Life-long Leeds United fan CHARLES HUTCHINSON considers the literary efforts of Vinnie Jones and David Batty, two footballers from the hard knocks school.

VINNIE Jones and David Batty are two of football's hardest men, the fire-stokers in the modern midfield engine room. Both have worn the Leeds United number 4 shirt; a number given an Elland Road iconic status by that supreme Scottish scrapper, Billy Bremner.

Both have received as many red cards as birthday cards; have had their run-ins with officials and been vilified by oppositions fans. Both returned to their spiritual football homes after years away, Batty to Leeds, Jones to Wimbledon. Off the pitch, family means everything to them.

Best of young mates at Leeds 12 years ago - Jones would regularly be fed and watered by Batty's parents - they are in every other way poles apart: a difference that goes beyond Vinnie's unexpected re-birth as a Hollywood star.

Batty would only ever wear a football stud; Jones has a diamond one in his left ear, and their autobiographies evoke these contrasting characters in their style of presentation, playing to their respective stereotypes of dour Yorkshireman and flash Southerner.

Batty goes for a You Looking At Me? cover photo, the picture cropped just above the stern eyebrows, the stubble-dusted jaw as square as his trademark pass. The content takes the standard biography form of chronological chapters, career statistics - you might need a magnifying glass to spot his rare, rare goals - complemented by two sequences of football and family photographs.

Jones went for a similar Wanted poster look on the cover of The Autobiography, his first book in 1998. Apparently the publishers favoured something similar for My Life - see the hard-nut image on the back - but Vinnie insisted on a clean-shaven, big-smiled Hollywood pin-up pose in the tradition of a bygone cigarette card. There are pictures throughout, including Vinnie shaving, Vinnie preening himself and Vinnie with his new Hollywood A-list friends, and the fashionable design is a cross between a Jamie Oliver cookbook and David Beckham's My World. Perish the thought, but this is Vinnie's pitch for the coffee table; Batty seeks only the bedside.

Batty and his collaborator, Bill Thornton of the Daily Star, write plainly to go with the plain speaking. To suggest they paint a portrait would be too colourful and there are moments when you wish Batty would not be so down to earth but that is his way. He is an uncomplicated man - he has never had a cheque book - and from Championship success to his World Cup penalty miss against Argentina in 1998, he treats everything in the manner suggested by Rudyard Kipling's If.

For all his undying love of Leeds United, he is very harsh on Howard Wilkinson's strict, restrictive regime and in the best chapter of all, Yorkshire's premier club does not come out smelling of white roses in its handling of his recent "injury nightmare".

Batty plans to "pack in work at 35" to do nothing but spend time with his wife Mandy and their twin boys and watch his beloved motor sports, melting away into the Wetherby background. That love of family stems from his own close-knit, secure roots in Leeds: to this day, his bin-man father writes a brief, tough match assessment of his son's performances (quoted at length in this book's most insightful comments).

By contrast, Jones's parents divorced and he was always on the move in his early years, even losing touch with his father for a few years.

All this has been written before in pretty much the same short, sharp, breezy sentences three years ago. My Life updates the story to take in the film career, and whereas Batty will be happy merely watching a Vinnie movie - his family regularly attends the Warner Village multiplex at Clifton Moor - Jones loves the premieres, the Hollywood home from home, the award ceremonies. Nothing is described beyond a superficial, wham-bam level: for example, Wilkinson was simply a "great manager", Batty was "my best mate", whereas Batty's book devotes detailed chapters to both of them.

While Batty has a habit of playing everything down, Jones lives his life in hyperbole and exclamation marks: no show on the one hand and the showman on the other. Read both books, and you warm to Batty's honesty and lack of frills but Jones remains a cartoon, working to a script.

Vinnie Jones, Vinnie: My Life, published by Headline at £16.99; David Batty, The Autobiography, published by Headline at £17.99.