1) Sheffield United v West Bromwich Albion (March 2002)

The warning signs were hanging above Bramall Lane on 16 March 2002, if you looked intently enough. Sheffield United and West Bromwich Albion’s previous five games had yielded four red cards, for starters. To whet the appetite further, all bar one of those encounters had been played under the auspices of Neil Warnock and Gary Megson – who were both, it could be said operating at peak abrasiveness around this time. It would, no doubt, be a typically no-holds-barred Championship ding-dong.

But there was something else – something that had, it would turn out, effectively pre-written the entire, barely believable story that was to follow. Almost exactly a year previously, the Blades’ Georges Santos – never the most shrinking of violets and a former West Brom player – had come off worse in a challenge with the midfielder Andy Johnson, then of Nottingham Forest. Santos had sustained a double fracture of the eye socket, was ruled out for the rest of the campaign and had promised to take legal action against Johnson. That particular threat had come to nothing but as Johnson returned in the Baggies’ yellow and green away stripes there was the thought that nobody nearby would be well-advised to play with matches.

As if in a hurry to get its flashpoints out of the way early, the match began at pace. Only nine minutes had been played when, after some horrible defending, the long-serving United goalkeeper Simon Tracey dashed out of his area to confront Scott Dobie and promptly batted away his attempted lob. Red card, box ticked, can we get on with the game now?

For a while the players did. Dobie, enjoying the best season of his career, headed the visitors in front shortly after Tracey’s dismissal. West Brom, who arrived in third place to United’s 15th, controlled proceedings thereafter and doubled their lead on 63 minutes with a thunderbolt from Derek McInnes.

Many games would simply play themselves out from hereon but Warnock decided to roll up United’s collective sleeves. On came the Cameroonian Patrick Suffo, a broad-shouldered striker built like a heavyweight boxer. And on, too, came the tall and baggy-shirted Santos. The television cameras knew the deal: they zeroed in on Johnson straightaway. If there wasn’t a story to be developed here they’d sure as heck try to drag out the old one.

No need. Not a minute had passed when Johnson was dealt a slightly undercooked pass by McInnes. Santos had anticipated it and, given the speed at which he was hurtling towards ball and destination, the challenge looked a 50-50 one – but the result was violent. There was, at least, time to brace yourself for the crunch as Santos flung himself high above the ball, sent Johnson flying even higher into the air and lit the spark that unleashed hell.

He was sent off within seconds. There could never have been an easier decision for the referee, Eddie Wolstenholme. If Santos had been intent upon retribution then, well, in a sense he had got it as Johnson held his knee in agony. But now everybody weighed in, players from both sides exchanged pushes and blows and it soon transpired that Suffo had done something that particularly enraged the West Brom keeper, Russell Hoult.

Suffo had, it would later be confirmed in slow motion, used the melee to slam his head into the face of McInnes, leaving the goalscorer bleeding. It was another astonishing act of violence and off he went too. Sheffield United were down to eight and both of their substitutes had been dismissed within 90 seconds of coming on to the field.

If that was all fairly clear-cut, although thoroughly unedifying, things then got murky. It took West Brom another 10 minutes to score again, Dobie converting his second. But then Michael Brown, who had somehow got away without receiving a second yellow card for a foul minutes previously as Megson’s side broke, pulled up with an injury and absented himself from the pitch. Just like that, Robert Ullathorne, sent off when the sides had met 14 months previously, pulled up lame too. Off he went and United were down to six. Everyone knew you were not allowed to play on with six, best of all Wolstenholme, and with eight minutes to play – and to a loud backdrop of “United! United!” from the home support – he took the teams off. Match abandoned.

“They were being told by certain people to go down, come off. Michael Brown wasn’t injured,” said Megson. “Everybody’s heard it, everyone knows what was going on on that line.” A typically chatty Warnock had his reasoning ready-made. “He had a groin injury in the first half, Michael, and he should have come off at half-time,” he said, before adding: “There’s a lot of things we weren’t happy with today.”

Megson said that, if the game was to be replayed, West Brom would turn up and walk straight off the pitch. Common sense prevailed; the points were theirs and Warnock took some action of his own – Santos and Suffo never played for Sheffield United again.

“I wouldn’t imagine Gary will be having a drink with me tonight,” Warnock concluded in his post-match interview. Well, no, but the absence of a partner in pints might have given him the chance for some reflection: how on earth could he have misjudged Santos’s mindset and the temperature of the occasion to such an extent that he let him loose in the first place? Nick Ames

2) Fulham v Watford (July 2004)

A football match that lasted 90 minutes despite being abandoned at half-time. Surely some mistake, eh? Nope, this farce actually unfolded. To celebrate their return to a refurbished 22,000 all-seater Craven Cottage for the 2004-05 season after a two-year absence in which they’d metaphorically kipped on QPR’s Loftus Road sofa, Fulham arranged a pre-season friendly with Watford in order to acclimatise players and fans with their spruced-up new digs.

With Fifa having capped the number of substitutions allowed per team in friendly matches to six in the wake of widespread grumbling about the number of changes being made in international matches, a row broke out at half-time when the match referee, Peter Walton, refused to sanction any more than six changes per team, despite the patently unfit players on show having only just returned from their holidays, having clearly summered very well. Rather than break with Fifa protocol in a match that was little more than a glorified kick-about, Walton abandoned the match at half-time and left the ground, prompting Fulham manager Chris Coleman and his Watford counterpart Ray Lewington to agree to continue the match as an exhibition with a linesman acting as benevolent referee who would let them make as many substitutions as they liked.

“There has to be common sense really,” said Lewington. “To ask players to play 90 minutes so early is ridiculous.” The Fulham club secretary, Lee Hoos, agreed, stating that limiting the number of substitutions in a game so early in pre-season imposed “a significant health and safety risk on players who have been back in training for one week to have to play 90 minutes”. A full 45 minutes’ worth of huffing and puffing after being called off by the referee, more than 18 subs had been used in a match that petered out into an oft-interrupted and presumably dreary scoreless draw. Barry Glendenning

3) West Ham v Crystal Palace (November 1997) and Wimbledon v Arsenal (December 1997)

Selhurst Park in darkness as floodlight failure forces Wimbledon v Arsenal to be called off. Photograph: Phil Cole/Allsport

Question: where was former West Ham manager Harry Redknapp when the lights went out? Answer: in the dark. On 3 November 1997, almost 17 years ago to the day, Harry’s Hammers entertained Crystal Palace in a televised Monday night Premier League match at the Boleyn Ground. With Palace leading 2-1, courtesy of a brace from Neil Shipperley, Frank Lampard scored an equaliser for West Ham in the 65th minute, apparently striking the ball with such venom that it prompted the floodlights to go out, shrouding the ground in darkness.

The stadium sparks were called into action and managed to illuminate proceedings once again – but only briefly. Seconds later the lights went out again, forcing the referee, David Elleray, to abandon the match, which was replayed the following month and won 4-1 by West Ham. It was not the first time a Premier League match had been abandoned because of floodlight failure. Nor would it be the last.

Three months previously, Derby County suffered the humiliation of having their much-trumpeted maiden league match at Pride Park abandoned when the lights went out 11 minutes into the second half, as they led Wimbledon. “We had 11 maintenance people on duty, including six electricians, but nobody has yet worked out why both generators failed,” said club official Peter Gadsby, shortly after the match referee, Uriah Rennie, was forced to call proceedings to a premature halt. At the time the incident was chalked down to teething problems at a new ground and little more was said about it.

If having football matches abandoned because of floodlight failure at two Premier League grounds smacks of carelessness, then having three abandonments in the space of five months positively reeks of foul play, so when the match referee, Dermot Gallagher, was forced to send players and fans home early after the bulbs shut down at Selhurst Park during the second half of a scoreless match between Wimbledon and Arsenal on 22 December, the stench of rodent in the festive night air was overwhelming. “Once was bad enough, the second wasn’t pretty and this is getting near a disaster,” said the former Wimbledon owner Sam Hammam. “Unless we stop it, there will be shame on the game. We are all embarrassed by it.”

With police as mystified by what was going on as they were suspicious, it was not until 15 months later that the reasons for two of these impromptu spells of darkness came to … er, light. As suspected, it was in fact a betting syndicate rather than dodgy electrics that was responsible for the floodlight failures at the Boleyn Ground and Selhurst Park. While bets on football matches that end prematurely are generally voided in the UK, in the far east, where illegal betting on English football is a ridiculously huge industry, wagers are settled on the “result” at half-time if the match is abandoned after the interval. Having successfully landed themselves bumper pay-outs by switching off the lights with a remote control at West Ham and Wimbledon when the scoreline was in their favour, two years later the ne’er-do-wells responsible attempted to repeat the stunt at Charlton Athletic.

Having offered Roger Firth, who was at the time a security supervisor at The Valley, the sum of £20,000 to grant them access to the ground’s floodlights in order to fit a remote control gizmo that would enable them to shut down the floodlights during a February fixture between Charlton and Liverpool, Wai Yuen Liu, a native of Hong Kong who held a British passport and was a long-time resident of London, and two Malaysian associates, Eng Hwa Lim and Chee Kew Ong, were foiled when their inside man offered a colleague £5,000 to keep watch while the lights were being nobbled. Firth’s colleague alerted the police, whose subsequent investigation revealed that the three Asian gamblers had engineered the blackouts at the Boleyn Ground and Selhurst Park in 1997. No evidence was uncovered to suggest the rogue gamblers were responsible for the lights going out at Pride Park.

Upon being charged with conspiring to cause a public nuisance, a relatively trivial sounding accusation considering the immense damage they could have done to what passes for the integrity of English football, Firth, Lim and Ong all pleaded guilty. Charlton Athletic’s former employee got 18 months in prison for his troubles, while the Malaysians who turned his head got four years each.

A heavy gambler who was up to his eyes in debt and had lost £120,000 over two years in west London’s Golden Horseshoe casino, Liu denied involvement, despite being arrested in a police sting at The Valley on the day he his associates turned up to install their circuit breaker. He was found guilty at Middlesex crown court and received a 30-month sentence for his role in a scam that allegedly netted far eastern organised crime gangs up to £60m. BG

4) Middlesbrough v Oldham Athletic (April 1915)

Not coming out to play is one thing – see Estonia v Scotland and, more recently, Serbia v Albania for evidence of that. But refusing to leave the pitch at all? It’s not a complete rarity for a player to stand his ground after a red card before eventually being dragged away, kicking and screaming (hello Antonio Rattín) but what if the unhappy aggressor simply isn’t for moving?

To find out, we need to go back nearly 100 years to a time when Oldham Athletic were going for the Division One title. It was Easter Saturday and the Latics travelled to staunchly mid-table Middlesbrough for a match that they quite fancied could help them steal a march on leaders Manchester City. In common with almost everyone in a league whose figures halfway resemble those of the 2013 Nigerian Premier League, their away record was in negative figures and a trip to Ayresome Park did not exactly seem foil-wrapped by the Easter bunny even if Boro had lost 5-1 in the side’s first meeting of the season. The weather was characteristically gloomy, damp and windy and the 7,000 home fans were perfectly used to receiving visitors who did not really fancy the fight.

It seemed that way once more after 20 minutes when Oldham found themselves three goals down. They pulled one back but the atmosphere was not at all good: the referee, a Mr H Smith from Nottingham, had made a number of decisions that appeared to favour the hosts and Oldham’s players, who included a gnarled 32-year-old left-back named Billy Cook, began to simmer.

As the match approached the hour mark, with Oldham still making a go of things, Middlesbrough won a penalty after a foul by Cook, who was well-known for taking few prisoners. Four-one, game over in a division that was not known for its astonishing comebacks.

There’s no about-face here, no carpet pulled from under the feet: it did remain 4-1 – but the fun had only just begun. Three minutes after the penalty, Cook made another late challenge and that, for Mr Smith, was that – the serial miscreant was expelled from the pitch. Oldham were outraged: they surrounded the official and Cook, meanwhile, did not have the look of a man who planned to go anywhere fast. Mr Smith – in a move that would surely curtail a gargantuan percentage of games in the modern era – whipped out a watch and give him a minute to head to the bath.

Cook did not. So Mr Smith did. If Cook would not leave the field then the punctilious official would not be able to continue the game, so he opted to end the game. The players traipsed off behind him. It had all been done very primly but that was match over.

Not so prim was the scene in the stands, where the supporters wanted their remaining 30 minutes or so but they were not given it, and instead the result was later allowed to stand. On account of “misconduct on the field and gross misconduct in refusing to leave the ground when ordered by the referee”, Cook was suspended from football for a year that would not, in any case, be seen out because of the first world war and Oldham were fined £350. If they had won the game, they would eventually have won the league – but the Greater Manchester side’s most successful season is best, and perhaps only, recalled for Cook’s moment of bolshiness. NA

5) Colchester United v Reading (November 1948)

The abandonment of football matches because of poor weather conditions is nothing out of the ordinary, although the decision to end Colchester United’s and Reading’s FA Cup first-round match as a consequence of thick fog after only 35 minutes seems particularly poignant. A non-league side made up of various professionals attempting to get back in the game after the war years, Southern League side Colchester had enjoyed a fine Cup run the previous season, beating local rivals Chelmsford City, Banbury Spencer, Wrexham, Huddersfield and Bradford Park Avenue, before losing at the hands of Blackpool. With hopes high that their club might emulate or even better the previous season’s success, a crowd of 19,072 piled into Layer Road to see the Essex side take on Reading, who would go on to top the Third Division that season, in the first round. With the fog impenetrable, the match was abandoned in the first half and Colchester lost the subsequent replay 4-2. Weirdly, the record crowd who couldn’t actually see the game they’d turned up to watch was never equalled or indeed bettered in the 60 years that passed before the League One club moved to the Colchester Community Stadium in August 2008. BG

Football’s a funny old game, Jimmy Greaves has been known to opine. It’s rarely funnier than when matches played in South America end in the kind of heroically violent cartoon brawls of the sort that would prompt mass hand-wringing, parliamentary questions and swift police action were they to occur closer to home. It seems distance makes the laughter grow louder, so the kind of regular violence that would almost certainly make po-faced news headlines were it to take place in an English league match is instead relegated to the “and finally, here’s a good one … ” slot because it happened far away … usually in Argentina or Paraguay, and sure aren’t those lads all mad anyway? Eh?

Of course, such is the monotonous regularity with which matches in South American seem to end in the football equivalent of a Wild West saloon brawl that there might perhaps be a kernel of truth to the notion that footballers from that particular neck of the woods are a mite more highly strung than their counterparts from elsewhere. The closing scenes of the match between Paraguayan teams Teniente Fariña and Libertad were deemed the pick of a very big bunch from a genre that appears to throw up a new example every couple of weeks.

Having sent off one player from each team for fighting in the closing minutes of this junior league match in Caacupe, the referee, Nestor Guillen, could have been forgiven for presuming he’d ended the scrap in question and restored order. Unfortunately for him, the players involved refused to adjourn to the dressing room and continued swinging haymakers at each other on the pitch, where they were soon joined by assorted team-mates and the occupants of both benches in a frenzy of punching, shoving and high-kicking so widespread that the sole cameraman present was unable to keep tabs on it all. Deciding an attempt at peacemaking would be futile and the best course of action was to flee the scene instead, the referee, along with his officials, did exactly that, abandoning the match and leaving the brawlers to their own violent devices. In his subsequent report, Guillen said he’d red-carded every player and substitute involved, 36 in total, much to the displeasure of officials from both teams.

“Many of the players that were on the field and on the substitutes’ bench, everyone went on to the field to try to control their team-mates and even the players from the other team,” said the Teniente Fariña president, Hernan Martinez, whose understanding of the word “control” seems sketchy at best. “The referees didn’t even stay on the field. As soon as the fighting broke out they went to the dressing room. They ran through the tunnel to their dressing room. They weren’t able to see anything that happened. But in the report, to more or less wash their hands of the responsibility, they expelled all 36 players.”

Martinez’s Libertad counterpart, Sixto Nuñez, concurred. “The referee needed to take better care of the boys,” he said. “He should have made sure that the two dismissed players were completely off the field. Instead, the officials left the field and when the players were all leaving together that’s when the fighting started again.”

Remarkably, this wasn’t the first time a referee “sent off” 36 people in one match, with referee Damian Rubino having served a mixture of players, subs and coaches with the same number after he abandoned an Argentinian fifth-tier match between Claypole and Victoriano Arenas that erupted in violence back in March 2011. “Most players were trying to separate people,” said the Claypole manager, Sergio Micielli. “The ref was confused.” BG