‘I used to ride a motorbike and my crash helmet would get filled. From my point of view, the best was talcum powder, but there were other things…’ Dave Beasant on Wimbledon’s Crazy Gang dressing room pranks

If you were part of the Wimbledon squad in the 1980s, you had to sleep with one eye open.

The Crazy Gang’s predilection for a dressing room prank was legendary, with their team featuring a murderer’s row of some of the era’s biggest hardmen and most bombastic personalities.

If Dennis Wise wasn’t rubbing Deep Heat into your jockstrap, then Vinnie Jones would probably be pulling your shorts down during the team photo, all while the suit you came to work in was being ritually burned back in the dressing room.

Dave Beasant on Wimbledon pranks

Goalkeeper Dave Beasant famously captained the south Londoners to FA Cup glory in 1988, but when he arrived at the club on trial from Edgware Town in 1979, he was given the kind of welcome that one would expect from the Dons.

“When I was on trial, I didn’t have a car, I used to ride a motorbike and my crash helmet would get filled,” the former England stopper recalls to FourFourTwo.

“From my point of view, the best was talcum powder, but there were other things…

“Even with the talcum powder, it got into the foam of the helmet, so for a week afterwards, every time I put it on, I’d come out with grey hair!

“We had a tremendous team spirit – in our dressing room, if things needed to be said, they were said, and you didn’t hold grudges against each other.

“I can see why Sir Alex Ferguson retired when he retired – you can’t give that hairdryer treatment to players now.”

Beasant’s playing career stretched across five decades from his breakthrough in the late ‘70s right up to 2014, when he was named as a sub for Stevenage at the age of 55 during a stint as the club’s goalkeeping coach, but admits a modern player wouldn’t last five minutes in that Crazy Gang dressing room.

“They’d be completely shocked – we might be changing their nappy by the end of the day!”

For more than a decade, Joe Mewis has worked in football journalism as a reporter and editor. Mewis has had stints at Mirror Football and LeedsLive among others and worked at FourFourTwo throughout Euro 2024, reporting on the tournament. In addition to his journalist work, Mewis is also the author of four football history books that include times on Leeds United and the England national team. Now working as a digital marketing coordinator at Harrogate Town, too, Mewis counts some of his best career moments as being in the iconic Spygate press conference under Marcelo Bielsa and seeing his beloved Leeds lift the Championship trophy during lockdown.