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by Tony Adams


  It was also hurtful to receive a call from Harry Redknapp accusing me of leaking stuff to the press. My co-writer on this book, Ian Ridley, was at the time the chief football writer for the Mail on Sunday and he wrote a column defending me and my time at Portsmouth, saying that I had inherited a sinking ship from Harry due to all the excessive spending at the club. Harry thought I had put Ian up to it but I hadn’t – he had written it off his own bat. Ian also got a call from Harry, but he was big enough to fight his own battles, as was I.

  The thing is, I could easily have leaked. I know how football and the media work. I could have done interviews, or rung up journalists, and given my side of events, blaming others. That’s not my style, though. I have never played the media or public relations game. I prefer to walk with dignity. I felt clean with my role in matters, and other people could make their own judgements.

  The time to set the record straight is – such as now – later, in the cold light of day when cooler analysis can be made. Then, Portsmouth Football Club was a shipwreck but people couldn’t see the causes because it was going on out at sea, and so many must have thought it was the captain’s fault, rather than the boat not being seaworthy.

  I coped with any feelings of rejection or pain the way I always do: I went to AA meetings and shared how I felt, without going into the specifics of what I did for a living or the personalities involved, knowing that to do so would help me process it better and not to do so would lead to the feelings festering in me. That way, for an alcoholic, can lie a drink.

  For recovering alcoholics, emotions and reactions can be extreme. If I am not careful, my head can run away with me and I can see myself as the worst in the world at my job, destined to drink again and die on the streets. Or I think that I am better than everyone else and they can’t see it, that I should be managing a Champions League club. The answer is to get it all in perspective. Somewhere between two extremes you can live.

  Also, I took solace in my assured belief that there simply wasn’t much more I could have done. As a player, when I had had a bad game, I would look in depth at how I could have done better. That’s what separates the good pros from the also-rans. Doing that again now, while I might have made a different decision here or there, mostly what I could see was a set of mitigating circumstances. In coaching and management, it is not always about ability. It can also be about being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  I didn’t want to dive straight back into the game but I knew that I had unfinished business. After a few weeks of soul-searching, I went into action, as the AA programme suggests, and started to make some calls to people to see where I might fit in. When the summer came, the job as manager of Celtic, in succession to Gordon Strachan, came up.

  I received a call from a Dutch journalist I had got to know from my time both at Arsenal and Feyenoord, Marcel van der Kraan. He told me that Wim Jansen, with whom I had got on well at Feyenoord in his role as an adviser to the club, had been approached by Celtic to go back there. Walter Smith had not long returned to Rangers and it seemed to have planted a seed with Celtic that maybe they could get back a successful manager of their own, as Wim had been in the late nineties, to recreate the past.

  Wim turned them down, Marcel said, but he would go back as a technical director if he could work with a young head coach like Tony Adams. Would I be interested in going there with Wim? Yes, I said to Marcel, if Wim wanted to call me.

  A day or two later I was making a personal appearance at a press conference on behalf of Nationwide Building Society, sponsors of the England team, ahead of a Wembley international. It was at Nationwide’s headquarters in Swindon, not too far from where I lived, so it seemed like a good idea at the time.

  I was asked about whether I would be going back into management and talked about the Celtic job and the interest there. That’s the way I am. If asked a question, I am going to be honest and open. Of course, that was not going to be the end of the matter.

  The next thing I knew, Celtic were denying the story and Wim was refusing to comment. I was disappointed with that. He could have backed me up. There was also an article in the Daily Telegraph by Paul Hayward suggesting I had gone a bit strange and must be hearing voices in my head. It was odd, because I respected Paul, who was a good writer and a good man, and so I got hold of a number for him. I asked him if he would meet me for a cup of tea.

  He agreed and so we talked it through. He admitted that his piece had been a bit wide of the mark and said he would like to write another, based on our meeting, redressing the balance. I wasn’t after that, I said. I just wanted him to meet me to see what I am really like. Let’s be men and move on, I added.

  Actually, Paul did write an article, this time from knowing me a bit better, and it was a fair piece. In years to come, I would even include it in my CV so that people might not judge me just on Wycombe and the Portsmouth mess.

  After that episode, nothing really appealed as the 2009/10 season approached, even though I might have wanted to show people – and myself – that I could succeed at being a manager or head coach. I wanted to keep active, though. I’d been out of work after leaving Wycombe and Feyenoord, and I didn’t want to get bored.

  And so I looked to further my coaching education and took myself off on a road trip to Milan, where Jose Mourinho had agreed to see me. He was manager of Internazionale at the time and he gave me access-all-areas and was charm itself, open and honest.

  I also had lunch with Patrick Vieira to catch up on things and we agreed that the 1998/99 side – unfortunate to find our nemesis in a treble-winning Manchester United that season – should have gone on to achieve more than win the double and reach a UEFA Cup final in subsequent seasons. We also agreed that side laid the groundwork for the Invincibles.

  While there I met up too with Alex Manninger, then playing in nearby Turin for Juventus; and I recall Jamie Redknapp also being around the Inter training ground, needing a bit of help, in fact, to get in with a film crew for a Sky programme he was making about trying to take a player and turn him into a superstar.

  It was interesting watching Jose work on the training ground. I thought he would be at the side of the pitch letting his coaches work. But he was very much hands-on, and he knew his stuff, empathising with players – among them Sulley Muntari, who I’d had at Portsmouth – in a way that was unusual for someone who had not played at the highest level. He had complete control of the group with his understanding of the game. It was easy to see why players loved him and why he has been a success everywhere he has gone.

  He said to me: ‘Tony, you have got a lot of catching up to do. I was watching van Gaal and Robson 25 years ago. Your playing career has got in your way of being a coach. You are going to have to give it a lot of time and learning.’

  I also talked to him about handling maverick players, Mario Balotelli being at Inter at the time. It was simple, he said: I tolerate him when he is scoring goals and playing well, I don’t when he is not. You cannot let players drag down your squad, Jose continued. If they are not going to give the team energy, you let them go.

  The way to get such players on board, he said, was to go to their close family and friends and seek their help in keeping him on the straight and narrow. The problem was, Jose added, there was even less stability among Balotelli’s support network.

  When I got home and took stock, I came to realise that autumn that after Wycombe and Portsmouth, I had become a bit disillusioned with the UK. And I was realistic about where I stood. No big Premier League club was going to touch me after what had happened at Pompey. Actually, no Premier League club full stop was going to. I didn’t want to go back to being a number two and I didn’t want to go back to the lower leagues. The only place I hadn’t worked was the Championship. That, in my thinking at the time, was a possibility. I kept my ear to the ground, went to watch a few matches.

  I was running out of options, though. Here I was, seven years down the line in coaching, and I wanted a number one’s j
ob at a club that had money and a chance of winning, with a chairman I could work with and who would give me time. It was, in hindsight, no wonder I was running out of options, given those criteria – which are sadly all too rare in the cut-throat environment that is the Championship, where most clubs have revolving doors on the manager’s office. And also given that those criteria form the wish list for pretty much every manager.

  Added to that, I had to consider whether it was going to be worth moving the family up to Blackburn or Bolton or Burnley for a salary of £100,000 and a job that might last just nine months. And one that would involve plenty of abuse in those nine months.

  And so I stayed patient and waited for an opportunity. I was in no rush, partly because by now Poppy was pregnant with our third child together, whom we would name Iris when she was born in the February of 2010. I wanted to support Poppy and also spend plenty of time with her and our new daughter.

  I continued to watch games and do the odd bit of TV work, then received a strange phone call just around the time Iris was born. It came from Gary Stevens, the former Tottenham full-back I had known from England squads. He asked what I was doing these days and I told him that I was enjoying life: spending time with the family, working with Sporting Chance, going to therapy and AA meetings, saying yes to charity functions now I had the time and just trying to keep an interest in the game. I was indeed enjoying life, though I had to admit I was still unfulfilled professionally.

  We talked about the state of the game and how it was spitting out coaches and managers. It was a long conversation. But even so, we both agreed that we would like to get back into the game, though there seemed to be little out there, with so many unemployed coaches going for so few jobs. Gary seemed more desperate than I was to be involved again.

  ‘If you do get a job,’ he said, ‘I’d love to be your assistant.’ I said I would bear it in mind, and I put the phone down wondering why I had had a call like that out of the blue.

  A couple of months later I had another call, this time from an agent who dealt mainly in lower-league players and with whom I had come into contact when I was manager at Wycombe. I had known Lorenzo Paolo for a while, as he had worked with Steve Kutner before branching out on his own. Our paths crossed again in a Frankie and Benny’s restaurant next to Oxford United’s Kassam Stadium, where I was scouting a reserve game for any potential players I might recruit. Glamorous life, football. As it happened, I didn’t take any players from him but we had exchanged details after he had reintroduced himself to me.

  Now he was asking me where I was. I was a bit taken aback. ‘In London,’ I said, having just come out of a lunchtime AA meeting on Piccadilly. ‘Great,’ he replied and said he would meet me in a coffee shop nearby. I was intrigued.

  ‘Tone,’ he said when we got together. ‘How do you fancy Azerbaijan?’ How did I fancy it? How could I say? I had never even heard of it. I told him I was open-minded, though.

  ‘Well,’ Lorenzo added, ‘I know this bloke I used to have dealings with at Bournemouth when he was chief executive there. Name of Alastair Saverimutto. He’s trying to build a club out in Azerbaijan, a club called FK Gabala, and he needs a head coach. Let me fix up a meeting with him and the club’s top brass.’

  I was curious and went away to do some homework, finding out that Azerbaijan was a former Soviet Republic with a population of around eight million, situated on the Caspian Sea between Russia and Georgia to the north and Iran to the south. Gabala was a town in the north of the country, the football club founded just five years earlier, in 2005.

  A week or so later, I found myself, along with Lorenzo, in a meeting in London in Queen Anne’s Gate, the headquarters of The European Azerbaijan Society (TEAS). Alastair, a smooth-talking guy aged around 40, told me about the Gabala club, which needed building up from the grass roots – the team, the club and the facilities. There would, he added, be ample resources available to do it.

  I would soon come to see that the defining characteristic of Alastair, who had been a Premiership rugby union player and also commercial manager at Everton, was his salesmanship. He was so enthusiastic about the project (and while I don’t like to use that word when it comes to football clubs, this was most definitely a project). It was a great little club with a young owner, he added, and he wanted to get me into a meeting with the guy.

  Alastair pointed out that I was a manager out of work – though I hardly needed reminding – and that this was a brilliant opportunity for someone young like me in need of a new start in coaching and management. They had, he said, considered a couple of more senior figures, in Terry Venables and Sven-Goran Eriksson. However, Terry seemed to want to do the job by Skype, he added, and Sven wanted a £4 million salary before he would even go to the country.

  I suspected Alastair was joking and doubted that Terry had even entertained the idea – though the Sven statement may have had a grain of truth – but what appealed to me was his assertion that they really wanted a younger man who would throw himself into the job. I was willing to do that, and I especially liked the idea of building a club from scratch, far from the madding crowd, where I could get on with my apprenticeship in management in peace.

  At this point, we were joined at the large table by two men, who turned out to be Tale Heydarov, the Gabala club president, and his right-hand man, Fariz Najafov, vice president and a national sporting celebrity, having been seven-times Shotokan World Karate champion.

  Tale was then just 25 years old. A well-dressed young man, he spoke excellent English, unlike Fariz who smiled and observed, and who I thought at the time was his security man. Tale was clearly well educated and I would discover later that he had been to the London School of Economics. He came across as sincere and respectful. I liked him.

  ‘Thank you for seeing us, Mr Adams,’ Tale said. I’m not sure many club owners would have said that. Normally you were expected to be grateful to them.

  He told me about the Gabala region, where he was born, the town having a population of around 25,000 but with 90,000 in the surrounding area. He showed me the drawings for a 25,000-seater stadium with a training complex adjacent to it. There were plans also for a ski resort, new hotels and an international airport to be built there. It was a fantastic presentation.

  ‘We need someone young and passionate to build the football club and Alastair tells me you are the man to do it, Mr Adams,’ he said. ‘Come and help us.’ It was nice to hear.

  I asked some football questions, about the standard of the league and the players they had at Gabala – and also about the playing budget. At this point Tale turned to Fariz and I realised then that Fariz was more than the president’s security man. Actually, he knew more about the club itself than Tale did, I would soon discover. It turned out the playing budget would be US $1 million, then about that of a lower Division Two club or mid-table National League (formerly Conference) club, but not bad for Azerbaijan.

  Having had the experience of working with Sacha Gaydamak and Peter Storrie, and seen their fancy drawings and plans for training grounds and stadiums, I still needed some convincing. Not only did I need to think about it, I wanted to get out there and find out for myself, I told them, whether or not it could be done.

  This time, I was determined not to do anything without Poppy’s agreement, having learned my lesson from the Portsmouth episode. When I got back home that night, we talked it through and made arrangements to go out to Azerbaijan together. She could help me through my fear of flying as well.

  Knowing that I had a six-hour flight ahead of me, I went to see a hypnotherapist in South Kensington for some tips. He had me tapping the pressure points around my head and face to try to reduce tension and told me to use that technique on the flight. It must have worked to some extent as I would get on the plane, but I must have gone to the toilet 10 times, so nervous was I.

  We had to wait a few weeks, mind, due to the intervention of the ash cloud caused by the eruption of that Icelandic volcano, Eyjaf jallajokull
. We even went to Manchester to try to get a flight, in the middle of the Conservative Party Conference, without any luck. At least it gave me more time to do further research on Gabala, Azerbaijan, Alastair, Tale and Fariz. Along with Gary Stevens.

  I had smiled when Alastair suggested Gary as my assistant. Gary had obviously known more than I did when he phoned me that time. It turned out that Gary and Alastair had met each other at an England Under-21 game that had taken place at Bournemouth, when they’d been introduced by a mutual acquaintance, as they shared the same lawyer. Clearly, I had been in the club’s thoughts for a couple of months, even if Lorenzo Paolo had joked that Adams had come up first alphabetically in their search. I was happy with Gary, and all of the people I might be working with, in fact.

  The trip was, as might have been expected, an eye-opener.

  The capital Baku – with its five million inhabitants who thus accounted for more than half of the nation’s population – was developing fast on the back of oil and gas reserves from the Caspian, with the country keeping its own wealth since the break-up of the old Soviet Union in the early 1990s, though of course there were trade deals in place. Elegant buildings were going up all over the place. It was a Muslim state but a relaxed one. Due to its comparative sophistication, Baku, indeed, had always been something of a playground for old Russians with wealth able to travel. With its sweeping promenade emulating La Croisette, it had been described as the Cannes of the region.

 

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