I wanted to batter wind-up king Mart

MARTIN O’NEILL wound-up Emile Heskey so much that FOUR Aston Villa players had to stop the big striker giving the Irishman a beating.

Former England star Heskey was in the twilight of his career at Villa Park – having also played for O’neill (above) at Leicester City as a teenager – when a row erupted at half-time during a cup tie at Crystal Palace.

Villa’s then boss was letting rip when he took it one step too far – and Heskey saw red. “Martin was great. At Leicester, he allowed me to go and play,” said Heskey.

“He would say to me, ‘What I want you to do is get the ball, turn and run’.

“I would have run through a brick wall for him. But I’ve seen another side to him.

“He can absolutely muller people, destroy them. And I came close to letting him have it once at Villa.

“I wasn’t the same player by then. I was 32 years old, not 17, and my game had changed.

Shouting

“I’d adapted to where I was. It still worked for me.

“But it almost kicked off during an FA Cup tie against Crystal Palace [in 2010].

“He was shouting, ‘****ing hell, Emile, get hold of the ball, turn and run’. I lost count of the number of times he said that to me. He was going on and on during half-time, and I lost it.

“I couldn’t get to him. It was probably a good thing. There were four people hanging off me in the end. It took four of them. I had properly gone.”

O’neill, who wrote the foreword to Heskey’s autobiography, said: “I felt Emile should have got to the ball more quickly than he had done in the first 45 minutes.

“He didn’t agree with me and rose to tell me so with much more eagerness than he had previously shown.

“We agreed to disagree on this occasion.”