by Tony Adams
I asked for a meeting with Tale and went to Baku near the end of August. Alastair and Fariz were also there. I was angry and gave it to them straight as I looked directly into Tale’s eyes.
‘You have put me in this region without the resources I was promised and you are expecting me to magic up a football club,’ I said. ‘I will stay here but you have got to tell me you are going to support me financially, both in the recruitment of players and the infrastructure of the club.’
Tale looked at me and smiled. ‘No problem, Mr Adams,’ he said.
I asked who I was reporting to and Tale said that Fariz was in charge of administration and budgets and Alastair’s areas of responsibility were marketing and commercial. Alastair’s jaw dropped while the penny dropped with me. It had never been made clear to him or me what the chain of command was. Now I knew who I had to work with, even if Fariz didn’t speak English.
Alastair may have felt undermined but I went away more reassured, and I thought things might improve when a well-respected Azerbaijani footballing figure in Ali Yavash, who had played for and coached Galatasaray in Istanbul – the Azerbaijanis loved Turkish football and the Turks, the languages being similar – was hired to form the academy and become its director. I liked him. He had previously been in charge of scouting and scouring the regions looking for players for the age-group teams and was great at it. Now he was given licence to pull it all together under one roof.
In reality, though, nothing did change over the next couple of months and I was still trying to sort out minor problems. I even had to ask for the kitchen staff at the hotel to start wearing hats as we found hairs in the food. One day, Gary, Daryl, Fariz and I were eating spaghetti Bolognese but it was cold. When we pointed this out, the waiter simply stuck his finger in one of our plates and said that, no, he didn’t think it was.
Then came a funny, ridiculous incident one night when Gary and I sat down to dinner.
The staff had a strange habit of serving both the starter and the main course at the same time, which was amusing at first but grew annoying. On this particular night, it became too much for Gary. He got up, called all the waiting and kitchen staff together and explained to them in English, them looking baffled, how to serve a starter first, then wait before serving a main course. To help them, he even mimed the actions, walking towards the kitchen and back for each course. I could only laugh. It wasn’t embarrassing even though the scene was conducted in the dining room. We were the only ones in it.
Alastair had been wounded after the meeting with Tale, and any effort he made to gain more control was being thwarted. He had no direct line to Tale himself. And I needed him having more of a say if I was going to get things done. Eventually, wasted months later, I would phone the president and tell him as much. It was always best to be up front. In sobriety, that is the only way to be if I am to remain at ease with myself.
I told him that the staff were all looking to Fariz and it meant they were not agreeing to anything I might want done without going through him. I needed my point of contact to be Alastair. Tale agreed and phoned Fariz to tell him that Alastair would now be taking control. At many English clubs, it might have caused considerable friction but Fariz is a lovely man and took it well. He just wanted what was best for Mr Tony and the club, he said, and if that meant him retreating a little, so be it.
The next day, Alastair met with all the staff to tell them the new arrangements. It should have been the start of things changing for the better, but Alastair then made a serious error of judgement – he went on holiday for three weeks to Barbados when he should have been cementing his position and been at my side. It was the action of a man who didn’t understand football and how it worked. In his absence, the staff started going back to Fariz for guidance.
By November of my first season, the players were still in T-shirts because winter kit hadn’t arrived and I was still struggling to train the side every day, given all the problems that needed ironing out. But we were getting some results now, which meant players were beginning to listen to me.
In fact, we were comfortably in mid-table in the 12-team league, which was where Gabala had finished the previous season. We reached the winter break, which spanned a few weeks from mid-December through to early January, in reasonable shape and with things gradually improving off the field as equipment began to arrive and people got paid more regularly. It meant I could go back to England for a family Christmas in a better frame of mind.
Despite the hypnotherapy I’d had earlier in the year – and taking a sleeping pill if I really had no alternative but to do it – my anxiety about flying was never far beneath the surface. Now I had a bit of time on my hands, so thought I would take a leisurely journey overland back to England, picturing myself having some thinking and reading time, enjoying the scenery. With no train service to speak of in Azerbaijan, the idea was that I would have a club driver take me to the Georgian border, then a taxi would ferry me to Istanbul where I would get a train – or rather several – home.
It wouldn’t, of course, work quite like that. In fact, it would turn out to be the most terrifying journey of my life.
The drive from Baku to the Georgian border took seven hours, where I walked through and picked up the taxi, which was an old rust bucket. And I soon discovered that the driver for this leg was somewhat of a nutter. That dawned on me outside the Georgian capital Tbilisi – where I played for England when not long sober in one of Glenn Hoddle’s first games as England manager back in 1996 – when the driver missed the turning for the direction we should have been going in, towards Gori, Stalin’s birthplace.
We found ourselves on a 10-lane motorway going in the wrong direction. After a while, he decided to stop and seek help. And so, when he saw a police car on the hard shoulder, he stopped to get directions. Right in the middle of the motorway. He got out, ran across several lanes of traffic, leaving me in the back with cars whizzing past either side of me, hooting their horns. It was –10°C and snow was falling. I was frozen with cold and fear. Naturally, the police nicked him.
After that, it was another five hours to Batumi, near the Turkish border, and the hotel I had booked. We were now negotiating some narrow mountain passes in the dark, but it didn’t stop the guy overtaking lorries, me covering my eyes, and at times he would only just make it back into our lane as an oncoming car flashed its lights. I asked him to slow down at times but he ignored me. I was grateful to get to the hotel in one piece at 11pm.
The nightmare continued the next day, however, beginning as soon as we hit the Turkish border. There, they already had a record of him being nicked the previous day and they were not going to let him through without paying a fine of $40. Naturally, that fell to me to sort out. Once under way, there was an episode where he cut up a van, whose driver promptly overtook us and stopped, forcing us to brake. A row and even some fisticuffs followed before it calmed down and we carried on. My anxiety levels, already high, were still rising.
We stopped for lunch but he seemed not to enjoy his. When we’d finished, he ushered me out of the place, trying not to pay. I told him I had money and when the staff followed us into the car park, I held out some cash. He just bundled me in the car, however, shouting, ‘Tony Adams, Tony Adams!’ to the staff and sped off. When we got to the hotel a few hours’ drive outside Istanbul for that second night, I ran straight to my room.
The next morning he tried to set off with ice still on the windscreen but I stopped him and went back into the hotel to get hot water. Finally, when we reached central Istanbul, following the hair-raising 1,500 miles and 24 hours of driving time, I leapt out of the car and gave him the $2,000 fee. It seemed a lot but I had never been so happy to pay somebody and would have paid more just for him to go away. So unnerved by the experience was I that I checked into a hotel for a few days to recover my composure before getting on the train back home. I took in Galatasaray v Fenerbahce while there.
When I did make it to the station, from Istanbul it wa
s trains to Bucharest, Budapest, Munich, Paris and London, which took five nights and grew more pleasant as the trains got better the further west I travelled.
Unfortunately, that meant that on the return journey, the trains got worse the further east I travelled. I was not in the happiest of spirits anyway, sad at having to leave the family behind in the New Year after a wonderful couple of weeks with them. This time I was heading for Antalya on the Turkish Mediterranean, where I had agreed the team could do a winter training camp, in sunshine, ahead of the resumption of the second half of the season. Instead of making the long journey across Turkey from Istanbul into Georgia and then Azerbaijan, I could get a driver – a club one this time, rather than some hired wacky racer – down from Istanbul.
The Eurostar to Paris was lovely, as ever, and I then got a good night’s sleep going to Munich. From there to Budapest was not too bad either. I then had a two-hour wait at the station for the connection to Bucharest, when I suddenly began to feel uneasy and unsafe. There seemed to be a few unscrupulous characters around and I saw money and packages changing hands. I decided to stay on the move until my train was ready.
The train to Bucharest was shocking, a real 1930s rattler, and I just couldn’t get any sleep. Near Sofia in Bulgaria, the engine blew up and we were stuck there for six or seven hours. We had been due at the Turkish border at around 2am but we were going to be very late. And I struggled to sleep yet again, finally drifting off at around 6am after 36 hours without any kip.
Suddenly, I was rudely awakened by the sound of hammering at the door of my cabin and loud voices shouting at me. I got out of the bunk bleary-eyed and opened the door, scared stiff, wondering what the hell was going on and what I’d done. I was confronted by a group of armed soldiers shouting and I just raised my hands in the air. One of the soldiers looked me up and down and began to speak more slowly and softly.
‘You are Tony Adams?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I replied, respectfully but worried.
‘Tony Adams. Yes,’ he said. ‘Galatasaray. We beat you Arsenal, UEFA Cup final. Thierry Henry missed penalty. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.’
Never had I minded less being recognised. And it was the only time in my life I was grateful that I had lost a football match.
He apologised for knocking so loudly on the door but I had not answered at first, so deeply asleep was I. He explained politely that we were at the Turkish border and I had to get off the train, pay US$20 for a visa then get back on the train. I was only too happy to do so and obediently followed instructions.
Back in Gabala after a pleasant training camp, the team began to improve in tandem with the solving of problems off the field. It was good also to have Poppy and the kids with me for the February half-term holiday. I had now moved into another hotel, separate from the players, as I felt I needed some distance from them. It wasn’t a problem. New hotels were going up almost by the week in Gabala now.
The way the league was structured meant that after 22 games, at the end of February when everyone had played each other twice, the teams were split into two groups, the top six and the bottom six. All in each group then played each other twice to decide the champions and the two relegation places.
I sensed the mutterings when we finished seventh, two points adrift of the top group, but personally I was not unhappy. It meant that we would have a good chance of winning the second group – we were never going to be relegated as points were carried over – and also that expectations would not be too high for the following season. The disappointment for the club, I think, was that they had recruited Tony Adams and thought they had sent out a message to the rest of the league. They were clearly expecting more. But then they hadn’t taken into account the starting point of the club the previous summer.
Money had gone into the club, yes, but it was on the infrastructure rather than the team, with us filling the squad with younger players. I wrote to the president explaining as much and he accepted it. It was easier for him to do so as he rarely came to games and could be more dispassionate.
In the end, we did win the second group, establishing a league record of 11 clean sheets in a row and 19 in all that season. And so I reckoned we could all be pleased with a first season that had seen the club overcome all sorts of obstacles and take huge strides forward. Crowds had doubled to around 400 and we now had some temporary stands to seat them in.
I made another list – this time of things we had done well and made better. We had improved both the first-team and reserve squads, increasing the number of professionals, and had a proper academy set-up. We also had a marvellous new groundsman in Phil Sharples, who had been with Watford and was going to expand our operation, turning the space from two pitches into six. He was an expert in turf management who had advised a whole host of clubs and tournaments around the world.
We were now one club, instead of a group of teams, and I had implemented many things I’d learned from the Arsenal and from my embryonic coaching and management career. We had a scientific approach to fitness and conditioning, and I had established a gym in the hangar. We had a professional medical department with rehab programmes, scans and physiological analysis of players. We had new kitchens and better food, which meant an improved diet and thus better-conditioned players. I had also introduced a scouting system and the scouting of opposition.
I had managed to get all the players into the main Gilan hotel in the town and we had a proper wage bill and bonus structure. Everyone was being paid on time now. We also had a decent coaches’ room. It sounds like a simple thing but it was hard-won, as with everything from getting the club website sorted to sourcing goalposts, floodlights and mannequins, often from outside the country. Patience and perseverance had paid off.
I was basically trying to turn an amateur club into one with a professional future. I wanted to engender an atmosphere of honesty and respect, of all being in it together. As well as the fans’ forums, I sent the players out into schools and the community to build relationships, and hopefully support, and thus increase attendances.
Above all, I hoped I was building a club based on my own beliefs and what I had learned, both in football and in recovery from my alcoholism, a club that a region could be proud of. There were also nods to the Arsenal amid it all. As well as having the pitch made the same size as Highbury, I had a club rule book based on the one I was handed as a kid when I first became a Gunner. At its heart was the old club mantra that has always stayed with me: ‘Remember who you are, what you are, and who you represent.’
After seven or eight months of frustration and now three or so of thinking I was getting somewhere, I felt I could go home and enjoy my month off before a new pre-season. Naturally, that month went quickly and soon, in the July, I was bringing the Gabala squad over to England for a training camp and some friendlies, staying at a hotel in Elstree. We played matches against Luton Town, St Albans City – as a favour to my co-writer Ian Ridley, who was then chairman there – and Barnet, whose new training ground, the Hive, we also used. It was a great experience for my boys, playing at decent grounds and in front of good crowds.
I was optimistic about the new season when we got back to Gabala – and this time I flew. After that journey from hell with the mad driver, I resolved that I could not go through that again and had gone on a fear of flying course run by Virgin Airways at East Midlands airport. There had also been an episode with the family when I was ashamed of myself and so had resolved to do something about it.
We were going on a skiing holiday and ran into some turbulence. Poppy was sitting with three young children and I was alone on the other side, shaking. She was trying to comfort me.
‘Don’t you feel better at least that we’re all together?’ she asked.
‘I don’t give a fuck what happens to you lot as long as I live,’ I replied. Poppy recalls that I wasn’t even semi-joking.
Later, I would come to love it when we were all together and would take comfort from it. That morning
on the Virgin course, I learned how and why planes stayed in the air, followed by afternoon talks on how to manage anxiety before the course culminated with a 30-minute flight with fellow nervous flyers. It helped me no end and would stand me in good stead for the future.
Now I was looking forward to Poppy and the kids moving permanently out to Baku, where there was an English-speaking school. I was aware, however, that while I had been happy with the way the previous season had ended – as had Tale Heydarov – some around the club were not. They still thought that seventh was a bad finish and failed to understand that, at this stage of the club’s development, I was less focused on results than building a club for the long term. And I considered there had been a remarkable transformation.
It didn’t stop a feeling growing around the place that we would surely be champions in my second season. In fact, the VP Fariz said as much publicly. The wrong messages were being sent out. I was still spending most of my time on the infrastructure, still encountering problems to be solved. I had realised after a month that this was not really a coaching job but a project manager’s job.
We didn’t start well and lost a few matches early on. It led to Tale, possibly receiving input from others around the club, sending me an email saying that he expected better results. I was unhappy with that and wrote to him explaining the situation. The club, the country, was not ready yet for bigger and better players. We needed to sort the stadium and the structure of the club before they would come. It would be a waste of money, anyway. We were still learning to walk but many were impatient to run. I began to think that Alastair may have told them I would be getting them into the Champions League.
The feeling out there seemed to be that we had the biggest budget in the league, but I knew we didn’t. Qarabag, Neftchi Baku, Inter Baku and Lankaran were all paying more. And the place was still a building site. Despite all my work and my explanations, I was concerned the president and the region were losing faith in me. It deepened after an October defeat by a club lower than us in the league.