by Tony Adams
The job in Chongqing, it turned out, was for a sporting director again but with a view to taking over as head coach sometime in the future. The team, John said, could get sucked into a relegation battle this current season, which was halfway through, and he did not want that for me. It was considerate of him and he clearly wanted me to do well.
I was willing to go out there to get my feet under the table and get to know the club, the culture and the league as sporting director until the end of the season in November. Chongqing Lifan had only been formed in 1995 and John seemed to be interested in me repeating what I had done at Gabala in building a club.
In relationships between owners and sporting directors, managers or head coaches, trust and loyalty are paramount and I sensed a connection with John, who had a great zest for life and passion for his business. After Portsmouth and some of the people there, I promised myself I would never again get involved with those who did not feel right to me. John was a serious, and cautious, man. We virtually agreed the deal there and then.
The money would be good but not outrageous, better than I had earned at Portsmouth, but certainly not in the league of Sven-Goran Eriksson and the former Brazil and Chelsea manager Phil Scolari, who were also managing in the Chinese Super League, the former in Shanghai, the latter in Guangzhou. It was an attraction, yes, but not the motivation. Had the money at Arsenal been better I might have had second thoughts, but I was simply always of the opinion that my dad had instilled in me: a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.
I certainly never felt trapped by money or the need to earn it. As a family, we could have downsized if need be and still feed and educate the kids. My own self-worth had never come from money or status or work, even though I had to acknowledge my basic needs and those of the family.
Thus it was the challenge of what was an emerging competition that appealed most, a competition that was beginning to make waves in world football. The Brazilian Hulk joined Sven at Shanghai SIPG from Zenit St Petersburg for a fee of £45 million and a salary reported to be £320,000 a week. Soon the league’s impact would be greater on England, for one, with Sky Sports signing a contract to show live matches – and some big players being targeted.
A week after meeting John, I boarded a train to Paris, where I changed to go to Munich to link up with the Arsenal under-18s, who were having a training camp and friendly there against Bayern. I got as far as Strasbourg when my phone went. It was Ivan to tell me the contract had been agreed. I got off the train, got another one back to Paris and headed home to Gloucestershire where I packed my bags to go to Chongqing.
I rang Kwame Ampadu to say I would not be joining up with him and the under-18s and emailed Andries Jonker, the academy head, on the way home to explain why I would not be seeing out my month’s trial. I apologised, saying that a good opportunity had come up and I hoped he understood. Andries did. He thanked me for my honesty and my fortnight at London Colney and wished me well.
There were people who thought I was doing the wrong thing – Lee Dixon was one who gently told me so – and that I should have stayed at the Arsenal for that year, given the previous failed attempts to get back into the club and that my complicated relationship with Arsène was now a smoother one. Perhaps the manager’s job would come up, they said, with Arsène going past 20 years at the club and into what looked like his final phase as manager.
Also, it would have been a simpler life, with more time to spend with the family. The job might, too, have brought me some recognition at home again – according to the arguments of some – and I would be in the country and available should a manager’s job come up elsewhere.
It was not going to happen, though. It was made clear to me that the under-18s job was not a preparation for bigger things, even if I was inside the club when Arsène departed. Of course I wanted – still want one day – to come back as Arsenal manager, but I don’t think at that time I was seen as management material by the hierarchy at the club, given my CV.
My love of the club, and my relationship with the fans, would always endure. ‘Play for the name on the front of the shirt and people will remember the name on the back,’ I once said and I meant it. That was not going to be a qualification for the job, however. Better, I thought at that time, to be a success in China – since no other English club seemed to want me – to enhance my reputation as a coach, as Arsène himself had done in Japan. I was simply not going to get a decent job in England without having succeeded in a big challenge abroad.
I also liked an adventure and for me the attractions of China were manifold. They wanted profile but they also wanted to build properly, certainly at Chongqing. In fact, the Super League would divide into two: those willing to pay fortunes for immediate impact and those looking to improve their infrastructure and youth development. Being flash was never my way and not the way of most of the Chinese people, and their customs, I would encounter. When I went to a game in Shanghai early on, I didn’t go through some VIP entrance; I went through with the crowd. It is, after all, still the People’s Republic of China.
You can’t be anything but humbled when you know that there are 1.4 billion people in the country. I’m not sure how many of them were watching my first press conference but I was told plenty were. I spoke for five minutes live on TV but didn’t feel intimidated. Once, I would have been terrified but AA has taught me to speak from the heart. It seemed to go down well. I was complimented by club officials and that was gratifying.
And so I settled down into hotel life, dividing my time between the sprawling Chongqing and the now awe-inspiring skyscraper city of Shanghai, where the club also had offices, 1,000 miles and a two-hour flight away, though I still preferred to take the eight-hour train whenever I could. My brief was to analyse the club, observe the team, identify new signings and work in the background to improve it all, ready to challenge the bigger clubs of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou the following season.
It was not quite that simple, though. Life became tough, indeed, as I endured what I can only describe as an emotional crisis. One that would bring me to my knees.
After about a month in China, I began to feel very lonely. There was some AA in Shanghai but none in Chongqing and, much as I spoke to people on the phone, read my literature and shared FaceTime with my therapist James, a sense of gloom began to overtake me. I was not sleeping or eating well and lost a stone in weight, which took me back to my prison weight of 25 years earlier.
I was nearing my 20th AA anniversary of stopping drinking and my 50th birthday and my vulnerability, my mortality, really hit home. It dawned on me now that I was nearer the end of my life than the beginning. I had endured the heart scare and began to think a lot about my great buddy Peter Kay’s relapse and death. He was 52 and we had been sober the same amount of time. I began to get pains in my chest, real or perceived I could not be sure. Alone in a hotel room a long way from home is not a good place to be experiencing these things. At least in Azerbaijan I had around me people I’d appointed.
I sobbed like a baby at times and was beset by panic attacks and bouts of depression. I had never had them before and they came as a huge, overwhelming shock. It was terrifying. I felt paralysed, immobilised, demotivated. There was no pleasure in the small joys of life, like the taste of a meal or a Skype call home. I would sob during the call, wondering what I was doing to the family and ashamed that I couldn’t snap out of it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t want to talk to anyone.
Taking a shower or shaving became a real effort, as did going down from my room to the restaurant in the evening, and I wasn’t even cooking the meal. Often I would have room service, which would mean even greater isolation. I cried a lot alone, dived into AA tapes and tried to cling on to what I had been taught: this too shall pass. But I knew what was happening wasn’t right.
The only respite came on the occasions when I did drag myself to a running machine, when I could check my heart rate on a self-testing kit I had and be reassured the readings were normal. I w
ould also take my blood pressure six times a day. But I couldn’t live my life on a running machine. Poppy asked me on the phone if I felt suicidal or like drinking again. I said I felt neither. Later she would say that when she heard that, she knew then we had some breathing space, at least.
In Azerbaijan, I had knocked at the door of death and didn’t like the experience. My tears came because I wanted to live, because I loved my family, had a good home and job, but still felt so low and didn’t know why. And, after so long sober, drinking simply wasn’t an option. Those with long-term sobriety will understand that, even if people who don’t have a problem with alcohol might not comprehend why anyone wouldn’t just have a drink or two now and then to make them feel better.
But I had learned how to tolerate emotional pain without booze, knew the madness that it brought up in me, knew that it was the first drink that did the damage by leading to more and more and more. I wanted none of that back but did want to be free of this darkness that was stopping me from functioning properly.
By now it was October and familiar echoes of the past were assaulting me too – of how I had left Wycombe and Gabala at this time of year too. They say in AA that FEAR can stand for ‘Face Everything And Recover’. It can also stand for ‘Fuck Everything And Run’. And so, convinced that I would have a heart attack if I stayed, and not able to distinguish between physical pain and emotional, I ran. One Sunday, in my desperation, I got on a plane back to England, thinking I would be safe there, free from panic attacks.
On the Monday, I went to see my cardiologist, Dr McCrea, who told me that my blood pressure and heart were fine. I was just stressed. I went to see my GP, Dr Borg, a lovely man and an Aston Villa fan.
‘Welcome to 50,’ he said. He told me that physically I was in reasonable shape but that I was not immune to a midlife crisis. He thought I might benefit from beta blockers and antidepressants.
I was very wary. In recovery, I had always been careful not to take anything that could be mood-altering and had often thought less of people who went on medication. I didn’t want to swap one flavour of addiction – alcohol – for another, in the form of pills. I’d always believed that I should be feeling what I was supposed to be feeling. Dr Borg insisted that what I would be taking was not addictive, however, and that it was only for the short term to get through a crisis. In fact, the pills could be seen as relapse prevention.
I also checked it out with people I trusted in recovery and one piece of advice stuck with me: ‘If you’ve been in a road accident and you’re bleeding,’ somebody said, ‘you need medical help. You ask to be taken to a hospital, not an AA meeting.’
The benefits of the medication would take a while to kick in. Over the next couple of days, I went out for meals with Poppy and Amber but was still sweating and suffering panic attacks and pains in the chest, which the doctor had told me might be side effects of the pills. As this was still happening at home, with my family around me, it showed me that China was not the reason behind my state. It was simply about me. I needed to go back out there and get on with what I do.
A flight was booked for the Thursday but I just couldn’t face it. Poppy said she would come out to China too and see it through with me, which got me to the airport. Once on the plane, I told the steward I was a nervous flyer and that I was having a panic attack. He said that since the doors were still open, if I really was in such distress, I could get off now but needed to make a decision quickly.
I turned and looked at Poppy.
‘If you were going to get off, you would have done it by now, so let’s go,’ she said.
We did, but it was a scary, scary experience. Waves and waves of panic overcame me, my breathing felt short. I took beta blockers and sleeping pills but got no sleep. Every other hour of the 13-hour flight, I would check my heart and blood pressure readings.
For the first three or four days after we arrived, my condition stayed the same. One night I went out in Shanghai for a meal with Poppy and we had to leave after the starter. There were AA meetings there, with so many expats from America and the UK now working in Shanghai, and I went every day. Bit by bit, my anxiety eased as I met other kindred spirits. The antidepressants probably also began to kick in after about 10 days of taking them and I gradually came to accept that the chest pains worrying me were side effects of the tablets. I even went one whole day without a panic attack.
The time came for me to go up to Beijing for a match and for Poppy to go home. It was tricky but I managed it and was pleased with myself. The panic began to leave me. My head cleared, though I was still on edge, fearful that it could all return.
My son Oliver, now 24, flew out to be with me and we had a precious fortnight together. It was probably good for him to see his dad vulnerable, human, like this, no longer on any pedestal as I might once have been. I was still planning each day, what we would do and where we would go, as I didn’t want to be taken out of a comfort zone I had created for myself. There’s a saying in recovery that if we’re not careful, we get ourselves into a rut and then furnish it.
Then one day, Ollie asked me what we would be doing that day. I answered that we were just going to go with the flow and see what happened. He was pleased. I was relieved. We just walked out of the hotel and found a restaurant instead of me booking one. Over the meal, he wanted to know more about my alcoholism. We spoke about my drinking and he just couldn’t identify with it at all. I was grateful that he couldn’t, especially as he manages bars for a living. He has turned out a pretty cool kid.
After Ollie went back, Poppy returned for a week around my 50th birthday, on 10 October, and we had a wonderful few days in Hong Kong. I had been there twice before, once on that drunken tour with Arsenal, then with England before Euro 96 when I didn’t dare leave my hotel room for fear of getting drunk.
This time I went to an AA meeting and shared what was going on in my life, being grateful that I was coming through a breakdown of some sort without the need to have a drink. I told of the contrast between now and 20 years earlier. Instead of the dentist’s chair, I was sitting in an AA chair.
By November, I felt more like myself and that I had come through the storm.
The sense of impending doom had left me. I started an AA meeting in Chongqing with another expat who was in the fellowship and we would meet once a week. A combination of working my AA programme and accepting that, yes, I did need help in the form of temporary medication had got me back on track, so that I could see what I was supposed to learn from my existential moment, in the process of accepting my mortality.
I had no concern that I would be unable to stop taking the antidepressants. At first, I began to look forward to taking them each evening. They became my security blanket as I knew that I had something that was going to make me feel safe. That feeling of looking forward to taking them left me, though.
I started doing transcendental meditation and I began to read again, now able to concentrate for more than a few seconds. I got into Alan Watts’ The Wisdom of Insecurity, which advanced the idea that the more you try to make yourself secure, the more insecure you become. And the more you let go of things you can’t control, the more spiritually content you become.
I’d known that through my AA programme but, having lost sight of it because of the depression, I was now reintroduced to the concept. Sometimes, you do simply have to concentrate on not taking one drink of alcohol one day at a time and then, once the storm has passed, you find out what you are supposed to learn from the experience.
I also got back to concentrating more fully on my work with Chongqing. My brief was to find ways of improving the infrastructure of the club – the 58,000-capacity stadium, pitches, offices, gym – as well as playing standards. That meant finding the best young players in the district beyond the under-17 and under-19 teams we had, as well as working with the head coach, Chang Woe-Ryong, to offer him my support and advice.
I observed and analysed, watched training, and wrote four reports for John on t
he club and the squad. I advised on recruitment, though Chang said he wanted to wait until the end of the season. Fair enough.
Watching games, I noted that they kept conceding from set plays and met with Chang and a translator. Fortunately, he was open to my input, even though the concept of a sporting director was new to him, and we talked about defensive options. He then implemented new training drills and they didn’t concede again from set pieces for the last few games of the season.
As I worked in the background on budgets and contracts for the following season, which would begin with pre-season training in January ahead of the season starting in early March, the team rallied to finish a reasonable eighth in what was becoming an extremely competitive league. Indeed, the Chinese told me they were the England of Asian football – a wealthy and entertaining domestic league but a poor national team.
Just how wealthy would become clear when some of the teams began throwing silly money about ahead of the 2017 season. Even the second tier team Shenzhen got in on the act, recruiting Sven-Goran Eriksson after he had been sacked by Shanghai SIPG. They had finished third but that was apparently not good enough.
SIPG then recruited Oscar from Chelsea for £52 million and their city rivals Shanghai Shenhua signed Carlos Tevez for £71 million from Boca Juniors. They were both reported to be on around £600,000 a week, a sum that also turned the head of Chelsea’s Diego Costa when an unnamed Chinese club reportedly came in for in.
It was all a bit crazy and not the way we were doing things at Chongqing. Our overseas starting players were more modest but solid. We had a Brazilian striker with a good attitude in Alan Kardec, whom the owner suggested and I vetted, another attacking Brazilian in Fernandinho and a Croatian defender who would keep you up in Goran Milovic.