by Tony Adams
It has always been a character trait of mine. I seem to need pain as motivation. If I had had too much success in my footballing career straight away as a young player, I think I might have got complacent, maybe got bored. I need stimulus, need defeat sometimes. After the Littlewoods Cup defeat of 1988, we went on to win the league in 1989. That was my pattern. My body was aching but I knew I had, and wanted, at least one more year. It just didn’t feel like the end.
Arsenal did not exactly smooth the path for what would prove my final year, however, I have to say.
At that point, the club were putting all their older professionals on one-year deals. I went to David Dein’s house in Hertfordshire to talk to him and Arsène about a new contract and was a little surprised to see a well-known senior agent, Jerome Anderson, whose agency had handled the deal for my autobiography Addicted a few years earlier, waiting outside for me. Jerome had been well connected at Arsenal for many years and close to David, having first represented Charlie Nicholas. He had rung me to suggest I talk about a new contract with Arsenal as I didn’t have an agent, but I still did not expect him to be in on the talks.
In the early days, my dad accompanied me into meetings just to look out for me and I always ended up signing my contracts. Now I was being offered a basic sum and then a sum for each game played. What I really wanted was a one-year deal with a guaranteed salary. I was shocked. In fact, I felt embarrassed for the club. Arsenal were not paying what Chelsea were at that time, as shown when Ashley Cole moved there, but what I was being offered was around half of what I was getting 10 years earlier.
This was so different to that time when I met with the then club secretary Ken Friar and Danny Fiszman back in ’96. I know I had aged, would reach 35 during the following season, but I thought I had done enough for the club over the years to warrant a salary rather than what I saw as a disrespectful appearance-based contract. Being sober meant I now had some self-esteem and could stick up for myself. David was a decent man – I have a memory of him enjoying himself like a kid at Wet ’n’ Wild in Florida on a club tour back in 1989 – and a good partner for Arsène in transfer dealings, but that day I did not think they covered themselves in glory.
Arsène said very little. He never has liked confrontation. I recall a time when Ian Wright was coming from Croydon and getting in late for training most days. Arsène simply made training later but the boys were fuming. We as players then told Wrighty to get his act together. It was the big players who policed the group rather than Arsène.
Then there was a time when Manu Petit walked on to the training ground after a session had begun. I asked Arsène if he was going to do anything about it but he just shrugged his shoulders. I went mad. Standards needed to be set and followed. In frustration, I picked up a plastic cup by the side of the pitch and threw it at Arsène. A bit comically, the wind took it away from him and it didn’t hit him, but the point was made to Manu and Arsène.
There were other run-ins. Arsène made us play a training game without offsides but I wouldn’t have it. It was not what we were about as a back four. And he wanted to do a one-versus-one session with Thierry Henry up against me. I walked off the pitch. I told him I had spent a career not getting isolated against the opposition’s quickest player due to my positional sense and wasn’t going to start now. I guess I was a big enough figure at the time to be able to make my point. In Arsène’s later years as manager, I couldn’t envisage any other player having the authority to challenge him like that, which would worry me.
Anyway, that night I told David and Arsène that I foresaw a problem. I told them that I had always been fair to the club and always given them my all. In these later years, when my body was not standing up to 40 games a year, I would try to get myself fit and ready for the big games to be of best service to the club – off the pitch as well, by continuing to be an influence in the dressing room and around the training ground.
With the deal on offer, the temptation might be to play games I shouldn’t because I would be chasing the money. In fact, that situation would come to pass in the upcoming season, my final one, after I was given little choice but to accept the contract.
It was a game against Charlton Athletic, when I was selected but decided on the morning of the match to be honest with Arsène. I told him my back was sore, that I could play, but I thought I might be better saving myself for a Champions League game that was coming up in midweek. I told him I was concerned about losing my appearance money, having been picked for the side, and he said he would get it for me anyway. In the end, Igors Stepanovs took my place, Arsenal lost the game and I never did get my money.
I would play only 13 games in my last season, 2001/02, and I suppose Arsenal would say they were therefore justified in paying me game by game. I just felt it was cheap, however, and not really in keeping with the club’s tradition of fairness to its employees. Nor was it at the end of that season, when the players were all given Muller watches to commemorate their achievements during it. Except me. It may well have been because I was no longer at the club when they were handed out – perhaps at some end-of-season function that I was unaware of after retiring – but I hoped mine might have been sent on. I do think I contributed plenty to that season on and off the field with my presence. I knew the club’s standards, helped to establish them indeed, and made sure they were maintained.
I remember two games in particular from my final season, neither of which I played in. The first came on that fateful day that will forever be etched on everyone’s mind: 11 September 2001. We were away in the Champions League against Real Mallorca and I went to see Arsène, who was watching TV in the lecture room of the hotel. ‘My back’s not good, boss,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I can play.’
Then I saw that Arsène was preoccupied, horrified, with the TV. I joined him in his shock as they replayed the planes hitting the twin towers in New York. Arsène soon got up and turned the TV off. We had a game to play. We would lose 1-0 and the atmosphere was eerie. Somehow we got permission to fly home that night when all other flights were cancelled. I think we were all pleased just to get home safely, especially when the enormity of the tragedy hit home the following day.
The other memorable date, and a much happier one, was Sunday 20 January 2002, when the team was away to Leeds United. After watching the game – a 1-1 draw – on TV, I decided to go out for dinner to the Embassy restaurant in Mayfair with a couple of friends. One was Peter Kay, who I had met at AA and with whom I had hit it off so well that he had become my chief executive at Sporting Chance, the charity I had not long established for sportsmen and women with addictive illnesses. The other was Steve Kutner, an agent I used now and then for personal appearances and suchlike. I remember Carl Fogarty, the motorcyclist who went on to win I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!, being at a nearby table.
As was a woman by the name of Poppy Teacher. She approached our table, introduced herself and said that she hoped I didn’t mind but she was an Arsenal fan and was wondering when I would be fit to play again. She had been due to go to Leeds that day, apparently, but – as I would later find out – had been having problems with a boyfriend she was splitting up with and decided against it.
Not long after she had returned to her table, her friend came over to me. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Poppy really likes you. Why don’t you go over and talk to her?’ And so I did. She was an attractive, single woman and I was a single man, after all.
It turned out that Poppy had been working as a personal assistant to a football lawyer and agent by the name of Richard Glass and was based in Holborn. We clicked and that day a relationship was born. Gradually, that click would turn into a certainty and that relationship would grow into a marriage.
Naturally, we made the papers whenever we stepped out after that. It was not lost on the media that I was a recovering alcoholic and Poppy came from the Teacher’s whisky family. It was an irony that she found amusing, though her name had not even registered with me at first. Lat
er, I would be able to joke that I may be teetotal but I still woke up with a Teacher’s in the morning.
There’s an old saying that when the pupil is ready the teacher appears. This one was literally a Teacher. Actually, at that time, I had almost given up on the idea of a relationship, and they also say that when that happens, one often materialises. It certainly did in this case.
I had been living on my own for six years, had had lots of fun and several short-term relationships, but it had been almost three years since my relationship with Caprice had ended. I had just got used to the idea of being alone, if that was what my life was supposed to be about, and was content in my solitude. In fact, I remember walking on Putney Heath one day and thinking that very thought. There is, after all, a difference between being alone and being lonely. During that time, I had been tested as I got to know myself, warts and all. I think it does people good to live alone for a while. It did this alcoholic. I learned to be comfortable with my own company, and so not to feel lonely.
I had honoured the previous relationships and been adult in them, telling the women concerned when it wasn’t for me, being honest and respectful of their feelings. Now I just seemed to be ready for Poppy. And nor was it purely about the physical. When you get the physical, emotional and mental aspects of a relationship coming together, you have an explosion, as I did with Poppy.
For her part, she would later say that she met a successful footballer and a few months later ended up with a has-been.
I got back to playing in the February, for an FA Cup game against Gillingham, which we won 5-2, and Arsenal embarked on a great run to the final. I also played in the quarter-final replay against Newcastle, which we won 3-0, though was injured for the semi against Middlesbrough at Old Trafford, which the boys won 1-0.
That took us to another final at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, and this time we would not make the same mistakes against Chelsea as we had against Liverpool the previous year. Goals in the last 20 minutes by Ray Parlour and Freddie Ljungberg saw us lift the trophy. I recall afterwards consoling John Terry, who was a young player then and had come on as a substitute, saying that his time would come but this was ours. I would be right about that.
What I remember most about the aftermath, though, was being in the dressing room with the cup when our chairman Peter Hill-Wood burst through the door. It was unusual for him to come in; normally back then it would be David Dein who liked to speak to the players. Peter would just send champagne.
Arsène at this point went to shake the chairman’s hand but Peter just kept moving past him, leaving Arsène well and truly blanked. Peter then came straight over to me in a corner, with the FA Cup beside me. Most of us were thinking that he wanted to lift the cup, and the players were all now standing up to attention for the chairman, but instead he said to me, his voice booming:
‘Tony. Met Poppy coming down here on the flight from Stansted. What a wonderful girl. Such a sweetheart. I knew her grandmother Rosie. Wonderful woman. We had some times. She was such fun. This is the best news I’ve heard today.’
Here we were, having just won the FA Cup, and the chairman was more interested in my love life with a woman whose family he knew well. That was Peter, bless him.
After that, we were playing Manchester United four days later with a chance to win the double, such was the run the boys were having, mainly without me, as they closed in on what would be a 13-match domestic winning streak to finish the season. Dennis Bergkamp and I were rested, though Dennis was on the bench at Old Trafford, expecting to be playing the following Saturday at home to Everton when we could clinch it.
In the event, the boys pulled off a famous victory with Sylvain Wiltord’s second-half goal and we’d won another double, the club’s third. I then didn’t need to play against Everton but lifted the trophy, the first man to captain a title-winning side in three different decades. The painful end to the previous season had indeed been motivation.
As a postscript, I had a testimonial scheduled and Celtic came to Highbury and helped fill the place as they usually do, Martin O’Neill then the manager. It was an emotional night that moved me greatly. I had by now decided to retire although I did have a few doubts when the crowd started singing: ‘One more year . . .’ I knew my time was up, though. I didn’t want to be a bit player again, dipping in and out, on the bench for some of the time. That wasn’t my style. I didn’t want not to be captain.
Arsène didn’t ask me to carry on either; I don’t think he wanted to tell me what to do with my life by this time and he probably knew he would be wasting his time. It might have been nice to have been asked, mind. We all like to be loved and wanted.
Nor did I want to go for a season to Leeds United or Rangers, both of whom sounded me out, just to pick up money. Major League Soccer in the United States wasn’t a retirement option at that time. Besides, I wanted to be known as a one-club man. And that club was Arsenal. As a banner at the club held up by fans used to say: ‘One Life, One Love, One Club, One-Nil’.
I had had six years of sobriety to prepare myself for this moment. I knew mentally, emotionally and spiritually that it was the right time to go. I was approaching my 36th birthday and knew my body well. Arsène had been a leader in English football in the physical conditioning of players and he had extended my career, but you can’t keep going to an empty well. You see people who get stuck and can’t move on and the decision is made for them. I wanted to be the one making it. Once you get a degree of consciousness, you know when things feel right.
On reflection, I might have been prepared to sacrifice a couple of the league titles I won with Arsenal for a Champions League success, or winning a major trophy for England, but any regrets could soon be banished when I considered what I had achieved. And if you are going to go, you can’t do much better than winning, for a second time, the classic double of English football.
4
Leadership – 1
SOMETHING that sobriety teaches you is humility, which emerges from the humiliation of alcoholic drinking. It means accepting that you are no better than anyone else and that the Higher Power I talked about is now in control of your life and events more so than you yourself are. For addicts, who are often beset by a huge ego and low self-esteem, it also means that you are, too, no worse than anyone else and that you acknowledge your assets as well as the defects of character that contributed to your drinking. It is called right-sizing. It is about getting life in perspective but also realising that you have qualities to bring to your life in recovery.
I guess that one of the qualities attributed to me during my playing days was leadership and – without boasting, but acknowledging my attributes – it always came easily to me, to the point that I captained every team I ever played for, right from Dagenham United as a kid up to Arsenal and England.
Whether it is nature or nurture I will leave to the anthropologists, but I am sure the contribution of my father Alex to my footballing education as a coach himself was key, alongside the drive, determination and will to win that I seemed to possess inherently. I just seemed to be born with a focus on football and an ability to be a positive motivator, and with the work ethic instilled in me by Dad, I had all the ingredients.
At school, for example, even at the age of 10 I loved nothing better than organising a game in the playground or after school at Pondfield Park in Dagenham near my home. Just give me three other players and I would happily lead them against all the rest – Jeff Fricker in goal, Marty Cooke as a defender and Richard Stout flying on the wing or up front. I loved the buzz of the four of us against the world, of upsetting the odds. I seemed to need the odds against me. And I loved winning, though it had to be by fair means.
It helped that I was taller than my peers from an early age and shot up quickly. I was a totem for the other players to look to and follow. Having an older sister who all the boys fancied did no harm either. It meant they literally followed me at times.
In all seriousness, I do think that
– much as I hated it at the time – my discomfort and insecurity as a teenager, shown in my shyness around girls and my lack of academic ability, contributed to my personality as a footballer. I wanted to be the best. I wanted to please my parents.
Football was something into which I could put all my energies. I had found my ‘thing’ – and I always think it is important for kids to try all manner of activities to find out what suits them, what they are good at and what might be their path in life. I certainly have instilled that in mine. They all have different characteristics and interests and aren’t necessarily sporty, though Oliver was a decent centre half for a while and Amber a good hockey player. I do see some of my own personality traits in Hector, my second son with Poppy, and he loves to throw himself into rugby.
He has what I had: an absence of fear on the field. It meant that I just loved getting stuck in, could get smashed, get up again and come back for more. It may have been – and I naturally didn’t know this at the time – to mask all the insecurity I felt off the pitch, which is an environment to where you can escape and don’t have to feel your feelings, an environment in which you can excel. When you can show that sort of fearless attitude, whatever the underlying reasons, players will follow you and your example.
I enjoyed stepping forward, needed to drive the bus. As a young player, if the ball was in the air and coming towards the defence, I would be the one to take command, shouting: ‘TA’s up!’ Some people, especially on the opposition or in their camp, would take the piss out of me and that did hurt. But it also spurred me on. I wanted to show them, ram their words down their throats and head the ball back at them – with interest.
I became Arsenal captain at the age of 21, with the coaches at the time, notably Steve Burtenshaw, aware that I was a player and person who needed to be stretched. ‘Just put him in and push him on,’ Steve said. He was right. I needed to be allowed to run rather than held back.