‘On away days, Dennis Wise would say, “Oi, go and get me a coffee”, and you’d have to. You’d come back with it, sit down, and he’d want another one for someone else. You’d do it again and again’ John Terry on breaking into a star-packed Chel

In your average football dressing room, a natural pecking order usually exists.

What the captain, or senior pros say usually goes, with those fresh out of the youth ranks usually at the bottom of the food chain.

When John Terry was coming up through the Chelsea youth ranks at the end of the 1990s, the Stamford Bridge dressing room had some big personalities in there, as the likes of World Cup 98 winners Frank Leboeuf and Marcel Desailly mixed with Italian legend Gianluca Vialli, while England international Dennis Wise was club captain.

John Terry recalls Dennis Wise’s character-building tricks

Few players had a bigger personality than Wise in the ‘90s and Terry – who was ranked at no.4 in FourFourTwo’s list of the best Premier League defenders ever – has recalled some of the tricks which his former skipper used on him in order to integrate him into the dressing room culture.

“In that era, as a youngster, everything was a test,” Terry tells FourFourTwo. “On away days, Dennis would say, “Oi, go and get me a coffee”, and you’d have to.

“You’d come back with it, sit down, and he’d want another one for someone else. You’d do it again and again – they wouldn’t order them all at once, so you’d be up and down the whole trip.

“I’d do it all day long – no complaints. Kids these days don’t know what that’s like, but it builds character.”

While these kinds of antics will have no doubt kept Wise and the senior pros amused on long away trips, Terry adds that Wise had another side to him.

“But Dennis looked after me, too. I used to clean his boots, and he still loves to remind me of that whenever I see him!

“He’d give me £25 from his goal bonus whenever he scored. When you’re earning £40 a week, that’s an awful lot of money. I would go into the first-team dressing room to give Wisey his boots and he’d be in the middle of a team talk, giving certain people a bollocking if they needed it.

“He’d give me a little wink, and I felt so inspired by that – the control and respect he had. Back then, you had to earn that respect from the top pros.”

Read FourFourTwo’s Chelsea Season Preview HERE.

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.