Dion Dublin interview: I lived with Jason Statham above a pub – the stories I can tell you…
Gordon Strachan, who managed Dublin during a hugely enjoyable period at Coventry, including the 1997-98 campaign when he finished as the Premier League’s joint-top scorer on 18 goals with Owen and Chris Sutton, was another Scot with a talent for reading people.
Coventry were playing a star-studded Chelsea at Highfield Road on the opening day of the 1998-99 season and in order to access the away dressing room you had to walk past the home one first. Strachan was five minutes later than normal. “‘Right I’ve just watched Chelsea come off the coach and they don’t give a s— about you. You are nothing to them. They’ve already won the game’. So he opens our dressing-room door and says, ‘Have a look at this’. Squeezes us all in together so we can watch the Chelsea players walk past. Somebody has a trouser leg up, another has headphones on, one has a cap on backwards, they’ve got music blaring. Gordon didn’t say anything else. He just could closed the door.”
Coventry won 2-1, with Dublin and Darren Huckerby “who I possibly had my most success playing up front with” getting the goals. Marcel Desailly and Frank Leboeuf were playing centre-half for Chelsea. “When I see Frank and Marcel now they both still joke about it and pretend to be scared of me, ‘Ahhh, it’s Dublin. Oh no!’”
Dirty tricks
Dublin was part of some great dressing rooms. Cambridge were in the old fourth division when he pitched up as a “thin, gangly little kid, quite timid” in 1988. By the time he left four years and more than 60 goals later they had only narrowly missed out on reaching the top flight after losing in the play-offs.
His old manager John Beck even pulled together a video compilation of all his goals for Ferguson. They were masters of the dark arts. “If it was a hot day, we’d screw the windows of the opponent’s dressing room closed and if it was a cold day we’d screw them open. Back then you gave opponents these big grey teapots but we’d put about three bags of sugar in so they’d get this massive high then crash 15 minutes into the game.”
The dirty tricks did not end there. “We’d give them no hot water at all and in those days when you went to any ground you’d get your warm-up balls from the home team so we’d shove the balls in the bath so they were as heavy as anything and then when the game started they’d be thrown by the lighter weight of the match ball.”
Even now, he could pick up the phone to any of those Cambridge team-mates and it would be just like yesterday. It was a special bond. There was just a solitary grim moment on the training ground when he was racially abused. He will not disclose his team-mate’s name but it prompted a very rare act of violence from Dublin. “The only time I’ve ever punched someone is when they called me a f—— black b——.” Bam, smacked him. It was just a natural reaction. I picked him up, said sorry, and that was it, done. He never did it again and hopefully he learnt a lesson, but I had it from fans, the monkey chants, all that kind of thing. You black this, you black that.”
Dealing with racism
The youngest of five children, Dublin first encountered racism at school in Leicester. His dad and mum Rose, who had arrived in England from Dominica in the Caribbean, had suffered terrible abuse, initially living in Notting Hill in London, and Dublin would have his own experiences before too long. “I’d have to go a certain way home from a youth club in Leicester to avoid certain people and one day, you go the wrong way, and you end up getting your head kicked in,” Dublin recalls.
“It was probably 10 seconds but it felt like half an hour. It toughened me up, taught me pain thresholds, resilience. And without knowing it at the time, those idiots kind of moulded me into the person I am today – straight, honest, hard-working, someone who doesn’t really fear much”.
It is hard to imagine Dublin ever losing his temper but he did so with Savage during a fiery Midlands derby between Villa and Birmingham at the tail end of 2002-03. They are BBC colleagues now but there was no love lost when Dublin careered through Savage and the pantomime villain went into full wind-up merchant mode. “Sav’s a good bloke off the pitch but on it he was an absolute a—hole,” Dublin says. “It was deliberate, part of his shtick. He’d actually asked for my shirt before the game and I said, ‘Of course you can son’. I was about three seconds late with the tackle, granted, but he got up off the floor and came walking towards me as if to say he was going to f—— chin me and I got all the usual verbals. Then the red mist descended. I was in the tunnel waiting for him for about 20 minutes before getting dragged away by the staff.”
