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 Wises character-building tricks
Few players had a bigger personality than Wise in the 90s and Terry - who was ranked at no.4 in FourFourTwos 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 youd have to.
Youd come back with it, sit down, and hed want another one for someone else. Youd do it again and again they wouldnt order them all at once, so youd be up and down the whole trip.
Id do it all day long no complaints. Kids these days dont know what thats 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!
Hed give me �25 from his goal bonus whenever he scored. When youre earning �40 a week, thats an awful lot of money. I would go into the first-team dressing room to give Wisey his boots and hed be in the middle of a team talk, giving certain people a bollocking if they needed it.
Hed 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.
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