Sober

by Tony Adams

  The transition that I thought did not apply to me had actually happened, almost despite me. Life is, after all, what happens to you when you are busy making plans. I had retired as a player and found a new relationship. I had buried and mourned my father. It had been another year of loss, but with the reward of something new and exciting as a carrot to go with the stick. And it was preparation and life experience for the next adventure and new challenge.

  7

  Under new Management

  A ship in harbor is safe,

  but that is not what ships are built for.

  JOHN A. SHEDD,

  American author and professor

  The question I was frequently asked in the immediate period after I quit playing was whether I missed the dressing room, with all its bonding, camaraderie and – the blokey word that everybody likes to use – banter. For some professional footballers it is, after all, as well as a haven of loyalty, a seductive bubble where they can lose themselves and escape from the real world.

  I had been a player for so long, and had always been a bit of a loner using the bravado that drink gave me to cover up my isolation, so I was never really going to miss that atmosphere. After six years of preparing for the moment, I was ready. I was, as they say in AA, under new management.

  Football had been a job of work. The dream job. But it was just what I did. I didn’t do it for the camaraderie and the banter, to make friends or get a social life. And I didn’t even do it for the money. I was there to play the game I loved. I loved training, loved the matches, loved the fans, the defending, the tackling, the scoring. Once you have done that to the maximum of your ability and extracted every last bit out of yourself and the game, it is very simple. You find another life for yourself.

  Nor did I worry about not being well known any more. My therapist, James West, our clinical director at Sporting Chance, would also ask me that question. He is not a directive therapist but he would challenge me and, having once wanted to be a rock musician himself, he asked me if I missed being out of the public gaze.

  I had never seen myself as a celebrity, although footballers can become that, especially in the modern media, and social media, age, so it becomes easier to give up if you don’t get sucked in by fame. As a young player, I was barely recognised in London, but in my later years I was naturally known everywhere I went. In fact, being asked for autographs – and selfies these days – has increased down the years. I guess one reason is that I was part of some people’s youth and they like to romanticise your role in that. Bob Dylan talked about it in his book Chronicles. You can transcend what you did to become something or someone else and thus a memory for people. It’s as Nick Hornby suggests in Fever Pitch – fans often judge and measure their lives by certain games. Players can too if they don’t find something new.

  I could honestly say I never had the feeling of being concerned about going into some kind of obscurity. I had the tools to deal with whoever I was now supposed to become – emotionally, spiritually, mentally and physically. I had no regrets about my career, even though the underachievement with England and not winning the Champions League rankled a little. It, my career, felt pretty clean now.

  Actually, I had spent so long in the public domain that I was relieved no longer to be in it on a daily basis. We all like the pat on the back and to be acknowledged – and, for me, it took a long time to be loved and receive praise for the career I had, having been ridiculed and called a donkey as a young player – but I could live without it. Part of being an adult is giving yourself a pat on the back.

  So it wasn’t to experience the dressing room once more, and certainly not to be famous again, that I decided to go for the job as manager of Wycombe Wanderers. It wasn’t because I was pining for the football environment, or needing something to do on a Saturday afternoon at 3pm to get me out of the house. Or to prove myself. Or to beat Oldham away.

  Quite simply, I needed to practise my coaching, to get a foot on the ladder that might one day take me to the top rung and the best fruit at the top of the tree. Dad told me to go to Arsenal when I was 13 because they had the best coaches – Terry Burton in the youth development department, Don Howe with the first team. He told me to watch the best centre halves and I did – Willie Young and David O’Leary, Bobby Moore and Alvin Martin, Franz Beckenbauer and Rudi Krol. Among all of them I found a player called Tony Adams, who was a blend of the kid watching the greats and finding out for himself what suited best his natural talent.

  One day I received a call from the agent Steve Kutner asking me if Wycombe was a job that might interest me. Indeed it did, I said. It could be the first phase in a new learning process. As with playing early on, it had a purpose. It could have been Brentford or Arsenal reserves, though I did hear many good things about Wycombe when I came to do my homework.

  One of Steve’s clients was Martin O’Neill, who had famously started his managerial career with Wycombe before going on to such success with Norwich City, Leicester, Aston Villa, Celtic and the Republic of Ireland. Martin was willing to put in a word for me, Steve said, both to help me and his old club. I also spoke to Martin before I went any further. He told me that it was a friendly club, with a great chairman in Ivor Beeks, who would support me.

  ‘There’ll be no money but you’ll get a free hand,’ said Martin.

  When I came to meet Ivor and his board that October in 2003, it was almost as if I was interviewing them. They had just sacked the former Wimbledon player Lawrie Sanchez – who had had some good times with Wycombe, including leading them to an FA Cup semi-final in 2001 – at the end of September after 10 games without a win. I asked the board if they would stick with me if I went 10 games without a win.

  ‘Absolutely,’ Ivor said immediately. He was a lovely guy and it seemed a good fit. Even the ground, at the end of an industrial area on the edge of the town, was called Adams Park.

  I had done my homework on the current squad and gave them a rundown, and I think they were impressed. They must have been, I suppose, as a week or so later they offered me the job, on a contract for the rest of that season and the following two.

  When I took over on 5 November, Wycombe were bottom of Division Two of the Football League – now League One – with 11 points from 17 games. It was a precarious position but, knowing I would be given some time and would be allowed to learn properly on the job, I didn’t feel under pressure. Ivor made it clear they were willing to give an inexperienced coach a chance and I appreciated that.

  It started well enough, with a 4-1 home win over Swindon Town in the FA Cup in my first game. Afterwards, I spoke with Andy King, the old Luton and Everton player, who was then managing Swindon and who would sadly die prematurely of a heart attack in 2015 at the age of 58.

  ‘What have you done?’ he asked, smiling. ‘Welcome to hell.’ I could only smile back.

  It would, however, be another six weeks before our next win, 2-0 over AFC Bournemouth in the league. In between, I would find out about the reality of the job and life in lower-division football.

  That first game was also memorable for me noticing that the groundsman, Jim, was drunk when he came into my office to talk about something regarding the pitch. I recognised the signs pretty quickly, having had, shall we say, a fair old bit of experience of it myself in the past, though it didn’t take too much working out. He could hardly stand up, in fact. I told him he’d better not let the chairman see him like that and that he should get his head down under a blanket in my office to sleep it off before someone else noticed.

  Early the next week, I called him into my office and suggested that he might consider going into Sporting Chance to get some help. Luckily – and wisely – Jim chose to go, acknowledging that he did have a problem and, as I recount this story more than 13 years later, he is still sober not having had a drink. I look back to that time and think that I was supposed to be there, if only to point Jim in the right direction that day.

  He was not the only staff issue I had to c
onfront. I was walking into a political situation internally as I inherited John Gorman as my assistant and he had been the caretaker for a month. He had wanted the job himself and had the backing of the players. I had no problem with John, having worked with him when he was Glenn Hoddle’s coach with England, and he was a good guy, but it was all a bit awkward.

  So too was Terry Gibson also being on the coaching staff. He was definitely Lawrie’s man, them having played together at Wimbledon, and he didn’t want to be part of my set-up. He was off ill for a while and that became another difficult situation, though one not uncommon at football clubs when new managers take over and there is conflict between the old and the new regimes.

  Sure enough, and soon enough, both John and Terry departed. With the club looking to make savings after paying them up, there was no money for replacements, people I might want to bring in, and so I promoted the reserve-team coach, Pete Cawley, who had all his coaching badges, to be my assistant. Actually, I didn’t really want to bring in people from outside. I wanted to see all aspects of the job and do it myself. I would certainly get my wish.

  Indeed, the job was an eye-opener. Over the winter I would come to see what the life of a lower-division manager was like and just how demanding it was. My salary was £70,000 a year, many times less than I was earning in my pomp as a player but for many more times the hours I had to devote to the job.

  I quickly found out that the club was in some financial difficulty, losing £6,000 a week, which for a club like Wycombe Wanderers was huge. ITV Digital, which had signed a big deal with the Football League, had gone bust 18 months earlier and the club was still feeling the effect, probably having budgeted for the money, like so many clubs that had been left with holes in their projected finances. It was why I never claimed any expenses. I didn’t want to add to their woes. I didn’t even have a club phone.

  Soon Ivor was asking me to build him a new team as so many players were coming to the end of their contracts. I would have a budget of £800,000 a year, around half of what Lawrie Sanchez had been given and much less than many in the division below us, or even the bigger spenders in the Conference. It might have got me Thierry Henry for a few months. This was new territory for me. I didn’t know anything about budgets then and just got on with it.

  I would spend my life on the road in the Mercedes that I had bought when I left the Arsenal and which would do 300,000 miles over the ensuing six years. Early in the week I would take training – opening and shutting the training ground myself – then head off to a match in the evening to scout players, mainly in the reserve teams of clubs such as Arsenal, Chelsea and Reading. It was all done with a view to the following season, as I sensed the players we had were not going to keep us in this division and I needed to prepare for a promotion push if we went down.

  Most of the time, it became more about issues off the field. One of the earliest was when I arrived for the first time at the training ground about five minutes away from Adams Park and discovered there were not enough chairs for the players. This was just a little bit ironic. Wycombe is a town once famed for its furniture-making industry. Wycombe Wanderers are known as the Chairboys, in fact. But they didn’t have enough chairs. I went out to a furniture shop and spent £500 of my own money on some second-hand armchairs so that the lads could have somewhere to sit down at the training ground.

  I also quickly ran into some rivalry I hadn’t been aware of. Just before Christmas, only a month into the job, we were playing Colchester United at home in the Football League Trophy, sponsored by LDV. Alan Hutchinson in the media department called it the Look, Duck and Vanish, after the old wartime joke that that was really what the LDV of the Local Defence Volunteers stood for. Anyway, it was not a competition that was a priority for me, let’s put it that way.

  In fact, I was planning to play some of the squad players who needed a run-out and to keep people fresh for a league game at Notts County on the Saturday. Word obviously got out about that and Pete Cawley, who had once played for Colchester, came to see me to say that the academy physio Terry Evans wanted to speak to me about fielding a weakened team. Imagine that at Arsenal – somebody trying to talk to Arsène about a team he might be selecting.

  ‘Fuck off, Pete,’ I said – it doesn’t take long back in the environment of football to pick up the language again. ‘The academy physio is never going to talk to the manager about that.’ But he did. And I asked Pete to sit in on the meeting as Terry was a big bloke.

  It seemed that the Wycombe and Colchester fans did not get along too well. There had been dislike growing over the years and it really took off in the 1991/92 season when the two clubs fought it out for the Conference title. Both sides finished on 94 points, but it was Colchester who went up on goal difference, the crucial moment being their win in Wycombe’s home game with a freak last-minute goal.

  Terry informed me of the rivalry and advised me not to upset the supporters by refusing to pick my strongest side. ‘With due respect, Terry,’ I said. ‘I am the manager of the club and nobody tells me how to pick the team.’

  I suppose he would say he had the last laugh. We lost the game 3-2 – to another last-minute goal, in extra time – and Terry would go on to become the personal trainer to a new owner who would eventually take over at the club, thus lasting longer at Wycombe than I would.

  There were some triumphs of recruitment. I got Nathan Tyson out of Reading reserves and the club would go on to sell him to Nottingham Forest for £700,000, which would sort out their debt. I also later got in the central defender Mike Williamson from the Southampton academy and he would go on to Watford, for £150,000, then Portsmouth and Newcastle United. It was a close-run thing, though . . .

  I had seen Mike playing at Torquay as a 17-year-old and made a note of him. He was now 19 and had just been released by Southampton. We gave him a club flat – with the poor old groundsman, Jim, getting kicked out to make way – and Mike came to me saying he was bored and asked if we could get him a TV. I went to Ivor and left it with him.

  I was then called in by Keith Allen, the club secretary, who was a good guy and always really supportive of me. He said that Ivor had refused the request and had insisted the kid should buy one himself. Keith had communicated this to Mike, who hadn’t signed yet, and Mike had reacted by saying that he wouldn’t now be joining the club. I saw both sides of the argument – that of a player in a club flat, and a chairman who thought players were paid enough and should buy their own TVs like average people – but I couldn’t afford to lose Mike. And so I went out and bought him a TV myself. Managers at lower levels often do that kind of thing and dip into their own pockets just to get the players they want or to keep them happy so that they will stay.

  I do believe in miracles, having experienced personal ones in my own life in being saved from drinking myself to death, but not really in footballing ones like keeping Wycombe up that first season. There were false dawns like a 4-1 win over Grimsby, when I managed to get in Steven Taylor, then a kid, on loan from Newcastle and Luke Moore, who scored a hattrick, from Aston Villa, but it was a grind.

  I did make the side harder to beat by doing simple things like sending out a 4-5-1 formation for when we didn’t have the ball and converting to 4-3-3 when we did. I got the side to reduce the gap between midfield and defence and tried to use the pace of Nathan Tyson and Danny Zenda on the break. We did limit damage so that we lost only two of 13 at one point, but unfortunately we drew nine of the 13; not enough points to climb clear of the relegation zone. I was pleased with points we got at Sheffield Wednesday and at home to Brighton, having lost 4-0 away to them.

  In fact, that day at home to Brighton was doubly memorable. Poppy was pregnant at the time and Keith Allen came to the touchline to tell me that he had received a call to say she had gone into labour. I left 15 minutes early to beat the traffic and make sure I was there for the birth of Atticus later that night. He was a bonny boy. We would attract some media comment for his name, which came from o
ne of Poppy’s favourite books, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, with its central character and hero, the lawyer Atticus Finch.

  Anyway, when I got back to work I could sense that, while I could organise a team, I was going to struggle to improve players who were just not up to it. We laboured on as spring arrived and duly went down. The fans were naturally disappointed but they didn’t turn on me. The chairman also understood that this squad needed to be rebuilt.

  I could only reflect on the irony at season’s end of Arsenal going unbeaten all year, with 26 wins and 12 draws, to become the Invincibles while I was getting relegated to the Football League’s bottom division.

  That summer, I had to let around 20 players go. Calling them all into the office and releasing them is one of the tough parts of the job. I actually said a prayer before each day of having to do it, asking for the courage to see it through. It helped me to be honest with people. I always gave reasons.

  Some were easier than others. Ian Simpemba came in to tell me that he had been offered the same money – £500 a week – to go part time with Crawley and he could also work as a gym instructor. It sounded for the best all round.

  Another lad, Andy Reilly, came into my office with his dad. I had given the boy his first-team debut at the age of 17 and he had done all right, but they were looking for a three-year contract. Now, the lad was a straight-A student and had been offered a place at Cambridge. I told them I was going to do them a favour and not offer him a contract because he should go to university. They weren’t happy but I believed it was for the best.

  It was a draining period but it had to be done, and I knew that at the end of it I would have a blank sheet of paper. Hopes were duly higher for the following season as I cleared some players out and got some in, even if they were cut-price. We also had a new investor in Steve Hayes, who bought 25 per cent of the club for a £250,000 stake. He was more of a rugby fan, who would later bring Wasps to Adams Park when he became the full owner of Wycombe, but it fitted with the feeling of it being a fresh start.