Grant Holt lifts the lid on his time at Wigan Athletic in hard-hitting autobiography

The 38-year-old – who was signed by Owen Coyle in the summer of 2013 – makes the claim in his hard-hitting autobiography, out today.

As well as suffering with injuries, he reveals how a fall-out with Uwe Rosler – who succeeded Coyle just four months into his first season – killed any chance of him helping Latics back up to the Premier League.

“It just never worked out at Wigan for me,” Holt wrote. “I’d got injured early, had to deal with a manager I had zero respect for, and then got injured again.

“I was lucky in my career to suffer very few bad injuries, so to get two in two years at Wigan was just really bad luck.

“I wish I’d been able to show the Wigan fans what I was capable of, but it never panned out that way.”

Things with Rosler got so bad – including making him train with the Under-21s, stopping him eating with the first team and denying him a squad number – Holt even filed a HR complaint.

“I’d known a lot of the boys at Wigan for a long time through playing against them, and they knew I’d done nothing wrong,” Holt added.

“Some of them would jokingly call me the leper.

“Then I had a couple of more lepers join me in the same situation, who’d also been binned off from the first team.

“To this day, I still don’t know why Rosler didn’t want me. He never told me. Whether it’s because he thought I was feigning an injury, I’ll never know."

Grant Holt: A Real Football Life is available to order from www.shop.canaries.co.uk priced £20 (hardback), and all good book stores.