On Saturday night Clive Tyldesley announced that the favourite to succeed José Mourinho at Internazionale was Sinisa Mihajlovic. Admittedly the ITV gurgler-in-chief probably only brought it up in a vain bid to stop himself mentioning "that night in Barcelona", but even so.

Julie Burchill once observed that rock'n'roll turns us into our parents. One minute you are full of youthful vigour, the next you are wailing "Où sont les Electric Chairs d'antan?" while your kids roll their eyes and turn up the volume on Spotify.

Sport has a similar effect. Mindful of that spirit‑sapping detail, I have strenuously tried to avoid becoming like certain Radio 5 Live personalities who wonder "how a certain Brian Clough would have coped with this situation" with the regularity and reverence of a US evangelical preacher asking: "What would Jesus do?"

At the mention of Mihajlovic, however, my grip on the remaining shreds of my self-esteem loosened momentarily and I found myself muttering: "You know what? There just aren't the grumpy bastards in the game any more."

During the 1990s, you see, the Yugoslavia captain stomped around the football pitches of the world with such a malign cast to his puss he made Roberto Rivelino look like one of the girlies from High School Musical. He first came to my attention when he was playing for Sampdoria. At Samp it seemed he took every free-kick that was within 40 yards of the opposition goal. His technique was simple: he trundled up from a great distance, and furiously smacked the ball over the defensive wall and straight into the stands. He did this so often in a game at the Stadio Luigi Ferraris in 1998 against the club he may soon coach, Inter, that after half an hour I started to believe he must have spotted a bloke in row G he suspected of making amorous overtures to his wife.

The extraordinary thing was that Mihajlovic was by no means the only really, severely cross-looking footballer of the period. You only have to think of Roy Keane – purple-headed, pop-veined, teeth-bared like a man-size version of the thing which bursts out of John Hurt's chest in Alien – to realise that. In fact, the 90s may well have been the golden era of fuming players.

Hristo Stoichkov, for example, was a Babel of bad-moodiness. The Bulgarian forward had many talents, he was quick, a great finisher and had a matchless ability to knock opposition defenders over with any available part of his body (his chest-butting skills were comparable to that of the male sea elephant). Once he started to slow up, however, he confined himself more and more to strutting around the pitch smouldering like a tractor tyre on a farm bonfire.

Watching him at St James' Park during Euro 96 and at the Stade de la Mosson, Montpellier, two years later as he stood, jaw jutting out, directing his team-mates from the centre circle with a series of sweeping hand gestures, I was convinced that if ever the opportunity arose he'd do a far better job of imitating Benito Mussolini than George C Scott.

Dunga of Brazil was another who was permanently set to a rolling boil. Crew‑cut and apparently frustrated by his team-mates' insistence on step-overs and other trickery, he had to be restrained from throttling his bird-like team-mate Bebeto. Telê Santana used to advise his players to "make love to the ball". Dunga, you always sensed, would much prefer to give it a quick hump and then get on with attacking somebody with a chainsaw.

José Luis Chilavert had a number of run-ins with Dunga and his team-mates. Nicknamed "The Bulldog", the Paraguayan goalie was so adept at staring you could watch him for an entire match and still be unsure of whether he actually owned a pair of eyelids. Chilavert was a genuinely world‑class keeper, he found the net 62 times with free-kicks and penalties and had enough of a political conscience to withdraw from the 1999 Copa América in protest against his government's failure to spend more on education (Are you listening, Joe Hart?). But he will probably be best remembered for a brawl with Faustino Asprilla and gobbing on Roberto Carlos, an act for which The Bulldog offered a whole variety of excuses, not the least of which was that Brazil had taken land from Paraguay during the 1870 war of the triple alliance and never given it back.

When it came to wild-eyed fury between the sticks even Chilavert struggled to match Oliver Kahn, a sulphurous net-minder who spent so much time yelling it seemed that at some point he would turn himself inside out. In 2000 I caught on TV the final moments of Bayern Munich winning the Bundesliga title, a scene that culminated with Kahn bounding toward the camera bellowing: "Ja! Ja! Ja!" As I watched his contorted face and gaping gob, the thought that popped into my head – and God I wish it hadn't – was: "Jeez, this must be what he's like when he's having sex."

Ten years later and I still have to drink a large scotch to get to sleep at night.