Was a bit of a girly thing to do and the uproar around it meant that he couldn't get less than six games. A shite state of affairs, but out of our control as it went so high profile.
I don't think it was girly. He went at one of the so called hard-men who just isn't hard. Costa shat himself.
This was a hard man (a total fucking headbanger).
The Harder They Come: Big Billy Whitehurst | The Daisy Cutter
Seven deadly sins of football: Being the Hardest Man in Football
Billy's Boots was one of the most evocative examples of football's capacity for romance and fairytale. Billy's boot, which went in many a time on helpless defenders, was one of the most provocative examples of football's mundane, crippling reality. And his elbows weren't especially congenial either.
Mick Harford, all dead eyes and slumbering menace, was the anti-poster boy for a generation of nails-hard centre-forwards to be forever viewed through claret-tinted spectacles, but Whitehurst, a journeyman striker described by Alan Hansen as the hardest man he played against, would give him a serious run for his money. Some might surmise that Whitehurst was the unprepossessing evocation of a mercifully bygone age of wanton thuggery. Others would simply say that he was an utter bastard.
Nobody would deny that he was seriously hard. He once apparently offered out the entire Crystal Palace side in the players' lounge at Hull. When he was at Oxford, he was rumoured to be supplementing his weekly pay, and winding down, with some bare-knuckle tomfoolery with local gypsies. Neil Ruddock said that, when Billy whispered sweet promises in his ear mid-match, "I used to start shaking".
Vinnie Jones, a colleague at Sheffield United, recalls in his autobiography how Billy nipped a burgeoning rumble with a phalanx of Sheffield Wednesday fans in the bud by sparking out the opposition ringleader with "one of the best right-handers I have ever seen - inside or outside a ring". During that spell at Sheffield United, he was sent out to roam the green with the explicit instructions from his manager, Dave Bassett: "Go and cause some bollocks, Billy." He so rarely disappointed.
When Whitehurst was skint he would go down to the local gypsy site, on his own, and fight them for money.
