Julian Dicks has gone down in folklore as one of the hardest, angriest and most-confrontational players in Premier League history.
The former West Ham United and Liverpool defender was a tough player in arguably the toughest era in English football, and regularly had run-ins with the likes of Vinnie Jones, Dennis Wise and Roy Keane. Yet the Englishman has now revealed the player he feared more than any other... and it's definitely not one FourFourTwo would have guessed.
"I never feared anyone when it came to confrontation, as I loved a physical battle," he tells FourFourTwo exclusively ahead the launch of his new book Hammer Time (Headline, £22), out now. "But I did used to get terrified of the fast players."
Dicks wasn't known for his pace, and so it was nippy players he used to lie awake at night fretting about before match day. "People like Newcastle United's Franz Carr and Tony Daley at Aston Villa. Franz could catch whippets, he was that quick! If he gave me a 10-yard head start, he’d beat me to a ball 15 yards away."
Yet Dicks reveals the savage way he used to try and shackle his speedy opponents in era when referees tended to be far more lenient than they are today.
"Luckily, back then, you could f***ing kick people," recalls Dicks, who received 22 yellow cards during his Premier League career. "You could nail a player three or four times and then the ref would come over and say, ‘Look, any more of that and you’re going in the book.’ So you’d need to make the first few count. If you caught them right, they wouldn’t come at you again."
