The situation is this: all 20 of the Premier League’s hardest bastards are having a hell-in-a-cell style ruck. (This is instead of running the league like normal, this year). Most of the hard bastards are centre backs, obviously — centre backs are never happier than when they are dragging the studs down the back of someone, or kicking some bright young winger up into the air; the same feeling strikers get from scoring a goal or you get from an orgasm, defenders get from cleanly breaking someone’s jaw and only getting a yellow card for it — but there are anomalies there, too. Glenn Murray tanked every lad in the Brighton squad for the chance to fight here today (qualifying involved every club having a battle royale, with only the survivors left over to fight. All your heroes are dead. Bernardo Silva? Dead. Javier Hernández? Javier Hernández is dead. Little Babby Rashford? Babby Rashford got slammed through a table by José Mourinho, mate. Babby Rashford is dead, dead, dead). Andy Carroll, through tears, had to punch a pincered Jack Wilshere until his head turned to mash. And now they are here, under floodlights, stripped to the spandex pants, Wembley-sized crowd watching agog as the Barclays’ Hardest Lads rip each other apart. First round they’re split into duos as per the first fixtures of this season. After that, all hell breaks loose.

Seconds out, Round #1:

PHIL JONES (MAN) vs. HARRY MAGUIRE (LEI)

I have often wondered what would happen if Harry Maguire (head like an Easter Island statue) ran full pelt head-down like a rutting stag into Phil Jones (head like an Easter Island statue that simply cannot stop falling down), foreheads both colliding with a dull and dreadful bunk: would the force tear through both their skulls, down through their bodies and into their feet, where the sheer energy would tear the ground beneath us into two? Would their bodies explode, heads still travelling like a shuttle, two missiles shaped like hard Midlands lads who are entirely capable of eating two fish suppers, one after another? Would they both just die? Would they both somehow form into one mechaskull, a dreadful chimera that can wordlessly marshall the England defence for many decades to come? It turns out, none of that: Jones obviously spills on his arse at the last second, sliding as he ever does, with that red shock of surprise face he always does, a dog frozen mid-jump, and he just keeps trying to outrun his own fall, until his head gets lower to the ground and he’s — yes, picking up ever more pace and he’s — god, he’s contorting like a Hulk is trying to break out of him through the face only, and he’s — yeah, yep, he’s run full pelt into the post again, he’s killed himself dead, his brain shattered like a chocolate orange, instant KO. MAGUIRE WINS.

NUNO ESPÍRITO SANTO (WOL) vs. JORDAN PICKFORD (EVE)

Jordan Pickford would be absolutely mega in a scrap outside a chippy, wouldn’t he. You don’t get many of those these days, do you: a good old fashioned chippy bust-up, all your lads versus all of theirs, fighting for something archaic and worthless — “Loser can never catch the number 29 bus again! That’s our route, now!” — caps flying everywhere, that lad Dean who chipped your PlayStation gets his eyebrow ring punched out, you all go in for chips and bits afterwards and Jordan Pickford — who absolutely bust that weird kid who spent a summer trying to shag your sister, always just leaning on your front garden wall, smoking, until your dad had to get his copper mate to come and have a word with him — and Jordan Pickford eyed him up with his left and just peeled him out with his right, proper boxing move, smashed his nose out just everywhere — it was art, almost — and now Jordan Pickford is pulling that what-do-you-mean-I-can’t-do-P.E.-in-jeans-? face of his and is convinced that he’s wobbled his tooth, but chippy bust-up tekkers means nothing when you’re against Nuno — “I fight like I fuck,” Nuno Espírito Santo says, ominously putting on black leather gloves, “first with my fingers, then with my teeth” — and it’s not that he lays Pickford out, exactly, it’s just he does such violently horrible things to his head and skull once he downs him that Eli Roth buys the film rights to the remaining hole in Jordan Pickford’s neck. WINNER: NUNO

JAMAAL LASCELLES (NEW) vs. ERIC DIER (TOT)

Good lad, Jamaal. Elegant lad. There’s a certain rich, velvety luxury to his hardness — he’s not outwardly hard, no, but if it all kicked off in a common room he’d suddenly rise from the back, wouldn’t he, in an absolutely immaculate box-fresh Puma tracksuit, and just start laying lads out, bop, bop, bop, Jamaal Lascelles seemingly eight or nine feet taller than everyone else in the immediate vicinity, arms just everywhere, actually fully karate kicks one kid in the head. That doesn’t stop Eric Dier, though. Nothing stops Eric Dier. How many animals do you think he’s watched burn to death inside a metal bin? How many microwaves do you think his mum’s had to replace because of all the dark red blood stains exploded into it? Eric Dier turns up to this fight in a trenchcoat, with every single hair on his body tactically shaved off so no one can grab it. “Did you need to shave your entire arsehole clean, Eric Dier?” you ask him, and he turns with those emotionless flint-dead eyes of his and solemnly says: yes. “You can’t grab an arsehole when it’s shaved down to the neb,” Eric Dier says, one hand in Jamaal Lascelles lower jaw and the other just pulling at the rest of his skull. “Don’t give the cunts an inch to play with.” WINNER: ERIC DIER

TROY DEENEY (WAT) vs. GLENN MURRAY (BRI)

Battle of the top-heavy quite-tidy ageing uncapped English strikers here, with Troy Deeney (a shark cursed to live inside the mortal body of a human) versus Glenn Murray (that bloke you’re pretty sure fitted your kitchen who inexplicably seems to be playing top-flight football for Brighton). I personally like a striker who looks like he can knock out the back wall of a garage just by running into it — Grant Holt, for example, or Gary Taylor-Fletcher — and after some untidy big lad grappling work where both Deeney and Murray try and lift each other up and over for a piledriver but both get winded on the way up, the winner is eventually decided by a war of attrition. Glenn Murray, who had the biggest Full English out of the two on the morning of the flight (“One ‘Big Belly’ fry-up, no tomatoes, eight slices of fried bread and two bottles of brown sauce. Fucking now”), eventually has the energy to overcome. WINNER: GLENN MURRAY

LAURENT DEPOITRE (HUD) vs. DANNY DRINKWATER (CHE)

Danny Drinkwater beat the rest of the Chelsea squad to get here because look at him, look at him: look at Danny Drinkwater, with his four or five simultaneous hairlines all at once, Danny Drinkwater looking more uncomfortable than any other footballer alive in a tracksuit, Danny Drinkwater is only ever himself when he’s wearing jeans and a blazer outside a nightclub built into a shopping centre, Danny Drinkwater waving a wad of twenties and shouting “I’m worth more than your life, cunt!” at a rapidly tiring bouncer, and yes Laurent Depoitre is built like an absolute tank — un shithouse de brique — but he’s only one man, whereas Dirty Drinkwater rolls up with a whole crew, pipes and that, lots of ‘adult men who ride quad bikes on domestic roads’, there are six hard dogs in the background squabbling over an old piece of rope, blokes who still honest-to-god happyslap, and they quite efficiently fill Depoitre in while filming it all on, inexplicably, a Nokia N55. I feel like Danny Drinkwater updates his Facebook statuses like those lads who smuggle a phone into prison do. “RAZZED THESE FUCKERS” after a narrow Chelsea win, that sort of thing. Grainy photo of him smoking topless in the away end showers. Really loud audio quality clip where he slashes Rafa Benítez’s tyres. WINNER: DANNY DRINKWATER

ALEKSANDAR MITROVIC (FUL) vs. JASON PUNCHEON (CRY)

Is Jason Puncheon hard? Undoubtedly. He’s from Croydon, seemingly is permanently on crutches, and got put on trial last year because, when a bouncer confiscated his belt, he yelled, “Keep it, keep it. Buy a house with it” before trying to spark the fucker, and that is all extremely hard behaviour. Aleksandar Mitrovic, though, has the intense vibe of one of those mostly mute lads in the Serbian army who can’t say much and smiles with his top teeth and always seems to find a puppy on the battlefield who he strokes just far too hard, and makes soft little burbling happy noises until someone fires a bullet at his best friend, at which point he just rips his helmet off and runs head-first into sniper fire, Mitrovic just absolutely ending lads left and right, ripping arms off them and hitting them with their own arms, sort of roaring and crying at the same time, kicks someone’s head both off and into the torso of another lad like a penalty, killing them both instantly. Mitro sees your Jason Puncheon, your pathetic Jason Puncheon, and just laughs. His limbs are off his body before his blood has the chance to hit the floor. WINNER: ALEKSANDAR MITROVIC

JERMAINE DEFOE (BOU) vs. NEIL WARNOCK (CAR)

Most of the Bournemouth squad are quite soft lads who all look like they’ve, at least once in their life, gone home and cried after a bad haircut, so Jermain Defoe is their de facto hardest in class because he flips and jumps and bounces around in an Umbro-branded luchador mask and kicks Nathan Ake in the neck artery so hard he just stands there and chokes to death. That’s no match against Warnock though, is it, because Neil Warnock is a walking Crippler Crossface, the body of a dinner lady with the rage levels of a local bus driver who’s turned the engine off and locked the doors because someone dinged the bell twice, and after a punchy first couple of rounds — yeah, sure, Jermain Defoe, 33 years younger than his opponent, gets a few punches, kicks and grapples in — Defoe is on top until eventually Warnock catches him by the leg, and just sort of savagely bends him, Warnock — in a head-to-toe padded touchline jacket, which he opens to reveal a spandex fighting mankini — just crushing Defoe in half, until his sneering face is nose-to-nose with his, and he just bares his awful dee-dar teeth at him and bites each diamond out of his ear, chomp chomp, then spits them out and whispers, simply, “cunt”, before breaking his little neck into two half-necks. Harry Redknapp, red and pink and varicose, watches on from the stands, weeping. WINNER: NEIL WARNOCK

KOLASINAC (ARS) vs. KOMPANY (MAN)

Kolasinac’s blood is spiked with protein supplements so obscure and darkweb that standardised PL testing hasn’t even heard of them yet let alone developed techniques to identify their markers, so while he grows monstrously hench and out-of-control swole and forgets entirely how to run and defend, Vincent Kompany — forehead like a mountain, forehead like an ominous cliff — comes and just butts him down to dust with a single crunching nut. WINNER: VINCENT KOMPANY

VIRGIL VAN DIJK (LIV) vs. ANDY CARROLL (WHU)

This is the ultimate first-round battle: the hardened grace of Van Dijk versus the unkillable chaos of Andy Carroll. Carroll, in the right mood, is arguably the most dangerous man in the Premier League: he’s all arms, and legs, and even he isn’t quite sure where they’re going to go next, limbs asunder, entirely unreadable, and that’s before he’s even bought into play his greatest weapon, an inch-thick forehead and a pathological lack of fear. For someone so granite-hewn and gigantic, though, he’s oddly mortal, and Van Dijk soon takes care of that: a slide beneath his knees here, a stab through his hamstrings there, and now Carroll is downed, like a statue of Saddam dragged by ropes into the sand, and Van Dijk is just chopping at him, defenseless. This is a man who once ruled himself out of three games by falling over backwards off a stool while sinking a Jägerbomb. There’s no way Van Dijk won’t bide his time, wait for him to injure himself, then deliver the finishing blow like a cobra striking out at a neck. “Howay man, me blood!” Andy Carroll says, as his neck gushes red like a fountain. “I need that in me body!! I need it to live!” WINNER: VAN DIJK

DANNY INGS (SOU) vs. SAM VOKES (BUR)

Sam Vokes looks like he can lift a sofa over his head no problem which is fine if you need to move house or fold James Tarkowski, but it’s not enough when you need to fight Danny Ings — oiled, in trunks, fuming in the centre of a ring — who is convinced he can worm himself back into the Liverpool starting XI if he just headbutts one (one.) Burnley striker to death. Danny Ings might seem like a nice lad with glass hamstrings, but close your eyes for a moment and imagine: Danny Ings, smoothing a white satin tie down in front of his suit, walking head-down into crown court while ITV News cameras follow behind and the voiceover says “aggravated assault”. He’s just got that vibe, hasn’t he? He’s got that vibe and that way of looking where his eyes stare up into his own forehead. Proper ‘CCTV footage of him jumping over a bar in Zante then, later, sprinting down the main strip covered in blood’ sort of bloke. Danny Ings isn’t the hardest striker in the Premier League, but he does look like he only runs away from a fight when the police sirens get near enough, and that alone makes him a dangerous enough prospect. WINNER: INGS