Eric Cantona kicks off at Crystal Palace – January 26, 1995

Eric Cantona’s indelible impact on the Premier League is forever immortalized by the night at Selhurst Park when the striker showed the incendiary personality of the poet he has since become.

Four minutes after the break in a match that would finish 1-1, Crystal Palace defender Richard Shaw’s close marking of the Manchester United magician caused Cantona to lose his cool in violent fashion and lash out at the defender in close quarters to the assistant referee, resulting in a red card.

As he strutted towards the tunnel, Cantona was offered choice words by a 20-year-old Palace fan who had raced down a stand, and his reaction – described by one newspaper as “nitro-glycerine in human form” – was to leap feet-first across a hoarding towards his taunting adversary.

Cantona’s leap was labeled a kung-fu move, but in truth it was too primally unconstrained to honor the discipline. He received a nine-month ban from the sport and 120 hours of community service.

Conor McGregor throws cans at the Diaz brothers – August 17, 2006

If Nate Diaz’s response to Conor McGregor’s sharp tongue ahead of UFC 202 – launching a plastic bottle at his rival as he angrily exited a press conference – was intended as a petty parting shot, it provoked a rippling response from the sport’s fiercest figure.

“You’ll do nothin’,” McGregor’s initial repeated barb into the microphone, has become a fixture of memes and mockery, but the former champion earned the reaction he really wanted in the form of a harmlessly lobbed receptacle.

READ MORE: Not proper: MMA veteran slams ‘stupid’ Russian blonde for posing with McGregor’s whiskey outside youth hockey club

Apparently incensed by the chuck, he leaped to his feet, grabbed drinks from the press table and began furiously launching them into the darkness, where Diaz and his mob were goading his team in kind.

One of the impromptu weapons was a Monster energy can which was reported to have struck a young viewer on its flight towards team Diaz.

“He shouldn’t have been throwing cans like that,” said featherweight Chris Avila, who revealed the identity of the luckless can victim.

Ayrton Senna trashes Alain Prost’s car to win the F1 World Championship – October 21, 1990

Brazilian Formula 1 great Ayrton Senna entered the 1990 Japanese Grand Prix in pole position, knowing that the only man who could deny him the World Championship was familiar foe Alain Prost, who had beaten him to the title the previous season.

Starting the day seven points ahead of Ferrari’s Prost, Senna was ruthless and reckless in knocking the Frenchman off the circuit at the first corner in a crash at around 130mph that savaged the right wing of his McLaren Honda before he had even achieved impact.

Understandably, Prost was disgusted by the precarious ploy, and the danger involved was underlined when Formula 3000 driver Hitoshi Ogawa was killed in a crash on the same corner two years later.

Conor McGregor's bus attack at UFC 223 media day – April 5, 2018

If the water bottle wobbly at UFC 202 was a warm-up, McGregor’s violent attack on a minibus in Brooklyn – which contained future opponent Khabib Nurmagomedov and several other fighters – was an outbreak of unbridled menace.

Following a hotel confrontation involving Nurmagomedov and McGregor teammate Artem Lobov, McGregor and his team hopped on a private plane to New York and attempted to exact revenge by attacking the bus containing the Russian star.

READ MORE: Khabib: ‘Sometimes I go easy on my opponents, I don’t want to hurt them’ (VIDEO)

Steel dollies, garbage cans and railings were a few of the weapons said to have been rained on the buses in the loading docks at the Barclays Centre, where McGregor and his cronies had stormed the innards and reached the mini-convoy.

All of which unwittingly gave Nurmagomedov ample motivation for his eventual encounter in the Octagon with McGregor, scoring a shock fourth-round win at UFC 229 to usurp the lightweight champion and secure his position as a name not to be messed with. More on that later.

Nick Kyrgios hurling a chair across a court at the Italian Open – May 16, 2019

Where do we start with Nick Kyrgios? Let’s take a recent flashpoint in the Australian showman’s histrionic history, when he reacted to being docked a game for swearing in typically reasonable fashion at the Italian Open, hurling a chair aside before packing his bag, marching off and defaulting the match.

He accrued more fines for a string of misdemeanors at Queen’s in London the following month, including lampooning an official’s headwear, but those incidents were only the latest in a litany of incidents that have been equal parts distasteful, disturbing and entertaining.

READ MORE: ‘Say it to my face’:Tennis Bad Boy Kyrgios slams ‘boring’ opponent who called him an ‘idiot’

One of the earliest, when he made abusive remarks to Stan Wawrinka about new girlfriend and fellow pro Donna Vekic in 2015, left the multiple Grand Slam winner publicly appalled by remarks he called “disrespectful in a way I could never even imagine.”

Since then, Kyrgios has stropped out of Wimbledon, faced sanctions for apparently throwing a match, been at the center of a BBC apology for seeming to simulate a sex act with a bottle and annoyed Rafael Nadal by serving underhand - although Judy Murray praised that unorthodox tactic as “genius”.