Who was your toughest opponent and why?

Rio opts for an old-fashioned striker whose physical attributes made him a nightmare for centre-backs, while Phil points to an ‘unplayable’ former Chelsea legend. It's fair to say both are extremely different!

“The toughest player I played against, I think the obvious ones are Messi, R9 and Cristiano, but they're obvious,” begins Rio.

“One player who used to always give me [a hard time], and no one would ever imagine and expect me to say this name, but Kevin Davies at Bolton.

“He was all elbows and at the end of it, [we’d] shake hands, fine. 

“But in the game he was scratching, elbowing. And the worst thing was that a lot of the time he was wrestling you with no interest in the ball [laughs]. 

“I used to think, ‘this isn’t football, I've got to go on a wrestling course, what's going on here?’ But he was just hard. He was a style of footballer that was bad for my game.”

Discussing the physical impact of facing such strikers, Rio recalls an incident against a striker who wasn’t known for the dark arts but still had it in his locker. 

“I played against Torres at Anfield once. The ball's at the other end and me and him are obviously battling in the game because I'm playing against him one v one. And so I'm around him quite a lot and I must have just wound him up, not knowing. 

“Then the ball's at the other end and all of a sudden I've just looked down, he's stamped on my foot and just as I'm planting my foot, there's blood coming out of where the laces are. And I'm like, ‘what's going on there?’

“But there's this mad stuff that happens in games that no-one sees. And then you've got half-time, you go in, take your boot off, three or four stitches, and then you're thinking ‘how am I going to get my foot back in that boot because it's swollen up!’”

Reflecting on his toughest opponent, Jones remembers the experience of facing a Chelsea man who was arguably the Premier League’s best player at that time.

“I've said in the podcast, I couldn't play against Eden Hazard,” says Phil.

“He had that season, a couple of seasons, where he was just he was unplayable.

“A low centre of gravity. You try to close him down, try to nail him, and he just twisted me up!”

The latest episode of Inside Carrington is available to watch now.