Don't get me wrong. Football fans should not be hurling anything at anyone, other than, perhaps, abuse. But Bruce has been around, both as a player and a manager. He must have had a lot worse in his time than a near miss by a green-leaved brassica oleracea.

And unfortunately it got a lot worse 24 hours later when it was announced that he had been given the sack by Villa. Having taken them to last season's Championship play-off final, Bruce has presided this season over just one win in the last 10 matches.

If Bruce was indeed the target of the phantom cabbage thrower - currently the subject of a nationwide trawl by the police, the army, M15 and M16, as well as the FBI, who have not been given enough to do recently - the idea that he is a vegetable in terms of footballing ability is manifestly unfair. But in the current world of football the old order seems to have become inverted, with managers being treated far worse than players.

As far as throwing things onto the pitch is concerned, however, the old order stands. It is, if not a time-honoured, then at least traditional element of the game. And indeed other games.

Staying with the vegetable theme a little longer, Chelsea's fans have, over the last 30 years, been in the habit of throwing celery at opposing players while singing a particularly rude song. No-one seems to know where this form of expression arrived from, although some believe it may have something to do with the fact that celery once grew on the pitch at Priestfield Stadum, home to Gillingham FC.

This sounds the only logical explanation - although I like to think the Chelsea fans are having a dig at the amount of money footballers are paid nowadays with a suggestive reference to "salary".

In 2007, Chelsea announced that any fan caught bringing celery to Stamford Bridge would be denied entry and risked a stadium ban. As for away matches - the fans stick with it.

And sticking with the theme of food - Paul Gascoigne's noted love for Mars bars was often marked by fans throwing - you'll never guess, yes - Mars bars onto the pitch when he played for Newcastle United. And sometimes he picked them up and - you'll never guess - ate them.

While some objects thrown into the sporting arena appear puzzling, and others banal, others still are sometimes logical and inspired.

In Charlton Athletic's 2016 home League One clash with Coventry City, the match was brought to an abrupt halt after thousands of toy pigs were thrown onto the pitch by Charlton fans.

They were protesting against the club's owner Roland Duchâtelet over alleged mismanagement and Charlton's recent relegation from the Championship.

Coventry fans, also unhappy with their club's owners, supported Charlton by joining their protests before and after the game.

In 1998, Hull City supporters protested against chairman David Lloyd, Britain's former Davis Cup tennis player who went on to make a fortune by starting a leisure centre chain. They made their feelings known by throwing tennis balls onto the pitch.

Moving a little further afield than England - which will soon of course be forbidden, and vice versa, in the cause of freedom - the examples of on-the-field "entertainment" become markedly more bizarre.  

The tennis ball tactic was repeated by fans of FC Basel in 2010 when their Swiss Super League away match against FC Luzern was shifted from its original start time in order to accommodate a tennis match on TV involving national icon Roger Federer.

Hundreds of balls were thrown, and the game had to be stopped for more than 30 minutes as stewards cleaned up.

In February this year, tennis balls made their reappearance in football as fans threw them onto the pitch during the Bundesliga game between Eintracht Frankfurt and RB Leipzig to protest against the match being played on a Monday instead of the weekend. Federer was not in the frame this time, however.

But some European fans have moved far from the cosy, bouncy world of tennis balls.

In 2001, Inter Milan supporters apparently stole a moped from a visiting fan before a home game against Atalanta at the San Siro and managed to sneak it into the stadium (these bikes can fold up and fit in your breast pocket these days, I tell you…)

Obviously the only thing to do next was to try and set it alight in the top tier of the stadium. But when that failed there was nothing else to be done but to hurl it over the edge towards the pitch - which it didn't reach. I have yet to see details of what or who it did reach.

A year after that motorcycle madness, a 2002 World Cup warm-up between New Zealand and Chile in Auckland was interrupted when one supporter threw a car door onto the pitch, prompting an eminently sensible warning from the stadium announcer - "Do not bring car parts onto the pitch".

Two years later there was wheel trouble (arf!) at a Copa Libertadores quarter-final between America and Sao Caetano in 2004.

During a heated moment between the players at the end of the game at Mexico City's Estadio Aztec, supporters began throwing - yes, you've guessed it - wheelbarrows onto the pitch.

When Real Madrid's former Barcelona midfielder Luis Figo returned to play for his new side at the Nou Camp in 2002, he was pelted with coins, bottles and a pig's head as he went over to take a corner.          

Hang on. There have been some pretty mental things thrown onto the pitch in England too. Back in 1965, play between Brentford and visitors Millwall was held up when someone in the away end lobbed a grenade onto the turf. Very sensibly, the home keeper ran forward, picked it up and threw it into the safety of his net. It turned out to be a dummy.

Meanwhile, in a cold parallel universe, another sport has its own beguiling and sometimes puzzling, and sometimes senseless, tradition of popular projectiles - ice hockey.

First off, it makes a lot more sense to throw something onto ice. If you catch it right you can send whatever you have felt moved to hurl sliding right across to the other side of the arena.

We see this happen in a nice, decorous and expected way in figure skating, where towering emotional performances evince a torrent of teddies and flowers from the stands that bounce and slide everywhere.

The vibe is a little different with ice hockey, however. And a lot of the reason for that, it appears, is down to two brothers - Pete and Jerry Cusimano - who, on April 15, 1952, decided to encourage their side Detroit Red Wings in the best way they could, which was by hurling an octopus onto the arena.

This may sound senseless, but tarry - there was method in their madness, for the eight legs of the octopus pointed the way to the eight challenges the Red Wings would have to overcome to win that year's Stanley Cup, including the play-off series.

Well, of course the Red Wings won, making the cephalopod the team's unofficial good luck charm ever since.

In 2006, a pair of San Jose Sharks fans decided to mimic the classic Red Wings story when the two teams met. Cousins Ken Conroy and Mike Gaboury simply smuggled in a four-foot leopard shark and then threw it onto the ice before being escorted out by security staff. And nobody got it.

So four years later, in another meeting with the Red Wings, they did it again - this time with a shark that had an octopus in its mouth. Get it?

Other teams have tried to hex the Red Wings octopus effect in different fashion. 

Fans of the Edmonton Oilers, for instance, decided before their Stanley Cup play-off series in 2006 that this would best be achieved by throwing slaps of Alberta beef onto the ice. The Oilers duly won.

If Villa results start picking up now, we might be seeing a few more cabbages flying around…