Peter Crouch "got a song" from Ed Sheeran for his 40th birthday.

Peter Crouch

Peter Crouch

The former footballer turned 40 in January and to commemorate the occasion, his 'Lego House' hitmaker pal rewrote a familiar tune to personalise it for the podcaster.

Peter said: "I got a song from Ed Sheeran. I thought it was amazing. Just a happy birthday kind of song.

“He wrote a song, it was good. It was a song that we know but he changed the words.”

Ed's musical tribute was part of a video montage put together for Peter - who has children Sophia, Nine, Liberty, five, Johnny, three, and Jack, 20 months, with wife Abbey Clancy - featuring his family and friends, including David Beckham and Jamie and Harry Redknapp.

Speaking on his 'That Peter Crouch Podcast', he said: "I got a bit ­emotional as I saw all my old pals.”

Elsewhere on the show, Peter admitted his wife had to take over homeschooling their kids because he wasn't strict enough.

Referencing characters in Roald Dahl's 'Matilda', he said: “We realised they were doing the bare minimum and getting away with it with me. Miss Trunchbull had to get involved, Ab, and take the reins.

"My Miss Honey approach was not proving to be effective. Abs came in and they’re doing much better now.”

The 'Save Our Summer' host also recalled a wild night from his playing days, when he, Gareth Barry and Lee Hendrie went to a London pub and one of them pretended to be a dog.

He said: "We were in London but we’d stayed down after a game. Two players stayed down with me – Lee Hendrie and Gareth Barry.

"We had a night out then the next day we played a drinking game. Whoever lost had to go round the pub and pretend to be a dog. It’s absolutely ridiculous and I’m not proud of it…"

The players were reported to their Aston Villa manager, Graham Taylor - who died in 2017 - but "golden boy" Gareth Barry escaped punishment.

He continued: "We didn’t know but there was someone that the manager knew in the bar, who had called him. All of our phones started blowing up saying we had a meeting with Graham Taylor on the Monday.

“He said we were behaving like idiots, which we were. He called me and Lee Hendrie in, he said to us: ‘It’s a disgrace. What are you playing at?’, he said, ‘Why can’t you be more like Gareth Barry?’. We were like, ‘Yeah, we should be. You’re right.’ I was dying to go, ‘He was f***ing sitting right next to us the whole time that we were there’. We couldn’t drop Gaz in it. Gaz was the golden boy.”

Series 5 of That Peter Crouch Podcast began on BBC Sounds on Thursday (18.02.21).

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