The ultimate Boxing Day football fight card - including Arsenal, Man Utd and Liverpool beefs being settled

Academics might tell you that Boxing Day is so called because, in Victorian times, there was a custom that saw the wealthy and well-heeled package up their Christmas leftovers to donate to the poor of the country. They are, however, incorrect, because it was of course named after St. Boxing, the patron saint of unnecessary scraps, who according to Christian tradition oversees all festive fights caused by games of Monopoly or debates over what Uncle Steve said to our Aunt Marge last summer.

So in honour of all of the many pointless, sherry-induced arguments that will take place over the holiday season around Britain, we’ve decided to build our very own Boxing Day fight card – a series of bouts between footballing figures who just need to sort their differences out the old-fashioned way. Will Virgil van Dijk be too arrogant to overcome Roy Keane? Can Mary Earps single-handedly defeat the forces of toxic masculinity? Read on to find out…

Jadon Sancho vs. Erik ten Hag

At the heart of every good Christmas fight are two people possessed of the unbending belief that they are right about everything – and the ongoing dust-up between (former?) England forward Sancho and his Dutch manager is clearly no different. Nobody know precisely who said what and when, but we’ve already reached the point where neither person will ever contemplate being the bigger man. A punch-up is the only way to settle this.

Sancho isn’t the biggest man, but having 30 years on Ten Hag is a pretty big physical advantage and indeed he spends the early rounds of this contest swarming all over his coach, with plenty of pace and flair and flashes of ingenuity. Sadly, in a clumsily-written metaphor for his Manchester United career, he doesn’t actually land a single telling blow. The fight is eventually ended in stunning fashion when Ten Hag whips his flat cap off and reveals that he’s been taking Peaky Blinders even more seriously than we thought – he drives Sancho off by slashing at his face with a series of razor blades sewn inside the brim while screaming “by order ah Manchester fackin’ Yoonited”. The 23-year-old does the right thing, and runs away to Turin.

Virgil van Dijk vs. Roy Keane

A proper heavyweight clash which should, in all probability, by the headline event and would be were it not for the fact that Roy Keane needs to be in bed with a warm cocoa by 10pm these days. So we’ve billed this one nice and early in order to make sure both competitors are at their full-blooded best.

It’s an unusual scrap from the start. Van Dijk delivers a series of thunderous overhand rights, but instead of retaliating with force, Keane simply comes back with withering put downs. “The arrogance of the man. Wins one belt in 30 years and thinks he can beat me up,” he opines with a facial expression which suggests that the Dutchman’s very presence causes him physical pain.

The bout ends when Van Dijk throws one last huge haymaker right into Keane’s chin, only for it to bounce harmlessly off his bushy beard. Collapsing with exhaustion, Van Dijk has to be carried out of the ring. Keane doesn’t celebrate his victory, but instead berates a young man in the crowd for filming it on his phone.

Crystal Palace vs. Brighton & Hove Albion

A slightly unusual bout this time, not between individuals but between two entire football clubs, who are for some reason manifested as a pair of Victorian bodybuilders with striped one-piece bathing suites and luxurious moustaches. They are here to settle their age-old mild grudge in a boxing match that will once and for all settle football’s deadly-ish equivalent of a dispute between neighbours over the maintenance of an adjoining fence.

The reason for their personification as 19th-century pugilists soon becomes clear – this bout is taking place under strict Queensbury rules, with fists balled and extended as far as possible away from the face. The two titans of Southern football slowly circle each other, aiming gentle prods while saying things like “good gracious, Crystal Palace, you really are a dreadful rotter” or “I do so look forward to beating you, Mr. Brighton!”. In the end, a long and tedious bout, almost entirely devoid of worthwhile highlights, ends in a draw. Same as every other time these two meet, basically.

Evangelos Marinakis vs. Steve Cooper

This fight has been brewing for some time, but it took a long debate and a couple of very specialised diets for the two combatants to settle on a weight class. Finally, though, the wiry Cooper can take vengeance on the burly Nottingham Forest owner for his egregious sacking at the City Ground.

All the frustration and stress of a year spent knowing the P45 could be in his in-tray on any given day has clearly provided Cooper with an immense quantity of suppressed rage – what begins as a ferocious display of boxing quickly shifts to take in knees, elbows, and biting in a frenzied flurry of vicious aggression. It’s like watching a crazed chihuahua taking strips out of a Great Dane. The crowd bays in bloodlust as Marinakis simply stands there, bloodied and battered, taking an incessant pounding from his enraged former manager.

But he never goes down. Everything lands, but he never once flinches. Did we really think that a man whose career has survived match-fixing scandals, corruption allegations, a drug-trafficking investigation and Russian sanctions would be beaten so easily? Did we seriously believe the man once named the 41st most influential person in the shipping industry would go down like a sack of spuds? Of course not. Walking away unfazed after the fight, Marinakis simply says “you’re still fired, Steve.”

Mary Earps vs. Joey Barton

Having won the Sports Personality of the Year award, England goalkeeper Earps is now forced to wearily continue the fight she’s been embroiled in for many long years already – the endless and seemingly unwinnable fight against the serried ranks of social media misogynists that do everything in their power to make women’s lives miserable for no good reason other than to alleviate the tedium of their own meaningless and pitiful existences. For the purposes of this fight, they are represented by Joey Barton.

It's not a contest, really. Barton has nothing of substance to offer. A feeble straight left, a metaphor for every inadequate man who has ever muttered something along the lines of “nobody cares about women’s football”, is batted away easily by the fact that a female footballer has just won the nation’s biggest sporting popularity contest for the second year running. A pathetic uppercut, representing gibberish about women not understanding the game properly, misses by miles after Earps saps Barton’s confidence by reminding him that he earned more cards than career wins in the Premier League.

Earps wins comfortably, of course, as she tends to – but even as the latest sad misogynist to challenger her inevitably fades into meaningless obscurity, another one prepares to take his place on the pedestal of tediously terrible opinions. Sorry, Mary, but it looks like we’ll be here a while yet.

Mikel Arteta vs. The Refereeing Community

There are, apparently, 25,500 active referees in England, and they’ve all got one thing in common – the desire for brutal and bloody vengeance on Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta after he used recent paralegal proceedings to clarify that yes, he really did think that they were a proper desgracia after all.

The scene is less boxing match and more Royal Rumble, with every whistler in the land given a ticket and asked by Howard Webb to queue up at ringside and enter at two-minute intervals in numerical order. Arteta, young and fit as he is, holds up pretty well at first – Michael Oliver goes down thanks to a sharp right, an ageing Jeff Winter is heaved up and over the ropes – but it starts getting a bit dicey when Mike Dean and Stuart Atwell get into the ring at the same time and start raining angry havoc down upon the beleaguered Spaniard.

Things are looking pretty bad for Arteta, but the increasingly one-sided proceedings come to an abrupt and unexpected halt when Simon Hooper reflexively blows his whistle far too early and brings the beating to a close. As Arteta escapes with dignity and face intact, Peter Walton patiently explains to viewers why Hooper made the correct decision.