Rio Ferdinand has hailed Alan Shearer as the 'most ruthless finisher he has ever seen' and the former Manchester United captain wishes he got the chance to 'feel the real force' of the Newcastle United legend when he was in his absolute pomp.
Shearer may have retired in 2006 but no one has come close to catching the Premier League's all-time leading goalscorer since the legendary No 9 hung up his boots.
Shearer, who won the title with Blackburn in 1995, scored a whopping 260 Premier League goals and was unsurprisingly the first player inducted into the top-flight's inaugural hall of fame alongside Thierry Henry back in April.
Ferdinand, bizarrely, did not include the 'great' Shearer in his top 10 picks for the hall of fame, because the former Newcastle skipper 'didn't win enough', but the Londoner certainly has a lot of admiration for his fellow BBC pundit.
Although the pair played for England together, Ferdinand did not get the chance to come up against Shearer at club level in the striker's early years because of an eight-year age gap.
Ferdinand would have loved to have tested himself against Shearer before the No 9 suffered a cruciate knee ligament injury in 1992 although it is not clear if the Manchester United legend was actually referring to the ankle injury the Gosforth native suffered nearly five years later because he went on to have the three best goalscoring seasons of his career after his first serious injury.
"I wish I played against Shearer before he had the cruciate knee injury because I remember I used to watch him thinking, 'Jesus, this guy is an animal,'" Ferdinand told Vibe with Five.
"He was running from the halfway line past [Gary] Pallister and people like that, leaving them in his wake, and banging it in the roof of the net.
"He's probably up there, after Ruud van Nistelrooy, as the most ruthless finisher I've seen. The way he finished the ball was like an aggressiveness that I've only seen Ruud van Nistelrooy have, really, or Wayne Rooney early in his career.
"The velocity he hit the ball with was [Gabriel] Batistuta type vibes. He was just a mad finisher from all angles. 30 yards? It didn't matter. Getting it on the six-yard box? It didn't matter. He could score all those types of goals.
"I played against him in a Newcastle team when my team was better than his. I would like to have played against him when he was in a better team to feel the real force because sometimes we would take the game away from him and he couldn't impact the game sometimes."
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