Keith Curle, Wimbledon's 'Crazy Gang' and Hartlepool United's fight for survival

When Keith Curle walked into Bobby Gould’s Wimbledon office in October 1988 he could not have expected what was about to come.

Curle had already felt indebted to Gould after the former Coventry City and Arsenal forward had handed him his first professional contract when at Bristol Rovers a number of years previous - but after Gould had tabled a reported £500,000 offer to Reading for Curle to join the FA Cup holders and the infamous ‘Crazy Gang’, the defender was about to get another surprise.

“My first conversation with Bobby was about Wimbledon and he told me about some of the characters in the changing room I was going to be walking into. It was quite eye-opening,” Curle told The Mail.

“Then the last conversation I had with him, as I was about to walk out the door, he said ‘oh and by the way, I’m going to make you captain.’

Curle felt perplexed.

Here he was, still relatively early into his playing career at just 24-years-old, about to sign for the side who had made history five months previous when toppling Liverpool to claim one of the greatest ever FA Cup final triumphs with household names who will forever be etched into Wimbledon’s record books, and he was to come in and captain them.

“I looked at Bob and I said: ‘Bob, I’m making a step up, you’ve told me about the characters in the changing room, they’ve just won the FA Cup, I don’t think it’s the right time for me to be captain,’ Curle continued.

“And he said: ‘It’s either going to make you or break you. Welcome to the captaincy.’

“You walk into the changing room with John Fashanu, Vinnie Jones, Lawrie Sanchez, Dennis Wise and then Bobby walks in and introduces me as the new team captain and I’m thinking I’ve got to take things on board very, very quickly.”

And take things on board he did. Curle went on to make almost 100 appearances for the Dons before being sold to Manchester City for a record £2.5m transfer fee - but his time at Plough Lane was not always plain sailing.

“It was a massive starting point for me when Bobby took me there,” said Curle.

“I went there for decent money at the time on the back of them winning the FA Cup. To walk in and be given the captaincy, Bobby’s words were right. It was either going to make me or break me.

“I had to face some challenges along the way. When you’re captain with people like Vinnie Jones and Fash, they ask questions, even though you know they know what the answer is. They want to hear you say it when something has gone wrong or when going to speak to the manager.

“They don’t really want to know the answer, they just want to see if you’re going to go in. But that’s part and parcel of it and I really enjoyed it.”

Curle added: “Wimbledon had a way of welcoming you to the football club.

“Very quickly I learned not to wear decent gear to training because it would be in a pile being burnt. If you wore a new pair of trainers they would get hammered and nailed to the bench. You’d have your pockets cut out.

“But once you bought into it, it was absolutely fantastic because every day you never knew what was going to happen. It was a phenomenal time.

“We used to train on the side of the A3 in Richmond where there was a service station and a truck stop but it was homely.

“We had a way of playing, we had a way of behaving as a team, but we had a unique philosophy of what we were good at.

“We had Don Howe, who was the England assistant manager. I remember in my first training session he broke down a recovering sliding tackle about the elevation of your leading leg. The type of detail which made you think ‘I’m going to improve just by being in this environment.’

“Likewise I can remember in one of my first training sessions when the players took the ball off the centre-forward and rolled it into midfield into Lawrie Sanchez and he booted it over my head, over the goal, and he said; ‘Don’t ever give me the ball in there. I don’t want it. Play to my strengths, play it forward into an area and I’ll land on second balls.’ So it was a learning curve very quickly.”

Curle’s time at Wimbledon would be a relative success, with the club climbing as high as seventh in the First Division before he would move on to Maine Road in 1991 for what was then a British record transfer fee.

The ‘Crazy Gang’ of Wimbledon many will be familiar with has been the subject of much controversy in the years since, following the FA’s commission to see the club relocate to Milton Keynes.

It would be supporters who would then relaunch the club under the umbrella we associate today as AFC Wimbledon - who were consigned to the Counties League before a meteoric rise back up to the Football League where we see today.

Crucially, that history remained and in 2020 that history came full circle as the club played its first game back at Plough Lane, a mere 200 yards from where Curle had captained the Dons 32-years previous.

Now in charge of Hartlepool United, Curle will take his relegation-threatened team to the place he called home and shared such memories as a player. But how he could do with the kind of ‘Crazy Gang’ spirit he was a part of for his Hartlepool squad between now and the end of the season.

“It’s about getting that identity of what we are, who we are and what we’re about and not shying away from it,” said Curle, whose side languish in the bottom two in League Two.

“When you played for Wimbledon back then everybody used to say they hated playing against Wimbledon.

“I remember we played one game away at Everton and it was the worst game of football. I think the ball must have been in play for about 12 minutes. We were breaking things up, there were stoppages in play, we didn’t let them have any flow to their game at all - I'm even talking waist-high rugby tackles just to stop them and their flow.

“We came in after the game and Don Howe rightly said ‘that’s not the way we want you to play football' and I think he got hit by a slice of pizza. I didn’t throw the slice of pizza by the way.”

Curle added: “But it was unique that people hated playing against us. Why? We were hard working, we were aggressive, we didn’t shy away from what we were good at.

“We banged it up to Fash, we landed on second balls and we penned teams in. If the ball popped out we recycled play and got the ball back in there and we were excellent at set pieces.

“There was an aggressiveness about the football club that if you kicked one of us, you’d have to kick 11 of us. Modern day footballers now, if you kick one the other 10 limp.

“That was an era where it was completely different, but the mindset of being involved in a club and a team was excellent to be involved in at the time.

“There were some players who left that Wimbledon team who went on to have very good careers. People like Dennis Wise, Terry Phelan, Jon Scales that went on to play for the likes of Chelsea, Liverpool, Tottenham. They bought into what we’re about.”

Curle now needs some of that ‘buying in’ spirit from his Hartlepool side if they are to remain in the Football League.