It probably says a lot about how Wimbledon used to be portrayed, back in the days when the team with the lowest gates, the worst-paid players and the tattiest stadium kicked in the doors of polite football society, that there were so few people willing to stick up for them Dave Bassett actually snipped out one of the newspaper articles where someone was prepared to go against the tide.

It was written by Eamon Dunphy for the Sunday Times when they were top of the league in September 1986 and Bassett still has that cutting, a little yellow round the edges now, in his collection of football possessions. “There are those who claim that what Wimbledon play isn’t really football,” it begins. “Ted Croker, the secretary of the Football Association no less, is one of them. He has even stated that Wimbledon should not be in the First Division at all. But what Croker and others in English football should be doing is extending to Dave Bassett and his Wimbledon players the respect and admiration they deserve.”

Those players held a reunion dinner last week, still wondering when that day might ever arrive, and for those of us in the audience, listening to their stories and seeing these men, some now in their 60s, immediately slipping back into the old routine, chopping down to size the pompous and the pretentious, it certainly struck a chord to hear the former captain, Gary Peters, saying the only comparison he could make was with The Dirty Dozen.

Dave Bassett with the his Wimbledon players, including Dave Beasant, fourth left, and Lawrie Sanchez, second right, in February 1985. Photograph: Mail On Sunday/Rex Shutterstock

In the film, Lee Marvin creates a crack fighting unit out of an assortment of renegades, drop-outs and novices. Bassett also had his share of misfits, rogues and unlikely lads. Wimbledon, Peters said, recruited “other clubs’ problems”. They nurtured the street-fighting mentality of the perpetual underdog. And, like the dirty dozen, their camaraderie was never something that could be created to order. It was why, when those players moved to other clubs, their managers often asked how it was done, desperate to recreate that spirit of togetherness.

Others will argue it was not a mark Wimbledon left on English football but a stain. Gary Lineker said the best way to watch them was on Ceefax. Ron Yeats, scouting for Liverpool, went to see Wimbledon once. “It was just welly, welly, welly,” he said, “the ball must have been screaming for mercy.” The cruellest line came from Terry Venables: “Wimbledon are killing the dreams that made football the world’s greatest game.”

A year later, Bobby Gould had inherited Bassett’s team and Wimbledon had beaten Liverpool on a sun-kissed day at the old Wembley. “When Wimbledon hit long balls up to a 6ft 2in centre-forward [John Fashanu] it’s destroying the game,” Bassett noted. “When Arsenal hit long balls to a 6ft 4in centre-forward [Niall Quinn], it’s good football.”

He makes a similar point in the new book, The Crazy Gang, he has co-authored with his one-time player and aide-de-camp Wally Downes, to put the record straight on the back of the lopsided BT Sport documentary that left the men from SW19 accusing Fashanu, and to a lesser extent Vinnie Jones, of a betrayal of their own.

Fashanu certainly ticked the boxes if Bassett was right to suspect the film-makers wanted “the slant on thuggery and violence”. Fashanu projected himself as a “warlord” figure, with wild stories of younger players being locked in car boots, duffed up and not allowed food for two days. It was a strange, sinister interview, in keeping with the suspicions of many that Fashanu is merely visiting this planet. There were boos when his name was brought up at the dinner, staged at the Kingsmeadow stadium, home of AFC Wimbledon, and there is enough testimony in the book – “the true inside story” it promises on the front cover – to understand why, as the old youth-team manager Geoff Taylor put it, something had to be done to “clear up all this bollocks”.

It is certainly a shame BT Sport did not delve deeper into the way a team went from the dregs of the Southern League to the upper reaches of the First Division and, on 14 May 1988, that epic day when John Motson announced a victory for the Crazy Gang over the Culture Club.

Seven of the players who reached the top flight with Wimbledon had been there in the puddles and potholes of the Fourth Division. Bassett would send his players to Lilleshall to take preliminary coaching qualifications and get a better understanding of the sport. Wimbledon set up an academy long before it was de rigueur and, though you might not have heard a great deal about it, the results were extraordinary. “In my last season we had 23 first-team players and 13 had played in the youth team,” Bassett recalled, to cheers from his audience. “If that had been Manchester United people would have been ejaculating all over the stadium.”

Likewise, there was nothing in the film about Wimbledon’s use of a statistician, Neil Lanham, to provide the team with data long before the practice was fashionable. There was no mention of the £11,000 a hard-up club raised for a video analyst, Vince Craven, to kit out a room of his house with the right equipment. Wimbledon were described as a glorified pub team; what people don’t realise was they actually spent hours watching clips of Arrigo Sacchi’s great Milan side and noting the way, believe it or not, the team of Franco Baresi, Ruud Gullit and Marco van Basten often adopted a more direct approach.

It might not fit into the stereotype of this homespun club, where the players stole traffic cones for what passed as a training ground and there was an annual trip to Magaluf, but their manager was ahead of Opta and Prozone by roughly 20 years. “Billy Beane at Oakland came in with Moneyball and all the statistics,” Bassett said. “We were doing that in 1981.”

The bar-room consensus at the Kingsmeadow, where framed photographs were going for more than £1,000, was that the documentary had damaged the team’s legacy. “They tried to make it out like Pulp Fiction,” the club’s old physio, Derek French, said. Fashanu was, however, invited to contribute to the book. His chapter notes “we were always a family, and in families there are bound to be one or two arguments”. But there is no explanation or apology.

Instead, in typical Wimbledon style, the rest of the gang are fighting back and, to be clear, this is no attempt at a whitewash. Wimbledon always sought to get a physical advantage over the opposition, and don’t deny it. “Alan Shearer used to try to take the piss out of us,” French says. “One time he was going on about how we were poor and our gear was crap, trying to look big in front of his mates. He didn’t realise Jonah was behind him – Vinnie grabbed him by the ears and moved him politely out of the way.” At other times, by their own admission, it did not matter how far the line was moved, Wimbledon would find a way to cross it. They were described as “the borstal of football”. It was Bassett’s own quote.

More than anything, though, it was the standard laddishness and lacerating humour that can be found in most dressing-rooms. This was the club where Stewart Evans was nicknamed “Good Evans” after he missed two sitters on his debut. Eggs were pelted, shoes nailed to walls, hotel rooms wrecked. At one stage the compere, Georgie Bingham, invited French to recall the time Downes nearly drowned him on a trip to Finland. Then there was the story of Bassett, who always spoke a thousand words to the minute, berating Glyn Hodges for being sent off in a reserve match. “Harry always used to get his words muddled up, especially if he had the hump and was trying to bollock you,” Hodges says. “He called me a ‘fat petulant cake’. So for about six months my nickname was ‘the Cake’.”

Tony Stenson, football reporter for the Daily Mirror, came up with the moniker. “Meet Dave Bassett’s team of all-sorts,” he wrote in 1985. “Rag-arse Rovers – soccer’s Crazy Gang.” Yet if a successful team needed hard graft, comradeship, didn’t that band of brothers have it all?

Dave Beasant took the microphone at one point and winced at the memory of his debut, aged 20, drawing 1-1 against Blackpool when a late shot came in. It was a pea-roller, bobbling over the pitch until it went between Beasant’s legs, trickling over the goalline so slowly it didn’t even reach the net. It was the decisive goal and in the bar afterwards the chairman, Ron Noades, called him over. “I was thinking my career was finished,” Beasant said. “He wrapped his arms around me and said: ‘Come here, you. We think a lot of you here, stick with us and we’ll stick with you.’ And then he got me absolutely paralytic. That was what Wimbledon was all about.”

Beasant went on to save John Aldridge’s penalty in the 1988 FA Cup final but, looking back, should that result really be held up as the greatest shock of all time? Wimbledon finished seventh that season. They were sixth the year before. That team were used to beating the top clubs.

Wimbledon’s Vinnie Jones celebrates scoring the game’s only goal during the Division One match against Manchester Utd at Plough Lane on 29 November 1986 Photograph: Brendan Monks/Mirrorpix

Downes remembers one game against Manchester United at Plough Lane. “After 60 minutes, Remi Moses was taken off. Vinnie looked over to me, winked and said: ‘That’s the hard work done.’ As he’s doing that, I’ve looked over his shoulder and who’s coming on? Oh, it’s only Bryan Robson. We’re 1-0 up against Manchester United and Captain Marvel, just about the best midfield player in the world, is walking on. And there’s me – I can barely run – with a dodgy knee. Vinnie’s 20 minutes off the building site. Captain Marvel’s coming on, and we’re laughing at him. We can’t help it. Robbo comes on and sees us laughing. ‘What the fuck are you laughing at?’ he says. But there was nothing we could say to him. I mean, what can you say? It must have thrown him completely.”

Robson, one imagines, had a grudging admiration for Wimbledon’s appreciation of what every successful team needs – good, honest pros who would take the ball even when they were having a bad time, mark their men and stick their heads in where they might get hurt.

“Lads like Alan Cork, Steve Galliers, Kevin Gage,” Dunphy wrote. “Lads like Roger Hunt, Nobby Stiles, Jack Charlton, Geoff Hurst and George Cohen. Remember them? Yes, England 1966 and all that. England didn’t win the World Cup in style. They just won it. They won it the English way, grafting, being competitive, finding inspiration and moments of real grandeur. But at the core of that achievement, which was much maligned at the time, was a willingness to compete, to concentrate, to take responsibility and above all a sense of commitment to Alf Ramsey and England. The same values distinguish Wimbledon.”

It wasn’t all flying studs, or swinging elbows, and it wasn’t always crazy. It is just a pity, perhaps, they need to explain themselves.

The Crazy Gang, by Dave Bassett and Wally Downes, is published by Bantam Press on Thursday