Sober

by Tony Adams

  The Reading job came up and I texted Nicky Hammond, who was director of football there. I had played with Nick, who was a goalkeeper in his playing days, in the Arsenal youth team. He got me in to see the then owner, Sir John Madejski, and the chief executive, Nigel Howe, nephew of my old Arsenal coach Don.

  Unfortunately, I made a mess of the interview. I began talking about a certain player, saying that he wouldn’t play for England, at which point Nigel told me that he was Welsh. I should have got up and walked out there and then. I was never going to get the job after that. In the end, they gave it to Steve Coppell again.

  I found the whole experience difficult. I was embarrassed to have made the mistake and it hurt me. I tried to tell myself that the interview was good experience for future job applications, and that I still knew I could coach players into being a good side. I had all the credentials and knowledge. The episode took me back to being a failure at school, though. All the echoes of the past crept in, of the kid ashamed of himself for pronouncing ‘really’ as ‘wheally’.

  It is that sort of memory that can be dangerous for an alcoholic. If he or she does not have the tools to acknowledge what is happening – that it is just a feeling and an echo of the past – the shame can take them over and lead them back to a drink just to drown it. When you drown sorrows, though, they have a habit of learning to swim. Thankfully, my sobriety was solid enough to own the feeling and share it, either by going to an AA meeting and talking about it there or with my therapist James.

  I retreated to my Cotswold sanctuary but was tempted out in the spring when I received a phone call from Robbie Williams, ex-member of Take That and mega pop star. He was putting on a new charity event in aid of UNICEF and wanted me to take part. I would be playing for an England XI against a Rest of the World team, the sides a mixture of former players and celebrities, in a match that was to take place at Old Trafford.

  Now, I was in two minds about it. I played seriously for 22 years and, when your last games involved winning the double with Arsenal, you don’t really want to be playing over the park with your mates. Or even in celebrity games. Being the professional and perfectionist I always was when it came to football, I didn’t want to risk my reputation while memories of me at my peak were still reasonably fresh.

  And I didn’t want the public to recall an overweight 39-year-old or for the media to poke fun at me. I didn’t want to feel that sting of ridicule again, the hurt I experienced when some fans early in my career would throw carrots while yelling ‘Donkey!’ at me. I wanted to do myself justice. And I was still competitive. I wanted to win and wasn’t going to play if I didn’t think we could.

  Perhaps at that time in my sobriety I looked at things too deeply. You can indulge in analysis to the point of paralysis instead of just doing things that appeal to you. And this did. In years gone by, I’d wasted too much time in my life worrying about what people thought of me, and I had made a lot of progress in just doing what I wanted to do and letting people think what they would. And of course it was a great cause.

  And so I said yes. I thought it would be nice to be around some of my old Arsenal and England friends, like David Seaman, Les Ferdinand, Bryan Robson, Jamie Redknapp and, of course, Paul Gascoigne, who had all also agreed. No, I wasn’t missing the camaraderie of the dressing room but a bit of nostalgia wouldn’t hurt a few years on. And Terry Venables was coaching, my favourite England boss to play under. To add to all that, I was, to be perfectly honest, searching around for things to do.

  Above all, I wanted to do it for Robbie.

  Robbie has himself spoken of his alcohol and drug addiction, so I’m not betraying any confidences when I talk about our friendship. He is another who has had to live it all in the public eye. I got to know him when he got clean and sober and we met at an AA meeting just off Oxford Street in London and went for a coffee afterwards to share our experiences.

  We would also have another, very powerful, conversation a few years later.

  It was back in March 2001; I was nearly five years’ sober, and we were playing Bayern in the Champions League in Munich. I got a call at the team hotel on the day of the game. It was Robbie. And it was one of those instances that may look like a coincidence to some but for people like him and me, it was a meant-to-be moment.

  He was in Munich playing a gig that night, one of his first sober, and was nervous about going on stage without some form of alcoholic drink or substance to take the edge off, as he had often done in the past. Could we talk? Of course, I said. And for the next hour or so, we shared about performing in front of big crowds in big venues, about the butterflies and the self-doubt.

  We all get scared, I said, but we have been given a talent by our Higher Power and I believe that my HP never puts me in situations that I can’t handle. They may be challenging but I do have the resources to succeed in them. I communicated that to Robbie. The God of my understanding, I said, wants me to achieve and gives me the wherewithal to cope when the time comes.

  ‘What if the audience don’t like me?’ Robbie asked.

  ‘That’s a possibility,’ I said. ‘But if it does happen, I now have the emotional equipment to deal with that situation.’

  I told him I was a better player after I stopped drinking. That had been my belief and my experience and it would probably be the same for him. He would be a greater performer clean and sober. Nobody wants a shy legend, I added. Now go out there and give your paying public the superstar they want. Perhaps I was practising team talks.

  Anyway, it must have helped, as sharing always does. It certainly helped me. I saw from watching TV replays later that Robbie was in the crowd before going on stage later. He apparently wowed his audience in the Olympiahalle.

  So it was that I wanted to support Robbie in the first year of this Soccer Aid venture. I wanted people to see what could be done by a couple of blokes who were free of drink and drugs. And I wanted to show that I could have some fun without putting anything mood-altering inside of me.

  Once upon a time, I would have been scared of all the showbiz stuff, would have been a bundle of nerves and shied away from it, but I enjoyed all the build-up during the week, with Ant and Dec hosting nightly shows. And I enjoyed travelling the 45 minutes each day from the Conrad hotel in Chelsea where we were based down the A3 to the Fulham training ground at Motspur Park. After all the lonely travelling to Holland for much of the previous year, it was good to have company.

  I was now 10 years sober and it was great to talk to Robbie and David Seaman and others. Gazza was still struggling, still a lovely guy but still scared. He hadn’t been ready to get sober back in ’98 before the France World Cup, when I tried to talk to him on the plane back from a friendly in Morocco and during that infamous time at La Manga when Glenn Hoddle cut him from the squad, and he wasn’t ready now. There’s nothing you can do if somebody doesn’t want it. Ronnie O’Sullivan was due to be with us but he pulled out, all over the place emotionally at the time.

  When we got to Motspur Park, I became almost Terry Venables’ assistant. I felt in my element on the training ground now. It was good to be working with Terry again and exchanging ideas with him. I put on a couple of sessions, did the warm-ups. I was trying to show Terry what I had been doing in Holland and I guess I wanted to impress my old England mentor.

  And I organised the back four. I put David Gray, the singer/songwriter, at right back and Robbie at left back. Ben Shephard, the TV presenter, looked like he could run so I put him alongside me in central defence. My idea was to get the defence sorted first. It was my environment and I could do that. Terry watched me and, more importantly as it would turn out, so too did Jamie Redknapp.

  Then we needed legs in midfield, and Jamie was still fit, so you could work around him. The actor Damian Lewis also went in there. He was a nice guy, keen to mix with the group of football folk around the place, so wanting to be part of it all and fit into the environment. Up front we had big Les Ferdinand and there was also Robbie’s ma
te Jonathan Wilkes, who was not bad.

  We took it seriously while the opposition, under Ruud Gullit’s management, looked as if they were winging it. I always thought we would win and we duly did, beating the Rest of the World 2-1, with Les and Jonathan scoring early on. The crowd – an amazing 71,960 – loved it when Diego Maradona pulled a goal back. He had some weight on and I was grateful he made me look like I was still in reasonable shape.

  I would, by the way, receive a curious phone call about Diego around that time. It came via an Argentine journalist, Maria Laura Avignolo, who was close to him. Diego, apparently, was struggling with his own addiction issues, with his cocaine use well documented, and he had heard about Eric Clapton’s treatment centre in Antigua. He wondered if I could arrange for him to go there. In the end, Diego didn’t go but that was typical of the grandiosity of addicts – he had to go to somewhere exclusive (although in reality it wasn’t; the treatment would be tough anywhere) set up by a superstar. Not for him mixing it with the lowly at some more basic place.

  Anyway, after the game, there was a party at the Lowry Hotel in Manchester, which I enjoyed, pleased that I could these days be sociable without the need for an alcoholic drink. When I was drinking back in the day and confused by people who didn’t drink, I thought them a bit weird. I’m sure drinkers thought the same about me when I gave up.

  That’s the thing about the illness of addiction – it wants other people to think we are weird because it is trying to keep us sick, fighting for its life. It wants us to turn away from people who are happy, joyous and free in an effort to make sure we also don’t become those things. Most people who don’t have drink problems, however, don’t even notice or care, I have come to realise.

  I found myself next to Jamie Redknapp and having a conversation about what had been a really enjoyable week and football in general. He had been impressed with my coaching, he said. ‘You have got to give my dad a hand at Portsmouth,’ he added.

  ‘Interesting,’ I replied. ‘Tell him to give me a ring.’

  9

  Pompey Times

  Coaching is taking players

  where they can’t take themselves.

  JOSE MOURINHO

  The phone did ring not long after the Robbie Williams match at Old Trafford and it was Harry Redknapp. ‘All right, Tony, Son? How you doing?’ he asked in that cheerful, bouncy way of his. ‘Jamie said to give you a bell. Come and help us at Pompey. Come and have a cuppa tea and we’ll have a chat.’ It was one of the first things I would find out about Harry. He had the common, personal touch and was great at meeting people. He liked to see them face to face, to get an instinctive feel for them. He did it with players too.

  I met him a few days later in London, at the Churchill hotel in Portman Square, with Peter Storrie, the Portsmouth chief executive, also there. At that point, I didn’t know Peter and barely formed an opinion of a man who would come to be so controversial at Pompey. He mainly sat, observed and smiled.

  ‘So you want to come and give us an ’and?’ Harry asked.

  I had pretty much decided that if the chance was offered I would indeed give him and Pompey a hand. I was grateful for such a big opportunity. It was a step up, a chance to work with Premier League players. I needed to get back in the swim. I’d not been around the top flight since 2002, and was thus unfamiliar with a competition, and its players, that was changing rapidly. Besides, I wasn’t doing anything else, was I?

  I said that I would love to have a ‘practice’ – that was to get some more experience of coaching, and in the Premier League. I told him what I had been up to, told him about Wycombe, Feyenoord and Utrecht, but I’m not sure he was that interested. He was more concerned about what I could do for him and Pompey than what I had been doing elsewhere.

  One thing I emphasised to Harry was that I would not be coming in as his defensive coach. I made it clear that I couldn’t be known purely as that. It was an easy label that people would stick on me, given my playing career, I said. I wanted to be fully involved on the training ground and I would need to access all areas.

  ‘There’s no point me coming down to watch you work,’ I said, determined not to repeat the Utrecht experience. I needed to be hands-on, working, and developing as a coach, with a group.

  ‘No problem, Tone. I’ll give you enough rope to hang yourself, mate, don’t you worry about that,’ he said, and laughed.

  Peter Storrie was ready there and then with a contract and I signed it straight away. It was for one year at a salary of £100,000. My title was to be assistant manager, the job having come up because Harry’s previous number two, Kevin Bond, had gone to Newcastle United as assistant to Glenn Roeder, who had just been appointed at St James’ Park.

  I went down to the training ground on the day before the players reported back for pre-season and found Joe Jordan, Harry’s number three, there along with Paul Groves, the reserve-team manager. Harry wasn’t there at that time, and while he did come in during the first week, he took a back seat. He said the players were best left with the fitness coach, John Dalziel, for that period. There was no point doing much technical work with them if they weren’t fit.

  I was surprised by the ordinariness of the training facilities, which were rented from a school and sited adjacent to Eastleigh Football Club. This was a Premier League club but, with its Portakabins for changing rooms, it was hardly any better equipped than Wycombe. The club’s stadium at Fratton Park, nestling in the middle of streets crammed with terraced houses, was charming and homely, but it was also outdated and lacking in modern amenities, certainly way behind the big clubs.

  What made up for these deficiencies was the atmosphere and attitude that Harry fostered. It definitely made for an enjoyable pre-season which was a breath of fresh air to me. At Arsenal, it had been very regimented under Arsène, though naturally highly professional, while during my most recent experience at Utrecht, Foeke Booy had just been dour. This was a new way of working. And a lot of fun.

  In fact, over the next couple of years working under Harry, I would have a ball. It was shambolic at times, it has to be said, but more often that was overshadowed by the innate professionalism that Harry possessed. Harry and I shared the belief that you could be focused on the job but could still enjoy your work. Over the next three seasons, I would come to see that Harry was passionate and erratic, ruthless and compassionate, kind and charming. And while I would also see an angry side that was rarely exposed in public, he did not hold grudges and had a heart of gold.

  At first, we were all feeling each other out, defining what our roles were and how we would work best together. We also very quickly had a new man in the mix who altered the dynamic.

  Harry was not best pleased when he heard that the owner, Alexandre Gaydamak – known as Sacha to us and whose Russian-born father Arcadi, it was believed, had bought the club for his son to run – had hired as technical director a guy called Avram Grant, who had been national team manager of Israel, where the Gaydamaks were based.

  It prompted Harry to fly out to Israel for talks with the owner, but it was soon smoothed over as Harry came back reassured that Avram was not going to interfere with his management. Just a few weeks with Avram revealed that he would never be a threat. He was such a lovely, warm, charming man who was not looking to stab anyone in the back. And, anyway, Harry was never going to let him get close enough to be a threat.

  In the year Avram was there before he went to Chelsea and became director of football for his great friend Roman Abramovich, he mostly stayed out of the way, sat in his office and ate a lot, and offered advice about recruitment. He was also friendly with the ‘super-agent’ Pini Zahavi, which helped him. I got quite friendly with Avram and liked him. In fact, part of my role would evolve into being the staff coordinator, the man who would move comfortably from person to person liaising with everyone.

  Soon, I had formed quite a bond with Joe Jordan, who was never a resentful man and made me welcome despite the fact that I was
coming in over his head. He came to me to talk about his son Andrew, a decent centre back who had played for Bristol City, Cardiff and Scotland Under-21s but whose career had been ended by injury. Andrew, he said, was having a problem with alcohol – relatives often put it delicately out of a sense of loyalty – and needed some help. Could I do something? I thought about the best thing to do and gave Joe Peter Kay’s number. I told him that Andrew had to ring Peter. It is important that alcoholics make the first move, as an important step in showing that they want to get into recovery.

  Andrew did, and spoke to Peter. Soon he was going through Sporting Chance and it would prove providential for all of us. After coming through the programme and getting into good sobriety, he would train as a counsellor himself and end up working for us. Great guy. In 2016, he celebrated 10 years of sobriety.

  Without treading on Joe’s toes, I took over most of the training, doing all the possession and technical sessions, except on the days when Harry fancied it and he’d come out, take over and instil whatever message he wanted to at that time. I got in plenty of practice as a coach, as he promised I would. He never told me what, or what not, to do. Once the season got under way, on the day before a game I would leave the team to him to prepare, which was only right. I would have my input with the goalkeeper and back four on set pieces, while Joe would do the technical analysis of the opposition, as he was more experienced in that than I was.

  I did wonder at one point in pre-season how we would ever get a side out for the opening day as Harry seemed always to be in the middle of overhauling the squad. Pompey had finished 17th the previous season, just four points clear of relegation having confirmed their escape with a 2-1 win over Wigan on the penultimate weekend, and there was certainly work to be done. He had taken over for a second spell only the previous November after an acrimonious departure from Southampton, the big local rivals, and now wanted to make a team in his own image.