Liam Dickinson, the Carnage Pub Crawl’s knight in shining armour
It’s a Monday night. Your mates are going out on the town and you fancy joining them for a few beers. It’ll be alright you tell yourself, I’ll just phone into work in the morning and tell them I’m sick. They’ll never know.
That’s until The Sun run a feature a few days later about the debaucherous Carnage Pub Crawls that used to dominate the student party scene. And it contains a photo of you. Carrying a comatose girl through the streets at 1am in the morning.
Now, you might get away with it if your boss or nobody at your work reads The Sun. But if you’re a highly paid professional footballer who has just cost your new team a huge £300,000, then chances are somebody is going to recognise you.
Welcome to the world of Liam Dickinson. It says much about Dickinson’s brief Brighton career that his moment as a pub crawl poster boy was the undoubted highlight of his time at Withdean.
This being 2009 when Brighton were perennial League One struggles, The Sun didn’t actually realise they’d snapped a £300,000 footballer partaking in one of those infamous pub crawls which used to encourage students to get as drunk as humanly possible before they passed out. Or in the case of Dickinson’s lady friend, actually did pass out.
If they had, then that would have made for an even better story than the disgrace and chaos the event brought to the streets of Brighton.
You can imagine the headlines if Lewis Dunk, Shane Duffy or Dale Stephens were caught in a similar position. Actually, it’s a surprise they haven’t.
Dickinson was too small-time to be recognised by those working on the features desk of a national newspaper. But there were still 7,000 odd people who paid good money to watch him ply his trade at an athletics stadium. And needless to say, quite a few of them noticed.
There was a thread on North Stand Chat which went along the lines of “Is this Liam Dickinson?”. The Argus reported on it from there and the news eventually got back to Tony Bloom who wanted to know why the club’s most expensive signing for over 30 years was out on the piss on a Monday night.
What we’d have given to be a fly on the wall in the manager’s office when Dickinson’s antics came to light. Not that we had a manager at the time.
Dickinson’s pub crawl with the students of Brighton came just 48 hours after Russell Slade had been sacked, meaning caretaker boss Martin Hinshelwood was left to deal with the situation.
“Boss, you know Liam phoned in sick on Tuesday morning? Well, there is a picture of him in The Sun carrying a woman up West Street at 1am in the morning.”
Needless to say, Hinshelwood wasn’t impressed. Dickinson was subsequently culled from the matchday squad for the following Saturday’s 4-4 FA Cup First Round draw at Wycombe Wanderers and it wasn’t exactly a good first impression to make on Gus Poyet who arrived a week later.
You can imagine Poyet analysing the squad he had to work with when he took over. Glenn Murray – bit injury prone but will score goals at this level. Nicky Forster – experienced professional and club captain. Liam Dickinson – phoned in sick last week because he’d gone on a student bar crawl until the early hours of the morning.
Poyet wasn’t impressed either. The new boss sent Dickinson on loan to Peterborough United less than three months later and at the end of the season he was offloaded to Barnsley for significantly less than Brighton had paid for him a year earlier.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Dickinson arrived amid much fanfare from Derby County who themselves had forked out £750,000 for him a year before he moved to Sussex.
Bizarrely given that outlay, Dickinson never played a game for the Rams. Instead, he spent the 2008-09 season out on loan at various clubs, scoring a pretty impressive six goals in 13 League One games for Huddersfield Town and four in six for Blackpool in the Championship. The Albion had even fought off Norwich City for his signature.
On paper, that made him look a good buy – even if the fee was astonishingly big for Brighton at the time. This was Bloom’s first summer as chairman and the club were spending money left, right and centre with Slade’s transfer policy at times looking suspiciously like it was based around signing anyone who had previously played for Stockport County.
Six former Hatters were in the Albion squad by the time the 2009-10 season kicked off with a 1-0 home defeat to Walsall. Dickinson, Gary Dicker, James Tunnicliffe, Jim NcNulty, Craig Davies and Murray had all played for the Edgeley Park club within a couple of years of rocking up at Withdean.
The early signs were promising for Dickinson as he notched two early goals against two of his former employers. His first was a cracker even if it did come in the infamous 7-1 defeat away at Huddersfield and he followed that up with another a week later in the 4-2 home defeat against Stockport in which Tommy Elphick and Colin Hawkins both saw red within two minutes of each other.
Further goals followed away at Yeovil Town in October and in the 3-3 draw with Hartlepool United, which proved to be the end of Slade’s reign.
Dickinson’s final two goals for the club came in Poyet’s second home game as the striker fired the Albion into the third round of the FA Cup with a brace in a 3-2 Withdean win over Rushden & Diamonds.
By the time he departed for Peterborough at the start of February, he’d scored six times in 32 games. Given that 10 of those appearances had come from the bench, it wasn’t a terrible record – although Bloom would probably expect more given the huge fee he’d forked out for Dickinson.
At 6ft 4in and being pretty good technically, he was clearly a talented bloke. What let him down was his attitude, as evidenced by that infamous night on the town.
Dickinson told The Argus after being caught out that he hadn’t actually been on the pub crawl, but to Wokmania for a meal with another unnamed player, who mysteriously had disappeared by the time Dickinson discovered the comatose girl.
“She collapsed in front of us,” Dickinson said. “Her mum or her auntie picked her up in a car. I picked the girl up and put her in the car. I didn’t want to just leave her. Anybody else would have done the same thing.”
We’re not sure many professional footballers would have been out on a Monday night at 1am on Brighton’s party street to be honest, Liam.
Dickinson’s career didn’t get any better after he left the Albion. He managed just one start and three substitute appearances for Barnsley and has since led a nomadic existence taking in Walsall, Rochdale, Southend United, Stalybridge, Guiseley, Bradford Park Avenue and FC United of Manchester.
Bizarrely, the last time we saw Dickinson was at the Albion’s opening pre-season friendly of the 2010-11 season against Burgess Hill Town – a few days after he’d signed for Barnsley.
Despite no longer being a Brighton player, Dickinson had come along to watch his now-former teammates. We were a few (about nine) pints down by the time we spotted him, and decided it would be a good idea to firstly offer him a pint and then ask if he would carry us home.
He at least saw the funny side of it – unlike Bloom, Poyet and Hinshelwood.
