On Soccer:Nothing says I care like a swift nut to the nose. Arsenal's players might have reverted to tedious type before Saturday's cup tie with Newcastle - exchanging terribly polite and self-important high-fives in the centre circle - but the evidence that good sides do not necessarily foster goodwill had been spattered all over the front of Nicklas Bendtner's shirt, courtesy of Emmanuel Adebayor's forehead, four days previously in the white heat of White Hart Lane.
Such incidents tend to provoke all sorts of sanctimonious chin-stroking and tut-tutting from media commentators whose bosses know that nothing perks sales or ratings like a good bust-up, preferably featuring one of the Premier League elite.
The ensuing heartrending pleas for wild-eyed, frothy-mouthed professionals to set better examples to our impressionable tots are reminiscent of Helen Lovejoy, the Reverend's wife in The Simpsons, whose greedy devouring of gossip is only interrupted by frequent exhortations for greater moral fortitude in her fellow Springfielders: "The children! Won't somebody please think of the children?" Journalists, the good ones at any rate, are anatomical anomalies, capable of finger-wagging and applauding at the same time.
It's all undeniably good fun, and all the more so because it gives football's outsiders - and I include the reporters in this - a tantalising glimpse into a maddeningly closeted world.
Clubs, particularly self-consciously urbane ones like Arsenal, would love us to believe that this shiny new sport called Premier League football is all about high-spec diets, holistic medicine and robot-like players whose every move can be programmed by professorial managers. Such attitudes are rigorously underpinned by the widespread refusal - it is not just Sky TV, now - to acknowledge the existence of top-flight football before 1992.
The reality, as emphasised by Adebayor's tussle with Bendtner, is very different. Footballers are, as they always have been, seething, broiling bundles of testosterone, whose primal instinct when confronted by adversity is to lash out indiscriminately. They are, in effect, no different from your average supporter and that, in a perverse sort of way, is rather reassuring: proof positive that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
This is not to condone an orgy of on-field violence. There are more constructive ways of channelling your aggression - striking a member of the opposing team might be a good start - but let's not kid ourselves that a relatively minor scrape between two men with history of antagonising their team-mates is cast-iron proof that Arsenal are a club in meltdown.
In fact, the last subject on the lips of the visiting fans as they trooped disconsolately along the Seven Sisters Road last week would have been Bendtner's bruised conk. Some were probably muttering that a Lome kiss - or whatever it is called in Togo - was the least the Dane deserved for an anaemic performance.
Arsène Wenger is never shy in trumpeting his side's "spirit" - it is one of his favourite words - but the Frenchman knows better than most that great teams are forever fermenting discontent. There is no more efficient fuel in the pursuit of excellence, and history suggests that the more vicious the feuds, the more driven and determined the protagonists become.
It would be stretching it to claim that Liverpool could not have become the most feared side in Europe without the violent spats that pock-marked practice sessions under Bob Paisley, but they certainly did no harm. At the other end of the aesthetic spectrum, Joe Kinnear once claimed he always knew Wimbledon were due a bad result if training did not end in a mass brawl.
In both cases, conflict sharpened the competitive edge and Wenger, for all his studious reputation, can hardly chastise his two errant strikers for allowing their frustrations to bubble over in public. It is scarcely a year since their manager, a self-confessed "very bad loser", had to be hauled away from Alan Pardew, his West Ham counterpart, on the Upton Park touchline, his face screwed up in rage and fists ready to fly.
There is, of course, one other very good reason why Adebayor, in particular, has escaped with nothing more than a quiet dressing-down. He is simply indispensable to Arsenal's cause: immensely strong, both in body and mind, a focal point for his team's attacking play and, in the absence of Robin van Persie, their most reliable source of goals, as he proved so emphatically against Newcastle.
Wenger is a principled man but, more pertinently, he is also a ferocious competitor. He will not have condoned Adebayor's outburst but he will have understood it and that, for all the tiffs and butts, is why he has been so successful for so long.
