by Tony Adams
I remember the previous Christmas spent with them, overwhelmed by love. Poppy’s mother Chloe – Lady Rosemary’s second and surviving daughter – came to me privately with some papers. They were the deeds to the flat in Sloane Square which she felt Poppy should have safe. I thought they were for Poppy’s stocking and was taken aback that they were giving each other central London flats for Christmas. It turned out not to be the case, though. They were actually an unostentatious family and Lady Rosemary often gave them all plastic toys as jokes.
I compared it with the last Christmas before my father died, just a couple of years earlier and the year before I met Poppy. I wanted to make things nice for Dad, knowing that it could be his last. He was in a wheelchair at the time. I booked the Four Seasons hotel in Canary Wharf for dinner, and my three kids, Clare, Oliver and Amber came. My younger sister Sandra turned up on her own, having just split up with her partner, and the older one Denise arrived with her new man. It couldn’t have been nice for my dad seeing his three children all divorced. It was all very fragmented, a bit sad.
We didn’t have a honeymoon at the time – as Poppy frequently reminds me – but instead went up to stay with Ray Parlour and his new wife in the North-east for a weekend as they hadn’t been able to make the wedding due to his football commitments. Ray was playing for Middlesbrough at the time and I went to see them play against Aston Villa, and win 3-0.
That night, Ray suggested that he and his wife Jo, me and Poppy and two friends went to a nightclub in Yarm. And so off we headed. When we arrived, there was a queue so we stood in line, with Ray suggesting I distract the bouncers and they all run in. Then a young girl in front of us in the queue was sick. I had gone with the flow but that was enough for me. ‘Come on, Ray,’ I said. ‘Let’s go home and have a cup of tea.’ And so we did. All very different from a night out with him in Hong Kong . . .
After coming back from the North-east, we had a lovely time at our new home with Clare, Oliver and Amber all there for Atticus’s first Christmas. Then it was skiing in the New Year. I was enjoying the good life.
I watched football, kept my eye in, and started on my Pro Licence, having finished the A. I watched that amazing 2005 Champions League final between Liverpool and Milan in Istanbul when Liverpool came from 3-0 down at half-time to draw, then win on penalties. In fact, it was partly as a result of that game that I found my next port of call.
Having become friendly with Robin van Persie at the Arsenal through my study of international players, it came up in conversation that Holland might be a good place to go and work. Robin was close to the Dutch football writer Marcel van der Kraan, who in turn mentioned it to Wim Jansen, previously manager of Celtic. Word of mouth and ‘networking’ are often how things happen in football.
Wim then put in a word for me with Henk van Stee, who was the academy director at Feyenoord, and I was invited out to Rotterdam for an interview at the De Kuip stadium. They had a vacancy in their set-up for a figure like me, Henk told me. They had taken note of Liverpool winning that final against impossible odds. ‘Only an English team could have made a recovery like that,’ he said. ‘We need to instil that in our players.’
Henk outlined the set-up at the club: Mark Wotte, who would go on to manage Southampton briefly and work with the Scotland national team, was the technical director and Erwin Koeman, Ronald’s brother, the head coach. Erwin had been brought in to succeed Ruud Gullit and been left with a lot of players, so the reserves had a big squad. Henk wanted me to assist Henk Duut with the reserves – the Beloften – as well as work across the club, helping with coaching sessions and the various age groups. Mario Been had just left to go to NEC Nijmegen and I was to be his replacement.
It suited me down to the ground, even though there was no salary, though they would pay my hotel and travelling costs. There would also be the logistical problems, of time away from home, but I could learn more of the art of coaching at a club – and in a country – where football was so technically conscious. I could finish my Pro Licence without being in any media spotlight. It meant I could just get on with the job without being scrutinised and having my results analysed, so that Tony Adams the coach was not compared with Tony Adams the player.
And so began another adventure, or a new one every fortnight, involving me leaving my Gloucestershire home on a Monday morning at 5am, driving to the Eurotunnel for 8am and being in Rotterdam for lunch ahead of a reserve game on a Monday night. Sometimes, for a change, I would drive to Harwich and get the boat to the Hook of Holland so that I had less of a drive at the other end, but in the winter the crossings became too rough and I would get seasick.
I have had many periods in my life when my fear of flying kicked in and this was one of them. In the Arsenal days, my fellow aviophobic – as the scientific name has it – Dennis Bergkamp and I had been known to keep each other company on a train while the rest of the team travelled by plane, and I would rather drive for eight or nine hours than take a one-hour flight. It also made sense to have my own car with me out there to get around.
I would then stay in Holland for 10 days, taking in games also in France, Belgium and Germany at the weekends, and work on weekdays on the Feyenoord training ground, with its excellent facilities and investment in youth, before going back home for my one weekend in two.
Away from the job, I also had plenty of AA meetings nearby, in The Hague and Rotterdam, which had the benefit of being in English. There were plenty of Americans around and where there are Americans, there is AA.
My time at Feyenoord was as educational for me as I hope it was for them. It was a remarkable set-up. The reserves and under-18s were in every day and I worked with them and their two under-18 coaches, Henk Fraser and Igor Korneev, who called me simply ‘English’. Then the younger age-group teams would come in during the evenings. On Saturdays they would all play games. Also on Saturday mornings, once a fortnight, they would have trial games for kids invited by the 16 Feyenoord scouts around the country, which all the coaching staff would attend and note.
Now I had real talents to work with at the age levels, young players like Royston Drenthe, who had a spell at Everton, and Jonathan de Guzman, who played for Swansea. Then there was Bruno Martins, who would go on to play in the first team and the Dutch national side before joining Porto, and Evander Sno, who would join Bristol City. Martins’ partner at centre back, Stefan de Vrij, would make his debut for the first team at 17, go on to sign for Lazio and play for the national team. He would also, touchingly, do an interview some time later in which he cited me as being a help and influence on his career.
It was a remarkable, formative time for me and I learned so much about techniques and the creation and use of space. Feyenoord had huge training areas so there was room to work, and they showed me how to put on sessions for offensive play, which I appreciated as I wanted to be seen as something more than just a defensive coach.
Holland opened me up to new ways of thinking, and not just about the game. It seemed to be appropriate to the master’s degree that I always intended to complete and fostered the interest in sociology I had developed. In fact, a fascination with foreign cultures would, I soon discovered, become very important to me.
In tactical terms, I even learned some new stuff about defending, though while they wanted to find out more about that side of the game from me, I wanted from them more about offensive tactics. I had been used to the old George Graham style of a zonal back four yet now I was working with the Dutch preference for man to man. Sometimes, they would also play a third man as a central defensive sweeper.
I learned 4-3-3 properly as it was the system played right through the club. Away from home, it would be two holding midfield players and one attacking. At home, it would be one holding and two attacking. It was the only versatility they allowed. They liked 4-3-3 as it meant all areas of the pitch were covered. They also liked a libero, who played in front of the back four, not behind, like Ronald Koeman did for the Dutch and Matthias Sammer
did for Germany.
If a team is losing, the English answer is often to put a big man up front – whether throwing on a striker from off the bench or pushing a defender forward – and to get the ball up early to him. It often looks good to fans, as if the coach is really going for it and doing something to turn the tide of a game.
Not in Dutch football. Statistics showed that it was much more effective to go 3-4-3 and put a centre back into midfield to make an extra man there. At Feyenoord, they would change the lines and shape of the team and that gave me another new insight. They liked wingers and players who were good one on one against opponents. They spoke of players by numbers rather than positions: a two was obviously a right back, three and four the centre backs and five the left back. The substitutes wore a plus-one number on their shirt, so 12 was also a right back.
I also liked what they did with goalkeepers. They wanted to make them footballers first and goalkeepers later, so often didn’t choose the best person to go in goal until they were around 12 years old, making sure they learned all the basics of control and passing first. Even in the later age groups, they made sure goalkeepers were included in all the warm-ups and the drills before they went to their separate sessions.
My work there showed me I was right to leave Wycombe. The Dutch perception of the English coach was poor and they thought we were all kick-and-rush. I remember going with a group of Feyenoord coaches to watch Wolves, then managed by Glenn Hoddle, play at Den Haag in a pre-season friendly. Glenn had a reputation as a passing, possession coach but the Feyenoord guys couldn’t see it in his side.
‘The English don’t want the ball,’ one of my colleagues said to me. ‘We pass, pass, pass and try and score a goal. Then they kick it back to us and we do it again.’ The Dutch like to think of themselves as great thinkers on the game and indeed they are, though they can be a bit elitist about it. I couldn’t really argue with them, though. I needed to learn differently, not get pigeonholed with that reputation, and I was in the right place to do it, to absorb a lot of knowledge and find my own best practice as a coach.
I was also in the right place to do some scouting, both for my own personal development and also for Arsenal. Steve Rowley, the scout who had discovered me on the playing fields of Dagenham and had now risen to be head of their scouting operation, had asked me to cast my eye over players for them. On my weekends not going home, I would travel round what is a very productive area for scouts – probably the best in the world after Brazil and Africa – that north-western corner of Europe.
Often I could take in a Friday night game in Belgium, maybe at Anderlecht, then head into Germany for a Saturday afternoon game and be back in Holland for a night kick-off. On Sunday, I would regularly head over to France, to Lens or Lille, for a game. It was a great grounding and I made a lot of friends and contacts.
I recall Steve sending me to Bayer Leverkusen to watch Dimitar Berbatov, but he was deemed too languid, even lazy, for Arsenal and it was Tottenham who took him. Then there was Simon Rolfes in Werder Bremen’s midfield, whom I liked, but Arsène thought that, at six-foot-three, he was too tall to fit the criteria he was then looking for. At that point, after Patrick Vieira’s departure to Juventus, he was preferring little guys in midfield. A memo had gone out to scouts asking them to look for players good at combination play and who would run 10 kilometres a game box to box. They were usually smaller and quicker.
I did text Arsène after watching Emmanuel Adebayor for Monaco at Lille and he agreed with me about his qualities. Another I took special note of was Manuel Neuer at Schalke, but Arsenal were unwilling to pay £25 million for a goalkeeper, even if he could have been persuaded to come to England.
I began to acquire some respect in the Dutch footballing community, and a game I took with the reserves against Ajax certainly helped mine and the club’s cause. They are Feyenoord’s big rivals and it goes beyond a tale of two cities. Ajax are the fancy dans from Amsterdam, Feyenoord the working-class club from more blue-collar Rotterdam – the dockers’ club. I began to feel a lot of affection and affinity for a club known as ‘The Club of the People’ and De Trots van Zuid – The Pride of the South.
I experienced first-hand how intense the rivalry was, even at reserve level. When I parked my car at the Amsterdam ArenA, I was recognised and shouted at by a group of Ajax fans, who looked a bit menacing. I thought a bit of a run to the stadium was in order. Fortunately, they were long gone by the time I returned – Feyenoord having won 5-1, with Jonathan de Guzman outstanding.
Then, around Christmas time, I was approached by one of the club’s directors, Jan Willem van Dop, who was about to leave to become president of FC Utrecht. He said he had taken note of my work at Feyenoord and would like me to go with him and become first-team coach at Utrecht.
I had little hesitation in accepting and said my goodbyes at the De Kuip at Christmas. I had worked with the kids and the reserves and learned much from being in the system and observing it in action: how they developed technique with the six- to 12-year-olds and tactics with the 12- to 19-year-olds. After that grounding, and having experienced the culture for half a season, I reckoned I had enough knowledge for a step up.
Two problems were soon to present themselves, however. First, Mr van Dop, known as Willem – nice guy that he was – was not the money man at Utrecht and, second, he had not informed the head coach, Foeke Booy (yes, that really was his name), that I was going to be joining the club in the New Year.
Not knowing this at the time, I went to see them play a game at Den Haag then drove over to Utrecht ready for work the next morning, as agreed with Willem. When I turned up, Foeke and his assistant John van Loen, the old Holland centre-forward, just sat in the office looking at me in an awkward silence that seemed to last for ever.
In fact, it would last a month. The two of them were used to doing things their way and they made it plain that it was not going to change, closing ranks and refusing to involve me in anything. I basically stood on the touchline watching training every day. I tried not to take it personally and I could understand their position – basically, another coach they had not asked for had been foisted upon them.
I was enjoying the country and the experience and so I looked to see if I could find another job. A head coach’s job came up at NAC Breda but they wouldn’t consider me because I didn’t yet have the UEFA Pro Licence. In England, clubs are allowed dispensation for people who are working towards the qualification. I phoned Andy Roxburgh, who was technical director at UEFA, and his counterpart at the FA, Trevor Brooking, to see if anything could be done, but they told me the Dutch were very strict about it.
I talked it over with Pops, told her of my frustration and explained my belief that if I wasn’t going to be able to get a head coach’s position there for a while, Holland had given me everything I was going to get for now. She reckoned I should come home. She was by now seven months pregnant with our second son together, Hector, who would be born in the April of 2006. And so I did, feeling a bit like I was leaving with my tail between my legs. I got back into family life again, spending time with Atticus and enjoying another skiing holiday.
I also worked that spring and summer towards finishing the Pro Licence that I needed in order to complete my set of coaching qualifications, taking in a club youth tournament in France to study players, formations and patterns of play as part of the theory. Being on holiday in the south of France, I went on a study visit to Toulouse FC, then managed by Elie Baup, watched them train and with Elie’s consent even gave a 10-minute presentation to players on some of my ideas.
It would be the following year when I completed the course with a residential week at Warwick University, where David Moyes, then Everton manager, was a speaker. It was more of an open discussion and a debate than a lecture and took in such topics as dealing with agents and star players, along with media and public relations. Hearing from him was fascinating.
Part of the course involved putting on a presentation and mine
was a video session on how to counter the Watford team then playing direct football under their manager Aidy Boothroyd. The aim was to instil a strategy in a group of players that they would be comfortable using and which gave them a belief that they would win the match. For that, I used the Chelsea way of doing it, which had brought them a win and which involved switching the ball from wing to wing to stretch Watford until they opened up.
I passed the course and was awarded the Pro Licence, which meant that I was a fully fledged, fully qualified coach. I was one of fewer than 200 in England at that time – compared to five times that number in Germany and 10 times more in Spain.
As can be seen from those statistics, it seemed that English football did not set much store by the qualification. In fact, it was often mistrusted, with management by instinct and intuition more the mentality. When the Premier League stipulated that the Pro Licence was necessary to manage one of their clubs, often executives at clubs would find loopholes to employ the personality they wanted anyway.
Those who had been managers for 10 years were exempt when the qualification was first introduced, but they are offered little refresher courses from time to time in these days of more structured organisation. There is nothing like learning on the job but it’s a bit like the modern driving test compared with the old, less intense one. It provides you with more detail more preparation for all the pitfalls ahead. There have been some old-fashioned managers who resented having to get any qualifications at all, of course, which meant that those from overseas were often better qualified.
I thought about getting back into the game in England, though was wary given my Wycombe experience. I wanted to be sure I would have a good chance of succeeding at a club, and also have plenty of time to coach players – and decent players – properly.
I also needed to be thinking about earning some money again soon. I had had two years now – at Wycombe and in Holland – of being out of pocket through my involvement in the game. We were comfortably off, don’t get me wrong, but I had begun to eat into the savings I had built up while a player.