Sober

by Tony Adams

  The fee would be £7 million and there seemed to be a lot of people involved in brokering this deal, from Harry and Daniel Levy at Tottenham, through Zahavi, to Peter Storrie at Portsmouth.

  I made some calls. I phoned Pep Guardiola at Barcelona, who told me not to touch him. I rang Arsène, who called me back after talking to one of his players and dos Santos’ Mexican compatriot, Carlos Vela. The word was that ‘Giovani does not live well’ and was not fit.

  I told Peter the player was not for me. Peter insisted the deal had to be done, even putting Sven-Goran Eriksson, then Mexico manager, on the phone to tell me what a good player he was. And so I offered Peter a deal in return: if the player passed a bleep test – a way of determining fitness – then I would sign him. I was pretty confident he wouldn’t.

  Dos Santos turned up at the training ground with his father and took the test with our fitness coach, John Dalziel. John came to me with the result. It was a nine. Considering that in my last season with Arsenal, at the age of 35, I had recorded a 12, and I was the slowest in the team, then this was really poor.

  The kid was in tears and I tried to console him by saying: ‘Maybe in the summer . . .’ There was no way I was taking him now, though, and I told Peter as much. Fortunately, he didn’t force the issue and the deal was scrapped.

  But the whole episode – when I wanted Dzeko, then up for grabs, and Peter wanted me to take dos Santos – showed me which way the wind was blowing. I knew then that I was the fall guy here. To use a newspaper industry term: I was a dead man walking.

  I always did find dealing with Peter difficult. We had, shall I say, a different take on how business should be conducted. Take the time we were negotiating with our midfield player Richard Hughes about a new contract, with his expiring in the summer. I met with Peter in my office ahead of Richard coming in with his dad, who was his agent.

  Richard was a decent player, not highest quality, I said, but a good club man who was worth keeping. Ideally, he wouldn’t be a starter but he could do a job when we had injuries and sit in there in midfield. At the time, salaries at the club were huge, though he was not among the highest earners. Start low, I told Peter, and I recommended two seasons at a figure just above what Richard was then on. OK, said Peter, we’ll keep him. And he called in Richard and his dad.

  Virtually the first words out of Peter’s mouth were a sum of money well beyond my suggested maximum. I was flabbergasted.

  ‘Peter,’ I said, ‘was there even any point in having a meeting? I have given my recommendations and I am the head coach.’

  This was all in front of Richard and his dad. I ended up storming out of my own office. Richard, who would later work as head of recruitment for Eddie Howe at AFC Bournemouth, was a great guy but he was never worth what was finally agreed.

  We lurched through January, reinforcements thin on the ground. When once I was talking about bargaining Yaya Toure down a bit from £75,000 a week, I ended up with Hayden Mullins on £16,000, Pompey having paid Reading £1.2 million for him. I worked at getting in a Greek striker from Bayer Leverkusen on a short loan, Theofanis Gekas, but he was on £37,000 a week so I knew we would never take him full time.

  With word out that Portsmouth were now a selling club, calls came in regularly. The final one I took in the madness of that January window came at 30 minutes before the 5pm deadline on Monday 2 February, the period having been extended due to the fact that 31 January fell on a Saturday. It was Mark Hughes, then at Manchester City, enquiring about Peter Crouch. It wasn’t going to happen.

  That night, I went to bed with a headache and the following day, a day off, I just duvet-dived.

  At the end of it, with players like Diarra and Defoe gone, we looked like a side that was going to struggle to compete in the Premier League – though at least the club was still in business, thanks to the sales. For now. I actually confided in a few people close to me that I thought the club might well go out of business soon.

  Our defence of the FA Cup was weak. We won a third-round replay 2-0 at Bristol City after a 0-0 draw at home, but lost in the fourth round 2-0 at home to Swansea, who were then in the Championship. In the league in January, we also lost at home to Aston Villa. The only bright spot was a 1-1 draw at Tottenham. Harry Redknapp’s Tottenham. David Nugent put us ahead – and Jermain Defoe scored the equaliser.

  The final day of the month saw us go to Fulham and lose 3-1. It was a third defeat in a row so it wasn’t entirely surprising. What happened next shocked me far more than the result, however.

  As we got back on the coach afterwards, this one Pompey supporter began screaming abuse at me, calling me every name under the sun. Now, I shouldn’t have let it affect me, especially given all the names I was called as a young player when I was less able to deal with it all, but it did. This was also an exception. The Portsmouth fans had always been great to me and still are to this day.

  I wanted to shout back at him, to tell him that he hadn’t a clue what I’d had to deal with for the last four months. I wanted to tell him what a pantomime the club was becoming with all the chaos behind the scenes. Everyone would come to see it later, but then few knew the extent of what was happening like I did. I guess, given what I was experiencing, I was just getting to the end of my tether and that final weekend of the transfer window was not helping.

  After the Fulham defeat, I took the team to the Forest Mere spa for a few days for us to try to clear our heads. It seemed to have some effect come the Saturday when we led Liverpool 2-1 at home with five minutes to go. Familiar frailties resurfaced, however, and we turned victory into defeat when Dirk Kuyt levelled and Peter Crouch gave the ball away in a dangerous area in the last minute, leading to Fernando Torres grabbing the winner.

  On my drive home, I mulled over the state of the team and the club and decided enough was enough. My belief that I was on to a loser with no chance of turning things around had been confirmed. My reputation was just going to get trashed the longer this went on. Peter had told me in January to hang in there and he would find me some money to get players in but nothing had happened. I knew it was doomed.

  I phoned the agent Steve Kutner to get him to ring Peter to tell him I wanted out. I wanted him to tell Peter that he needed to sack me because I wasn’t going to resign. After Wycombe, I didn’t want to be labelled as a quitter; didn’t want it said that Tony Adams couldn’t hack management. I knew I had it in me to be a good manager at a high level, but not in this dire situation where I had no chance of succeeding. Anyway, Peter had put me in this, so he needed to get me out of it. Also, although it had never been about money, having walked away from Wycombe with nothing, I wanted to be paid some of what I felt I was owed.

  Peter, who, I would later find out, had gone to Sol Campbell and David James to discuss my position, then rang me to ask if I wanted to come down to the club to talk things over. It was Atticus’s fifth birthday party on the Sunday and I told Peter I wasn’t driving to Fratton Park to get the sack and that he should – please – just do it. He agreed and I settled on three months’ salary with him as a severance package.

  The sacking was duly announced. I had been in charge for 21 games in total, winning four, drawing six and losing 11. In the Premier League, we had taken 10 points from 14 games. Not a great return but, given what would follow, it could have been much worse. I knew we were in a relegation fight but we had never gone into the bottom three in my time. Who knows, the 10 points under me might have kept them up that season.

  What I did know was that I had been set up to fail. In view of what was going on behind the scenes – which would culminate in ownership wrangles over the next few years and Pompey subsequently slipping down into League Two, finally to be taken over by the supporters’ trust – I was not going to turn this ship around, whatever I did.

  Paul Hart would be promoted from the academy to caretaker manager, but the job would do him no favours and he lasted till November. Nor would it enhance his successor Avram Grant’s reputation much
, though he did reach the FA Cup final again. Pompey had just enough decent players left to survive that season I went by seven points but it was a stay of execution. The next season they finished bottom with just 19 points, all the higher earners departing, some of them never to get paid.

  Harry rang me to say he thought it was disgraceful that I was sacked before a run of less-demanding games, but that wasn’t the point. Longer term it was going pear-shaped. Only one player rang me to say how sorry he was that I had been sacked and that was the gracious Richard Hughes.

  Later, in the summer, Glen Johnson would text me after his move to Liverpool to thank me for my coaching, which helped develop his career. I would also later meet Fabio Capello, then the England manager, in a box at Arsenal and he would thank me for my work with Glen.

  Other coaches rang me too, including some I had been on my UEFA Pro Licence with. Glenn Roeder, now at Stevenage, reminded me that all the greats had been sacked, most notably around that time Jose Mourinho at Chelsea.

  There were one or two players less kind towards me. David James did an article in one of the Sunday papers saying that I was not a good manager. The dressing room was too quiet, he said, and the team not well enough organised. He discussed a row we had after the Fulham game and added that he never felt we would win against Liverpool, despite leading, as we were too open.

  That all disappointed me not only because he had been quoted in the press a few months earlier welcoming my appointment, but also because he wasn’t seeing the bigger picture, the one outside of his world of being a player. He didn’t know what was really going on in dealings with the hierarchy. And he wouldn’t have seen me working hard with the team on organisation as he was a goalkeeper doing his own training, often away from the group. That said, I don’t blame him really. I could be like that as a player – in my own zone. These days, the evidence of how it went south very quickly is there for all to see and he might have a different perspective.

  Could I have done anything differently? Not taken the job, that’s for sure. Otherwise I did the best I could in the circumstances. Some would say I paid a high price, with that unhappy experience of management being people’s last impression of me in charge of an English club. I am, however, grateful for it. It taught me that I didn’t want to be one of those managers on a roundabout of jobs, going from one to the other just to be in the game and earn money. I wanted to be working at a club where I had a chance of building something over a period of years and could win things, as I had as a player.

  As I watched Portsmouth from afar over the next few years, I could see that their demise was coming. We as professionals could move on, though it was painful for some people after me who wouldn’t get the money they were owed, and I saw several within the club struggling to get jobs afterwards. It was the fans who had enjoyed the thick but who would now be experiencing plenty of thin who would be really suffering.

  And they were lovely fans, their world shattered by financial illiterates who destroyed their club. Some people who thought they could save the club were like those who end up going to Al-Anon – partners of alcoholics who believe they will be the one to get the addict to stop destroying themselves. The George Best story is an example of that.

  I think most of the fans appreciated the job I did for them, but it was all a perfect storm of overspending and mismanagement that would have taken a lot of good people under with it. How to ruin a football club. It left me making a vow to myself that I would never work with idiots again.

  For me, it was actually a relief to be out of the firing line at first, as I headed back to my sanctuary in the Cotswolds and the comfort of my family. Soon the assault to the senses that leaving a club in unhappy circumstances produces would kick in.

  11

  Loyalty

  Being a one-club man as a player has its benefits but also drawbacks. As a player, I was often lauded for my loyalty. It probably ranks alongside leadership as the quality most associated with me and I am often cited as a rare beast, one coming close to extinction in modern football.

  When it comes to wanting to be a coach or a manager, it can work against you. You don’t, after all, have a lot of clubs where you are remembered fondly and knowledge of you as a character, along with your record and reputation, might give you a chance of an interview at least.

  So what is loyalty? In my case, it could have been very different at Arsenal but for circumstances and experiences. I could have begun at another London club, for example, but chose Arsenal because my dad recognised what a good youth set-up they had and I liked the look of their facilities.

  I then stayed with them out of convenience. The training ground was accessible from Essex and I could be near my family. Arsenal liked me and I liked them, and I was too scared to ask for any more money and create waves. I was no trouble to them – on the pitch at least. I guess because we were having success, they put up with the off-field stuff. It meant I could happily indulge my drinking for a long time.

  It felt right; there was nowhere else I wanted to go. And we were successful. It was the same as when I was a kid at Dagenham United. The team scored 140 goals a season and conceded one. Where was I going to go?

  You develop a feeling for your environment and colleagues when you start so young at a club. I was in that class of ’82 with Martin Keown, Michael Thomas, David Rocastle, Niall Quinn, Paul Merson, Gus Caesar and Martin Hayes. We came through to the first team. We looked out for each other. There was also a great working-class, and work, ethic around the club that would be fostered later by George Graham.

  So it wasn’t hard to turn down any Manchester United overtures in 1991. I was simply too young and too scared to leave the comfort zone of Arsenal where I could do the two things I loved best: play football and drink. Although somewhere deep down I would have said that Arsenal was my club, that was masked by the way I was living my life. I think I would have to say I was probably trapped rather than loyal.

  That all changed when I got sober in ’96, when I turned down Manchester United for different reasons. It was then that I got in touch with my true self and my real feelings about the game, my club and my life. I was clear of mind and free of fear.

  Then you can call it loyalty. In fact, over the final six years of my playing career, I became the most loyal man I knew in football. I realised how much I loved the Arsenal and wanted to win things with them.

  At that point the loyalty that can get buried – and sometimes did in my drinking days when I was just acting on instinct rather than being aware of my bonds to colleagues and club – becomes significant, as it did with me.

  I always felt grateful to George Graham and would have run through brick walls for him, but that kind of loyalty was a product of the way I was then, of my upbringing and drive to succeed. I did consider leaving during the brief Bruce Rioch period, and even when Arsène Wenger arrived, as I was sceptical of change. Sobriety, though, is a great precursor to loyalty. Such was the respect that Arsène and I developed for each other that loyalty became natural to both of us.

  So what did loyalty feel like then? It was a sense of wanting to do the right thing by those around me through being the best that I could and using my talents for the good of the collective. It was thanking the football club who made me what I am.

  I never wanted to leave once that became established in me. I felt I would have been letting my team-mates down, primarily David Seaman, Lee Dixon, Steve Bould, Martin Keown and Nigel Winterburn, my fellow defenders with whom I had gone through more than 500 games. Steve and Nigel would leave in the end, but that was because they were being replaced. I don’t doubt they would have stayed on at the Arsenal as I did if they could have done.

  In football, you are obviously not facing the same kind of dangers as a soldier in the SAS, the Marines or other branches of the military, but it is the same principle: you are putting your faith – if not your life, as in the soldier’s case – in the hands of someone close to you and he is putting his in yo
u. You don’t want to renege on your responsibility.

  When you have such an intense attitude, and have been through so much together and seen each other warts and all, the defeats may hurt more but the wins are all the sweeter – which is why you become so determined to avoid the former so you can experience the latter.

  Clearly, as a coach and a manager, I will never know the longevity of loyalty that I did as a player and that Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsène have enjoyed. They are extreme rarities amid the hire-and-fire culture nowadays, and being given the chance to stay at a club for a long period is unlikely ever to come along again.

  All I as a coach or manager can do when fortunate to find employment is bring to bear all the experience and qualities learned through the times when senses were heightened. Such as in those six years at Arsenal after getting sober.

  You are constantly looking to bring your loyalty of service to a group of players, your employers and the club, and hope that, by seeking to instil it, you have a chance of receiving it in return. For many coaches and managers that is a forlorn hope in the dysfunctional world of the modern game, but for your own satisfaction and integrity, you can never give up the search for it.

  At least, whatever may have happened to me in the past during my management career, and whatever may happen in the future, I will feel forever blessed that I got to know intimately what true loyalty is.

  12

  Every Cloud . . .

  Success consists of going from failure to failure

  without loss of enthusiasm.

  SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL

  It took a while of licking wounds after leaving Portsmouth before I was ready to face the world and the game again. Leaving a club amid bitterness attacks every part of your psyche and your self-worth. It is not just the event itself but the aftermath. Players have their say – as I saw with David James – and it feels like your whole character is being examined; your talent and ability dismissed. It is especially difficult when you have had a playing career that has taken you to the top and won you trophies. Even as a coach, I had just won the FA Cup with Portsmouth eight months earlier. That, however, is a long time in football.