Sober

by Tony Adams

  For all his tactical deficiencies, he was well liked by the players and probably the best Englishman around for the job at the time due to his transformation of Newcastle United. He fostered a good spirit by and large and the players were all behind him. He was adamant, however, that he had gone as far as he could.

  To me, Kevin’s problem was that he didn’t surround himself with the best. In fact, it has been a problem with the England team for a long while. And whereas the German FA and the Bundesliga got together after Euro 2000 to work on a plan to solve their problems, we never did. The rivalries and power struggles between our FA and the Premier League have always been detrimental to the game as a whole, in my opinion. They were then and continue to be now.

  Kevin had great motivational qualities and ran entertaining training sessions, but he never had expertise around him in the way, say, Terry Venables had at Euro 96, with the late Don Howe – a wonderful man and coach I also worked with as a kid at Arsenal – and Bryan Robson. Kevin had Derek Fazackerley and Arthur Cox, good footballing figures but without the experience of World Cup and European football. Alan Shearer was captain and had never played in Europe as extensively as I had. Our game was about playing to the strengths of an old-fashioned centre-forward and we were exposed as outdated. Our movement was poor and we were back to playing in straight lines, unlike our mobile, developing Arsenal team. We thought we were fine just because we beat the Germans 1-0 in the summer.

  Kevin could also have had the best physiologists, nutritionists and experts in biomechanics to fill in for his weaknesses. As England coach, you have access to them. He could have brought in a tactical expert. It would have been brave, for example, to have brought Glenn Hoddle back into the fold, to tap his expertise and experience of France 98. We may have had some differences at that tournament, when I thought him a bit too regimented in his approach, but I always believed that Glenn had a good tactical brain. Terry Venables was the last one to be brave, and not worry that people might take his job. Kevin had his mates around him.

  I knew more about European football than they did. I was in an environment at Arsenal that was tactically superb; a passing team with great movement. One that kept the foundations of defence and did not overplay, knowing that 60 per cent possession would win you the game – but that too much more could be detrimental, with sides growing used to defending and the team in possession becoming predictable.

  After Kevin came Sven-Goran Eriksson, which I think was the Arsenal vice-chairman and FA councillor David Dein’s appointment and had the added bonus of keeping Arsène Wenger away from the job. David had got to know Sven when we played Sampdoria, the team he was then managing, in a Cup Winners’ Cup tie. Not that I think Arsène would have taken the England job then. He was building another great Arsenal side and would have missed the day-to-day involvement.

  We missed a chance to reassess our football after Euro 2000. At a time when we should have been coaching the coaches, we simply hired an expensive foreign manager. Public opinion would probably not have allowed Glenn to return, but I don’t see why we didn’t turn back to Terry to finish the job he had started at Euro 96. When Fabio Capello later took over after Steve McClaren’s short and ill-fated tenure, it meant a decade of doing little to change the system while paying a lot for a man at the top.

  I wouldn’t have wanted Arsène to become England manager – and not just for selfish reasons of keeping him at Arsenal. While I can see the value of an overseas technical director, having a non-native coach is something I do not believe in for England. After all, none of the other World Cup-winning countries has ever hired a foreign coach. Personally, I would make it a rule that national coaches have to be from that country. UEFA and FIFA say they can’t dictate to countries, but why not? They are the governing bodies. International football is different from club football and should remain so.

  People – the FA mainly, and the media were buying it – were talking about a golden generation emerging at that time, and while it was true that we had the Manchester United group of Rio Ferdinand, David Beckham and Paul Scholes coming to maturity, I thought it was a bit of a myth and couldn’t see that the new crop were any better than 1982, 1990 or 1996. Given his quick, explosive style of play, I always thought that Michael Owen was going to struggle with injuries. That said, they were a good group compared to what we have these days, with certainly more depth in the squad.

  There was no temptation for me to stay on after Kevin departed. It wasn’t quite a shambles but it certainly wasn’t great. England were far inferior to my club team and I was finding it increasingly hard work, physically and mentally. The captaincy issue was also going to surface again under a new manager. On top of that, I am an all-or-nothing character, and could I commit, at the age of 34, to another two years? Could I make it to the World Cup of 2002 and sit on the bench? I am not that kind of player. I am a main man who likes to pull his weight. It was the end of my international days. I wanted to go out at the top.

  Besides, Rio was coming through and could form a good partnership with Sol Campbell. Let the next generation have a bash. It felt clean to go now. I had done my bit and was not going to do myself justice with my body packing up on me. I guess it comes down to personality and style. I was never really the sort of player who would be a candidate for the club Man of the Year award by doing a job in playing out of position, like right back.

  The bottom line was that I didn’t want to let my country down through being off the pace, and I knew I would struggle if I wanted to play for Arsenal for another couple of seasons. I owed it to my employers and the supporters, the people who paid the bills.

  In politics, there is a saying that all careers end in failure. It can be true in football, too. I guess Kevin’s with England had. I never felt that mine with my country had ever got properly started. After the disappointment of not making the final squad in 1990 following a tricky baptism at Euro 88, I was given a chance by Graham Taylor, Bobby Robson’s successor as manager, but he dropped me for Euro 92 before restoring me to the side. England didn’t make it to the World Cup finals of 1994, however.

  The only time I really had any momentum was that spell under Terry Venables as his captain in a team that had a plan. He selected and integrated leaders, such as myself, Paul Ince and Stuart Pearce, and had us playing a fluid, mobile style of football, blending solidity at the back with creativity further forward. Again, I was comfortable because a manager had made me the main man and I always responded to that. In their wisdom, though, the FA refused to give Terry a contract beyond Euro 96 ahead of the tournament. Terry famously said he didn’t do auditions and quit after it, and that was that.

  Eventually, my decision to retire came out in the following weeks, probably after the caretaker manager Peter Taylor left me out of a squad to face Italy. When I bumped into Peter some time later, he told me he had left a message on my phone explaining that he wanted to give some younger players a chance, but I said I’d never received it. We both agreed that was odd. Only years after, when the Daily Mirror admitted to hacking my phone between 2000 and 2005, did it become clear why. Apparently, messages can get deleted after someone has tapped into your phone. I was big enough to deal with not hearing anything at the time but, without an explanation, it can feel like you have been bombed out.

  When Sven took over early in 2001, I met him in a players’ lounge somewhere at an away ground. He introduced himself, I wished him well, and there was never really a discussion about me coming out of retirement to play for him. I think the decision may have been taken out of my hands anyway because of his desire to have a fresh start, and he would have felt vindicated by that amazing 5-1 win over Germany in Munich.

  Besides, there was something going on in my personal life that probably coloured my thinking, something that required my urgent attention.

  In the four years that had passed since my last drink, I had learned that pain was the touchstone for growth. It was necessary in my development as a person.
Any pain I was feeling with Arsenal underachieving and my England career having ended was as nothing, however, to watching my mum, Caroline, suffer with illness. A terminal illness. In fact, it was the most horrific thing I have ever had to deal with and tested every last ounce of my faith and my sobriety.

  Back in the spring, before Euro 2000, I went to France with Mum and Dad. I had got to like the country very much during the 1998 World Cup, had taken French lessons, and had decided to buy a villa there. Having consulted Patrick Vieira and Thierry Henry about a good location, I had settled on Mougins, just inland from Cannes. It was a beautiful spot.

  We were staying in a hotel in Cannes, having appointments with estate agents and lawyers, and were going out one day when Mum, as she got in the car, broke her arm. After being treated at a hospital there, it just wouldn’t heal properly when we got back to the UK, even though the local NHS hospital told us all was well. In the end, I took her to see my old friend John King at the London Independent Hospital, a doctor who had often treated me in the past, and he ordered some tests.

  I remember where I was when I heard Mum had bone cancer. It was on a pre-season tour in Austria and our physio, Gary Lewin, pulled me out of the dining room. He’d had a call from John King. X-rays had revealed the extent of the disease.

  Over the next six months, I watched her die. On my days off, I would drive over from Putney to Mum and Dad’s in Essex to be there with her. She was in agony, poor soul. She was a good woman, a simple woman, who loved her family, and she didn’t deserve that. She lived for her grandchildren. Sometimes I would take Oliver over. He was still young and she was more concerned for him and his wellbeing, even when the cancer was unbearable and she kept having to be moved because of bedsores.

  When she died, she was skeletal, her head just a skull. There was no soul there. It is an image that I retain to this day.

  I was angry initially, wondering why the Higher Power I had discovered in recovery had done this, and immediately after her death I went into a decline and couldn’t get out of bed for three or four days. I was duvet-diving, immobilised, wondering what the point of life was, having experienced the death of a loved one. It is fair to say it was the darkest time in my life and sobriety.

  Eventually, an acceptance kicked in and I managed to get myself up and to her funeral, which was even an uplifting affair. We played one of her favourite songs – Elvis Presley’s ‘The Wonder of You’. It was odd. It would later become the run-out music at the Arsenal.

  I began to recall and implement the basics of Alcoholics Anonymous, living by the cornerstone phrases – ‘one day at a time’; ‘this too shall pass’. Getting out of bed to struggle to AA meetings in Wimbledon and Putney kept me going.

  During these days I was feeling everything without the anaesthetic of alcohol to numb me. My only real experience of death previously had been years earlier when my dad’s young office lad Cliff, to whom Dad had grown close, died. One day, Cliff, who was only in his early twenties, left the Squirrel’s Heath pub in Romford, where we had all been drinking, and was hit by a car as he crossed the road. The poor woman in the car was distraught. Our way of marking Cliff’s death was to have a drink and drop our trousers to ‘It’s Not Unusual’ by Tom Jones, as it was his favourite record.

  I had no desire for a drink through all the pain surrounding Mum, thankfully. I also wanted to honour her death and the feelings it provoked rather than self-medicate. Still to this day I miss my mother. I want her to make me better, to comfort me, when I am ill. I want her to make me scrambled eggs on toast and put a glass of water by my bedside. But I guess it was time to grow up.

  There was another death around this time which shocked me. At the end of March 2001, after a short illness, my fellow youth-team graduate David Rocastle succumbed to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the painfully young age of 33. We went through so much together, having been at Highbury as 14-year-olds, not least the time when, on a tour in France, he and another youth-teamer, Greg Allen, were fighting and I had to separate them and then stay awake all night to keep them apart in the dormitory, with them wanting to prolong things. David could handle himself all right, as I recall him doing during a fight on holiday in Cyprus once.

  Rocky was a lovely lad and rightly an Arsenal legend, even though he was a Crystal Palace fan as a kid. He was a talented player, strong in the tackle, a great up-and-down midfield player. He was, in fact, probably the player of the season the year we won the league at Liverpool in 1989. It was all the more remarkable given that he was as blind as a bat and needed contact lenses to play. They would often fall out.

  So many happy memories of him . . . like a great night dancing at the Camden Palais in 1987 after we had beaten Tottenham in a League Cup semi-final, him smoking one of the thin cigars he liked every now and again. Then, by contrast, came the most poignant memory of all, going to visit him in Northwick Park Hospital in Harrow shortly before he died. I felt so sorry for his young children, Ryan, Melissa and Monique, as well as for his wife Janet.

  Amid such sadness that season, I threw myself back into my football, which had ever been my salvation, and Arsenal were in the middle of an excellent campaign. My old mate Nigel Winterburn was gone, to West Ham, along with Manu Petit and Marc Overmars, who were now at Barcelona. In had come another full-back in Lauren and two French players, Robert Pires and Sylvain Wiltord.

  By now we were a better European side. At times previously we had looked like a team built to win at Stoke City, but now we really had the makings of a modern Champions League outfit. Robert Pires in particular would develop into the sort of inventive player that made a difference, often from wide, like Rocky had in ’89, Anders Limpar in ’91 and Marc Overmars in ’98. This despite Robert never really learning or speaking English. He mostly kept himself to himself. So clever on the ball was he that Lee Dixon used to hate going up against him in training. Sylvain, meanwhile, went back to France most weekends after matches.

  This time our home games in the Champions League were back at Highbury, which had been upgraded, and I really think we could have won it that season. The fact that we didn’t was probably down to a moment when I could and should have done better, I have to admit.

  We weren’t in the toughest of groups and beat Sparta Prague twice, and Shakhtar Donetsk and Lazio at home as well. Our away draw in Rome, when I travelled but was injured, also meant we topped the group, even though we lost 3-0 in the Ukraine.

  At that time, there was a group stage in the second phase as well, and we were in with Bayern Munich, Lyon and Spartak Moscow. I particularly remember the away game in Moscow. It was a bitterly cold Russian night on a synthetic surface and, although we took an early lead through Sylvinho, some of the boys clearly didn’t fancy it and we lost 4-1. Still, we won the home game and also won in Lyon and were able to finish second behind Bayern Munich to reach a quarter-final against Valencia.

  We went a goal down, a valuable away goal, in the first half but should have won the home leg by more than 2-1. After the break, Thierry got us back into the tie and two minutes later Ray Parlour drove home a good goal. Unfortunately, Thierry missed a great chance late on to give us a real cushion.

  In the Mestalla, it took just one moment for all that hard work to be undone. The big Norwegian international John Carew, all six-foot-five of him, was a good player at that time and just got in front of me to head home a cross for the only goal of the game and take Valencia into the semi-finals on the away-goals rule.

  I had forgotten the first rule of captaincy: do your own job first before you focus on other people. Sometimes as a captain you can be looking around to make sure everyone is doing their job and you switch off for a moment. That’s what happened and it shouldn’t have.

  I was annoyed with myself, and afterwards in the dressing room just said: ‘Sorry, lads. Sorry, Arsène.’ We were a good side – no, a great side – and that was the closest I came in the Champions League. Blowing it was a regret, the more so because Valencia drew Leed
s in the semis and won through comfortably to play Bayern Munich in the final, losing on penalties. I would really have loved another crack at Bayern that season.

  After that, we were the nearly men again. In the Premier League, we were once more runners-up to Manchester United, though we got closer to them this time and only finished 10 points behind. We even beat United 1-0 that season and had 6-1, 5-0 and 6-0 wins over Leicester City, Manchester City and Queens Park Rangers respectively. We were improving.

  In addition, we reached the FA Cup final after a satisfying 2-1 win over Tottenham, who had just recruited Glenn Hoddle as manager, in the semi-final at Old Trafford. We went a goal down early on but we dominated after that, with Patrick and Robert scoring the goals. It came just a week after Rocky’s death and was some small tribute.

  In the final, we also outplayed Liverpool for long periods at the Millennium Stadium. We took the lead through Freddie Ljungberg in the second half, something we should have done earlier, having been denied a clear penalty in the first half when Stephane Henchoz handled. It would be remembered as Michael Owen’s final, though, as he struck twice to win it for Gérard Houllier’s side. It was the first time two FA Cup final sides had overseas managers.

  Afterwards, Arsène threw his runners-up medal in a dressing-room bin. He does have a temper and it hit him deeply, though usually, being a clever man, he would take himself out of the room to vent his anger. I’m not a great loser either, but by now I could take it better, having become familiar with Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If’, which talks about treating triumph and disaster the same. The twin impostors, it’s said.

  I picked the medal out of the bin and put it back in Arsène’s hand. ‘Look,’ I said to everyone, ‘let’s remember how this feels. Let’s come back and win it next year. We’ve had a great year but let’s make next year greater.’