Levein: I locked troublemaker in cupboard as lesson – and forgot
FORMER Scotland boss Craig Levein has revealed he once locked a wayward footballer in a broom cupboard to show him what life would be like in a prison cell – then forgot about him.
The 56-year-old said he took action after a police contact regularly tipped him off about the player’s off-field behaviour.
He said he only intended to lock the player away for a short time, but forgot about him for eight hours and the plan to teach him a valuable lesson backfired as he found the player asleep and unflustered.
Levein, who co-hosts podcast Sacked in the Morning, said: “I had a friend in the police and he would give me a heads up if any of the players had misbehaved over the weekend. I had one player, I can’t even say which club, that I got phone calls about every Monday.
“He was just a young lad too and he was up to all sorts – he got thrown out of a nightclub then had a fight with both the bouncers and beat the two of them up.
“I said to him ‘you’re going to end up in the nick at some point because your behaviour is way past what is normal’.
“There’s a broom cupboard up stairs and I said to Peter Houston ‘here’s the key, go and stick him in that’. What I was trying to do was get the kid to think about what he’d been doing and what it’d be like to be stuck in a cell. We stuck him in the cupboard and then forgot all about him.
“It was about four o’clock in the afternoon, I said ‘oh s***’.
“I took the key and I went up thinking ‘he’s been in there eight hours or something’. I opened the door and he’s sleeping... not bothered his backside. Nothing. I had to wake him up. That plan backfired.”