bernie Friend first sat down with him to write his life story he assumed it was all made up. It wasn’t. Roy really did behave like that. And, as detailed in the pair’s hilarious account – called, naturally enough Red Card Roy – it is some yarn.

“I’m not proud of the record cards by the way, but there’s a lot more to me than that,” he insists. “For a start I played for three managers who’d won the World Cup.” Indeed he did. When he was a 17-year-old local prodigy at Birmingham City, Sir Alf Ramsey gave him his debut. He then moved to Chelsea where he played under Sir Geoff Hurst. It was not a relationship charged with mutual respect.

“Absolute muppet,” he says of Hurst. “Bobby Gould was his assistant. Let’s just say as a pairing they weren’t in the same league as Alex Ferguson and Brian Kidd. To be honest they weren’t in the same league as the Chuckle Brothers.” Then there was Moore at Southend. “What a privilege it was to play for him,” he says. “The highlight of every week was the eight a side game on a Thursday at training which he’d join in. I’d always try to play alongside him, to watch what he did. He’d suddenly drift out to the wing and you’re thinking: where’s he off to? And the ball would go exactly where he’d gone. He read the game off the scale. Trouble was, as a manager, he couldn’t get it across to idiots like me.”

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Communicating was never the issue for Roy. It was staying on the pitch. His problem was, he says, he was a target man in every sense.

“When you were a centre-forward in them days, you had to fight off two 6ft 2in heavies for 90 minutes. Mind you, I loved that. You set out to get their respect. Yes, you’d take an elbow or two across the mooey, but you’d not go down. You wanted to show how hard you were. That was the test.”

The best centre-back he played against, he says, was Steve Bruce at Gillingham. “You only have to look at his face now to see he’d put his head in anywhere. So brave. Never once moaned, just kicked you back.”

After the sort of scrap he encountered facing Bruce, Roy invariably headed to the bar. Where he would stay for most of the weekend. And the following week.

“I had great life, had a few beers, few girls, had a right giggle,” he says. “But I think I gave the fans value for money. They liked to see a scrap. You don’t get that anymore. There’s no physical test in the game. It’s gone. When was the last time you saw any claret spurting out of a player’s nose? Nobody gets asked questions physically anymore. Most of them these days would fall over if you put them in Burton’s shop window. They’re mannequins, not footballers.”

McDonough is now living on the Costa del Sol

Always the social secretary of any dressing room, Roy found his popularity put to good use when he was appointed player-manager of then non-league Colchester United in 1991.

“My opening gambit to the squad was: we are going to play from the back, passing game, do it my way and we’ll have the biggest beano of our lives. They did exactly what I asked and we were pissed for ten months. The spirit was off the scale. And I loved being player-manager. It meant I could pick myself every game.”

As a tactic it paid off. Handsomely. In his first season he led Colchester to a double of the Conference title and the FA Trophy.

“I spent £742 on the team and rewrote the history books. The next season we missed the Fourth Division play-offs by three points. I thought, I’m doing all right here.”

But then he fell out with the chairman (it was possibly not a good idea to run off with the groundsman’s wife, given that at the time Roy was married to the chairman’s daughter). He was soon relieved of his duties. And despite his initial tearaway success, he never found another job in the game, his every application for a manager’s job undermined by his ill repute.

Eventually, frustrated at never even landing an interview, he headed to Spain, where he has been entertaining expats with his stories ever since. Though there is one thing he is anxious to point out: that his reputation as football’s wildest of wild men may have been a touch exaggerated.

“Listen, the last game I was paid for playing was when I was 44. I turned out as centre-half for Harwich. The manager was a drinking buddy and he was desperate. I had to borrow a pair of boots. So I played for 27 years, 22 red cards. If you average it out that’s less than one a season.”

Red Card Roy is published by Vision Sports £9.99