Sober

by Tony Adams

  After an anxious three-hour drive back to the capital, I spent a long night in my hotel room worrying about the following day. I phoned my GP in the UK, Dr Anton Borg, and I asked him if I had time to get home to England. He thought it best I stay where I was. I still thought it might be muscular, that maybe I had been overdoing the weights and press-ups. Or that I wasn’t fit enough. Maybe I just wanted to believe that, such was my state of mind.

  When the morning came, I was keen to find out now what was wrong. After some blood tests, I was given an angiogram at 11am. I was tense and confused, but holding it together. Any instruction to keep calm, though, by the Azerbaijani doctor – Dr Uzeyir Rahimov, who had been trained in Turkey and was recommended to me by Samed Nasibov, the Gabala commercial director – had the opposite effect on me.

  Soon, the doctor told me I would be going down to theatre and I grew frightened. Very frightened. He gave me a sedative tablet and I was taken down in a wheelchair. Once there, I was laid on a slab and a camera was pulled above my head and a cannula inserted into my wrist for a drip. Then the camera was inserted through my arm and I could see pictures of it going across the chest. There were two red blotches with a white line, looking like cotton wool, linking the two. I was wondering, in my sedated condition, what the hell was going on. In fact, I was getting tearful.

  Dr Rahimov said he had to leave the room to consult with a colleague. When he came back, he didn’t pull any punches.

  ‘Mr Adams,’ he said in a serious tone. ‘B-e-e-e-e-g problem.’

  ‘Big problem? Oh my God,’ I thought.

  ‘You are a very lucky man,’ he added.

  I didn’t feel that way.

  I can’t remember giving the guy permission, but I must have done, because within minutes, through the same cannula, he was passing in two stents – small mesh tubes that are inflated to open up blocked arteries. That, I now discovered, was the problem: I was getting chest pains because my heart was not getting the blood through that it should have been pumping. In fact, I would find out later, two of the arteries were blocked, one a dangerous 99 per cent and one a barely less dangerous 70 per cent.

  As I would realise when I came round properly and in speaking to people in the coming weeks, I had indeed been a very lucky man.

  The procedure took somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes and I was part-amazed, part-relieved and part-emotional as I watched the screen on which the camera was recording it all. I did what my AA programme taught me to do: I surrendered, said the Serenity Prayer – God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference – and a massive acceptance came over me. I was teary again, but knew now that my fear that I might die was not going to be a reality today.

  Soon, the red blotches had gone and the white area that resembled cotton wool was a red line, which meant that the blood was flowing properly again. And then I was back in a wheelchair being returned to my room, waving the cardiologist goodbye and thanking him.

  As I lay there that evening, being monitored overnight, there came the welcome sight of Poppy appearing through the door. She had taken the 10am flight from Heathrow and looked as if she had been crying the whole way, which she said she had. She, too, was relieved and left me to get some sleep. She needed some herself, now that she knew what was going on.

  In the morning, she was back, helping me to fix up a flight home for the following day, the doctor having given me the go-ahead, along with bottle of tablets. There was no fear of flying any more, just a feeling of gratitude that I could get on that plane and return to my safe Cotswold haven.

  Over the coming weeks, however, something strange would happen to me.

  Everything was fixed, Dr Rahimov told me, and I thanked him profusely. I had nothing to worry about physically. I just needed to sort out a fitness and physio programme with the doctors back home. It might, though, take me a while to get over it psychologically, he added. He would be right.

  Not longer after I got back, Tale Heydarov called me to see how I was. Dr Rahimov had been to see him and shown him a DVD of the procedure.

  ‘The doctor has saved your life, Tony,’ he said. ‘He got to you just in time. He said that if it had been left any longer, you would not be alive.’ I felt grateful, certainly, but was also only too aware of how serious this health scare had been.

  Feeling both thankful and well, I arranged a party two weeks later to celebrate my 49th birthday which had just passed. It was in the Whiteleys shopping centre, in west London, where they had a film theatre that you could hire privately and I did so for 20 of my best mates. It was for the James Bond film that had just come out, Spectre.

  David Seaman, Lee Dixon and Ian Wright were all there and they started asking me about what had just happened to me in Azerbaijan, as it had been in the papers. As I went through the story with them, I suddenly began to feel very emotional, almost overcome. I went to the toilet and there I had a full-scale panic attack. Actually, I thought it was a heart attack, but I calmed down eventually.

  I sat down to watch the film but couldn’t, in my agitation, and so asked Poppy to take me back to the hotel we had booked round the corner. There, I grew anxious again, thinking I was having a heart attack, and at 1am, Poppy by my side, I decided I just had to go to the nearby A&E at St Mary’s, Paddington. There must have been 400 people there. It was not like a private hospital in Baku.

  When I was seen, I was given an electrocardiogram, which showed nothing untoward. My heart rate was raised, along with my blood pressure, but that could have been tension, they said. I could wait to see a doctor, but it might be three or four hours. We resolved to go back to the hotel. If I had a heart attack, I figured, I could do it in comfort and then jump the queue.

  I had no sleep and we drove back to Gloucestershire in the morning. By midday, I was still feeling panicky so Poppy drove me to the A&E at Cirencester. Again, they told me nothing was wrong but it just didn’t feel like it. I rang Dr William McCrea, the cardiologist at the Great Western Hospital in Swindon I had been assigned after coming back from Azerbaijan. He couldn’t see me until 7pm, he said.

  I just wanted to get over there straight away. The paramedics at Cirencester were great and offered to take me over in an ambulance but we didn’t need it. Poppy drove me instead and we were there by 5pm. While, ever supportive, she waited in the car park, I just sat outside his office. I was a mess psychologically and just felt safer there. At 7.30pm he emerged to say he would see me now.

  Dr McCrea is a big Irish guy, who loves his football. He liked to talk about potential candidates for heart attacks among managers. Alex Ferguson was unlikely to have one, he reckoned, because he gets his anger out. Arsène Wenger was more of a possibility as he bottled things up. One of Dr McCrea’s ideas was that red wine helped prevent heart attacks but, since I’d told him my history, he knew better than to suggest that with me.

  Basically, he gave me my marching orders. He told me that the stents had been a success and a straightforward procedure that he himself did 10 times a day. Any heart palpitations were to do with the psychological rather than the physical. Two weeks ago, the danger level for me was nine out of 10; now it was 0.000001. He added that it was time to look after Poppy and the kids and to get on with my life.

  The hospital gave me a physical rehab programme and over the next few weeks I became more confident. I started putting strain on my heart again, running and playing tennis, and felt fine. The palpitations and anxiety attacks had been manifestations of self-imposed stress. My mum and dad had been worriers and here I was, following in their footsteps.

  There were still wobbles now and then, still times when I imagined numbness in my fingers and toes and had to talk myself down from any anxiety, but I largely managed to get on with things and enjoy Christmas at home. Just before then, I went to see Tale, to tell him I was ready to go back out to Gabala.

  Once there in mid-January after the winter break, I worked
with Roman to vet and recruit new players. Results were not great, after the excitement of the autumn Europa League campaign, and there was a thrashing by Qarabag. It was a little frustrating for me as I watched a good defender I had recommended, a Ukrainian by the name of Vitaliy Vernydub, being in and out of the side.

  In the end, the team finished a reasonable third on a budget that had been halved from $5 million to $2.5 million – still double my first couple of seasons. There had been a downturn in the country due to the oil price falling.

  I sensed my time at Gabala had passed. I hosted around 20 friends in the early spring knowing that this would be my final period in the country, taking them on the ‘Tony tour’ of Baku – the Croisette, the old city, the remarkable buildings like the Flames, symbolic of the burning gas the country produced, the streets where the first Azerbaijan Formula One race would take place that summer – and then to Gabala, where the new ski resort was now fully operational and had the wonderful bonus of being quiet so you could ski to your heart’s content.

  I had done what I set out to achieve. I had built a team from nothing and a club from scratch. It had a wonderful training facility now with a decent stadium at its heart. It had reached the group stages of the Europa League and would be having another shot at it the following season.

  I went to see Tale to tell him that it was time for me to move on and he understood. He told me that I could always remain as an adviser to him and Gabala if I wanted and it was a generous offer. His friendship and five years of a remarkable odyssey would not be forgotten that easily, but it was time now to see what else the footballing world held for me.

  16

  Leadership – 2

  One of the main things I discovered in getting sober was that I like people and enjoy working with them to improve both them, hopefully as professionals and people, and myself through our interaction. It has stood me in good stead through 15 years of coaching, management and being a sporting/technical director.

  There are clearly differences between leading men on a football field and creating the environment off it in which they can thrive. For me, leadership on the field of play was all about being focused on one job without distraction. You could be single-minded, without the need to see the bigger picture of what went on around the club. You could also directly influence the outcome of what everyone worked all week for – winning a match.

  As a leader off the field, you have many factors to consider in picking a team and gelling them together, making decisions they may not understand from their own narrow playing perspective. You have to take into account how players complement each other, both in playing ability and temperament, as well as what type of formation will suit them and best counter the opposition at hand and how they set themselves up.

  For that, you also need people in your coaching and technical staff whom you respect for their talent and trust for their support and discretion. The selection and appointment of them is crucial. You don’t just want yes-men. You need people who will be brave enough to challenge your ideas, have input into team matters. After that, they need to support, rather than sulk, if you do not always take their advice. Because you disagree on odd subjects, it doesn’t mean that admiration and co operation can’t flourish.

  The Arsenal club motto of Victoria Concordia Crescit may also have been a code by which I have lived my footballing life, but my interpretation is slightly different from the usual translation. Rather than Victory Through Harmony, I prefer Victory Through Togetherness. Rather than the ideal, the reality is that things are not always going to be harmonious in football clubs, nor should they be if shades of opinion are to be encouraged and embraced, but after any disagreements must come unity.

  Behind all team matters come the elements that fans do not see; the huge underwater part of the iceberg. You have finances to deal with as well as the internal politics and personalities at clubs. You have the demands of owners, shareholders and supporters. And, of course, once players step over that white line, you are powerless. The AA programme is certainly good for showing you that you are simply not in control of events sometimes, and that you can only do your best to prepare for situations and then leave outcomes to play out in the way they are supposed to.

  Of course, there are also similarities between leading on the field and off, and they boil down to whether you have the honesty, character and charisma to win people’s trust and get them to follow you and implement the plan that in your experience will bring results. It is true that people don’t necessarily have to like you, either as a team-mate or a coach, but they do have to respect you. And that respect is earned through you knowing your own job and being good at it, and people working with and for you as a result of seeing that.

  There is a lot of nonsense talked about motivation. Many football fans seem to need to see managers or coaches shouting and screaming as a sign that they are motivating players. There are times when such reactions are understandable, even necessary, but it won’t achieve anything unless the players have been coached properly and understand their jobs.

  There has to be an element of self-motivation in players, as I had when I was a player. You can’t always instil it in people. Finding the right characters is part of the recruiting process for a leader in football. You have to do your homework to discern whether a player has the right mentality to go with his ability.

  To get players really fulfilling their potential is more about giving them the tools to do the job. Good practice makes perfect but bad practice can make permanent, as Terry Venables once said. You are looking to rehearse players through enjoyable repetition so that they repeat the right things as a matter of routine when under pressure. From that, confidence comes. And from that comes success – which is the greatest motivator of all.

  Everybody wants to experience that sweet feeling and will do their utmost to achieve it. It is addictive. Fortunately for a character like me, it is a natural high.

  I like to think that I have become a good judge of character and can tell if people are being honest with me or not. I certainly get a gut feeling with people and, with players for example, whether they are in it for the money – or the location of the club – and acting out of self-interest, or whether they are going to buy into what you are looking to achieve together.

  The story of two bricklayers at work appeals to me . . .

  A man asks the first what he is doing.

  ‘I’m laying bricks,’ says the first, bemused by what sounds like a stupid question.

  The man asks the second bricklayer what he is doing.

  ‘I’m building a house,’ he replies.

  I have always wanted people who see what they are doing as building a house. Your job as the site manager is to create the right environment so that they feel that too.

  It echoes the wisdom of Sir Clive Woodward, the man who coached England to winning the Rugby Union World Cup: you have to get the right characters on the bus with you, he said.

  My spell at Brunel University gave me a feel for the wider elements of the game, including economics and sociology, and I have carried that into my life in football off the pitch. I also feel I learned a lot in my early days of coaching and management about compromise and mediation. Despite what people think, with a manager’s word being the final one, sometimes those are qualities required in dealings inside clubs.

  At Wycombe, for example, we had a new money man come in who eventually became the owner. There was no point resenting his presence and worrying if things might change; you had to work with him to do what was right for the club.

  Then at Portsmouth, I was often the mediator between Harry Redknapp and Joe Jordan. Again, it was a case of working out what was the right thing for the group of players and the club. I think I also learned a lesson then from Harry in knowing when to accept the advice and suggestions of staff, as he did when listening to my input about the FA Cup final team.

  You are basically looking to enable and empower the people who are, when
you get down to basics, going to win you football matches, from which everything stems – the enjoyment of staff and supporters and all the revenue streams that keep the club prosperous. Good results equal bigger crowds and sponsorship. And the more revenue generated, the more you have to spend on the team. It is a virtuous circle, simple in concept but difficult to keep repeating.

  As a leader, you have to be sure that you are able to shoulder the burden of being responsible for the wellbeing of those under you. It often means listening to them, hearing their problems and being their support. Patience is vital. Leaders also need support of their own and I guess I have been fortunate in receiving it from AA and my therapist James West, as well as from my network of AA friends. I have also learned much about dignity and respect, and quiet leadership, from James.

  When you are able to do that well, to empathise with people, it helps you get the best from them. I would cite an example of a player we had in Gabala during my time as sporting director.

  The player concerned found himself out of the team when the coach brought in a new player. Naturally, he resented it, and his reaction was to begin drinking heavily. The feeling grew on his and the coach’s part that the club would just release him when convenient.

  After a while of watching him go further downhill, I sat him down and talked to him. First, I had to listen, to find out what was going on with him. It emerged that he thought he was making a statement, a protest, by drinking and not trying in training.

  I told him that he had to sort himself out and knuckle down, not for the team or the club, but for his own sake. Any protest was going unheard and it was him who was suffering. He might well want to leave the club when his contract was up but, football being a gossipy game, word would get round about him and nobody would want him.