TONIGHT’S DOCUMENTARY on the Wimbledon team of the 1980s and 90s is a must-watch for football fans.
The film, which airs on BT Sport 1 at 9pm, revisits the days when the London club’s motley crew, who earned promotion from non-league before beating Liverpool in the 1988 FA Cup final, were known as ‘The Crazy Gang’ because of their physical playing style and off-the-field antics.
Former players Vinnie Jones, John Fashanu, Dennis Wise, Lawrie Sanchez and Terry Phelan, an ex-Ireland international, were all interviewed with several stories told about the mischief they got up to over the years.
“We were just a bunch of misfits that found a family which accepted us and we all clung onto that,” Jones, who went on to become a Hollywood actor, told The Express.
“We all found our spiritual home, we all lived off each other. It was like going to work with 20 brothers. Can you imagine what it would be like living in a household with 20 brothers, the chaos it would be? That is exactly what we had.
“Each week the manager would put us under a lot of pressure, saying, ‘You have had the craic, you have had a few beers, now come three o’clock it’s business’. A lot of people thought we were a joke, but really we were mugging them off.”
Practical jokes were rife — Alan Cork famously had his car set on fire because the club wouldn’t give him a new contract while John Hartson’s gear was set alight on his first day of training.
Violence was also common-place and Jones tells of how Fashanu once threw another player around the dressing room “like a rag doll”
However, the club’s former owner Sam Hammam was highly-critical of how the club is portrayed by the documentary after its premiere earlier this month.
“Wimbledon was a group of people who worked hard and fought against heavy odds for 20 years and came up trumps,’ said Hammam.
“We represented the little person, the working-class fan who doesn’t have a lot but works hard and doesn’t give up.
Everyone at the club I have spoken to was appalled at the way the programme made us look.
“The programme portrayed the group as violent thugs as if that was all they had to them. The suggestion was that the players were just a bunch of Fash’s boys and they were all terrified of him. It was far, far from the truth.”
The Crazy Gang is on BT Sport 1 at 9pm tonight. Watch the trailer below:
