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by Tony Adams


  The potential for boom and bust, a bit like the old North American Soccer League, along with the poor showing of the national team, may well have been one reason why the Chinese football authorities changed the rules for the 2017 season, with clubs now only able to field three overseas players in the starting line-up, rather than four.

  Come the end of the 2016 season, John Jiang and everybody else at the club was happy enough and the coach got a new contract. I wasn’t quite able to come home for Christmas yet, though. I had a five-hour meeting with John about all his football interests, at the end of which he asked me to go to Granada to prepare a report for him on why I thought his team in Spain was bottom of La Liga and what might be done about it.

  On taking over the club, for which he and his group had paid €37 million, he had said something I liked: ‘You can’t change the direction of the wind but you can take control of the sail.’ It seemed he wanted me to see which way the wind was blowing with a view perhaps to putting a firmer hand on the tiller.

  I felt healthy again. In hindsight, the lesson of my emotional crisis had been not to worry about outcomes but just to play my part in things and see how they worked out. And so I agreed. I still wanted to be a coach, which remains for me the best part of the football business. One of the main reasons I had turned down chances to go on Strictly Come Dancing, despite the money on offer being good, was because I was concerned about not being taken seriously as a football coach after it.

  Being seen as a sporting/technical director or adviser was OK for now, however. And so I took a flat in the beautiful city of Granada, home of the magnificent Alhambra palace, right next to the cathedral and began to attend training, observe and analyse again. The squad was deficient in certain areas and it became my job, certainly during the January transfer window, to use my contacts and advise on recruitment.

  John and his group had bought the club from the Pozzo family, who also owned Watford and Udinese, and Granada’s policy had been based on loans, with the rules on the number allowed at clubs far more relaxed in Spain. It was efficient in many ways, with a club not being lumbered with long contracts, but it meant that players felt like guns for hire and might have little affinity with the club. It was a policy I was charged with reviewing.

  I had to strike a delicate balance. I did not want to interfere with the work of the coach Lucas Alcaraz or to foist players on him, but I had to represent the interests of my Chinese employers, particularly John, and ensure that any players coming in were going to be good enough to help avoid the relegation that would be a serious setback to the Chinese owners.

  While relations were always civilised, there was naturally some friction as I suggested remedies for poor results or players at the right price and quality, but I had to do my job. For the rest of the season, I would just do what was being asked and see where it led, with the Chinese group also looking to purchase other clubs around the world where opportunities might arise.

  By the early spring of 2017, it became clear that after a brief rally, Lucas Alcaraz was not bringing the results John wanted and expected. Indeed, after a home defeat by Valencia in early April that meant Granada had taken just one point from their previous six games, he rang me, including club vice-president Kangning Wang on the conference call.

  I was back in Gloucestershire for a few days, mainly to take in Hector’s birthday, but the trip would be curtailed. By this stage, nine months into the relationship, John trusted me enough to want to make me a vice-president with the DDMC football management company that owned Granada. Now he wanted me to take over the team for the rest of the season.

  And so, early on a Tuesday morning, I found myself on a plane to Spain and by lunchtime was conducting a press conference. The media back home seemed to wonder where the appointment came from, and also had some fun with some of my beloved colourful suits, but it illustrated again the insularity of our game sometimes. I had been working in the game abroad for a long time now, almost going under the radar but building a reputation in the world game.

  Keeping Granada in La Liga was always going to be a monumental task, given that they were seven points adrift of safety with just seven games left, but the idea was that it was just an interim appointment to liven things up at a club that was struggling, until such time as a new sporting director and coach could be recruited, a process I had been involved in. My report to John had been all about giving Granada a new identity, with players on contracts who would feel something for the club, rather than just recruiting guns for hire on loan.

  I got some criticism for talking in my press conference about giving the team a kick up the arse, as if I was just some old English stereotype of a coach, but I knew what I was doing. I had observed the Granada training for months and knew how I could change things technically, blend players.

  It would be good to get the grass under my feet again as a coach, if only for a few games, before taking up whatever challenge John and DDMC had in mind for me next.

  I also liked John’s reasoning for sending me to Spain. ‘You are loyal and trustworthy, Mr Adams,’ he said. ‘That’s why I got you and that’s why I am going to keep you.’ That would do for me. Sobriety had made me only too aware of my defects of character, but it had also got me in touch with the assets that I possessed as well.

  20

  What we are like now . . .

  True ambition is not what we thought it was.

  True ambition is the profound desire

  to live usefully and walk humbly

  under the grace of God.

  As Bill Sees It

  A friend of mine in Alcoholics Anonymous has a dry saying – literally and metaphorically. ‘If I’d known I was going to stay sober this long,’ he says, ‘I wouldn’t have worried so much.’ The fact is, though, as I look back on my clean time, that worry – or, more accurately, self-doubt and vigilance in taking care of my sobriety – is what has kept me off alcohol and living a free life for these past 20 years.

  It may look odd from the outside that this big guy Tony Adams of Arsenal and England suffers from self-doubt, but it is just a part of being human that has to be acknowledged for anyone in recovery from alcoholism. As was that anxiety and depression that beset me around the time of my 50th birthday in October 2016 when I was alone in China. Even those who don’t have the disease of addiction suffer from self-doubt, and when I see seemingly super-confident people in football like Louis van Gaal or Jose Mourinho, I wonder what is going on underneath that. I wonder if, in private, they too endure periods of doubt and depression and who they share those moments with. I am sure they do.

  I remember doing a ‘chair’ – that talk by a speaker to kick off an AA meeting – one night at Tetbury, near my home in Gloucestershire, and feeling a need to share my vulnerability. There were perhaps 12 people there, the usual mixed bag of men and women, from a famous actor to a refuse collector. As I found out early on, the illness is no respecter of gender, status or wealth.

  Before the talk, I went into a toilet for a quiet moment to pray, to the God of my understanding, a Higher Power. I wanted to calm myself as I still get nervous before I give my talk, and I wanted to pray that I might be given the right words to help myself and somebody else in the room. At such times, I try to ask that, ‘Thy will not mine be done.’ It is amazing that sometimes the words that do come out of your mouth do not feel like your own, but that you are a channel for a message that needs to be delivered and heard that night.

  I talked about the doubt, fear and anxiety that can overwhelm me, about how we are all the same, that no one is any better or worse than the next. There is a real power in surrendering, in exposing your flaws and weaknesses. I had been a guy that kept everything in and was trying to do things my way for so long. Actually, to let go of all this stuff and be under the new management of a Higher Power was and still is wonderful. There will always be things, some dark stuff, that I can only reveal to my closest confidant James West, but otherwise at meetings my motto
is: mad, sad or glad – share it. Secrets, they say, keep you sick. Sometimes, I can think I am strange with what goes on in my head but, once I share it, in my experience it loses its power over me.

  The feedback from the meeting was amazing, as it so often is. The actor responded by saying that if someone like myself, who had been at the peak of his profession and so often looked assured in the public eye, could talk about that in a calm, courageous way and get through it, then so could everyone.

  Another guy, who was head of a major corporation, said that he doubted whether he could do his job properly given his worries about hiring and firing. I had similar feelings when I set out in management at Wycombe.

  One of those sometimes funny paradoxes of the AA programme is that you have to surrender to win. That can be difficult for a sportsman or woman to grasp. You are taught never to give in, to show no weakness. But that is your professional life, not your personal one. There is a difference between what I do and who I am. I had to find new attitudes that would not be so self-defeating and lead me back to a drink.

  It can be confusing for everyone and it certainly was for me at first. What will you become if you let go of who you were? You become you, is the answer; what and who you were meant to be. There is a fear, though, of being a shell. You represent a certain type of character to people out there for so long – in my case the tough defender who prompted that chant of ‘Ooh, Ooh Tony Adams’ (along with the ‘There’s Only One Tony Adams’) – that you end up believing that’s who you are.

  It goes back to what I told James: ‘I get drunk and I play football but I don’t know who I am.’ Recovery has been a journey from the head to the heart for me, to quieten the voice in my brain that tells of insecurity and self-loathing and quell the thinking that got me drinking, then to learn to trust my intuition, instincts and feelings. Once you are free of all the mayhem around the drinking, the brain can become a powerful tool – a terrible master but a great servant.

  People often ask me how I have stayed sober for these last 20 years. They find it hard to believe how it can be done and, when I look back, it has been remarkable. The answer is: ‘By the grace of God’ – but that is hard to explain to people, some of them struggling after quitting the drink. There are practical ways of doing it, too.

  It has, I have to say, never been easy – though easier than my previous life – but it has always been simple. That is to say, the programme of Alcoholics Anonymous is a simple one. I stay around people in recovery by going to AA meetings, I read the AA literature and I live the AA life as outlined in the Twelve Steps. Gradually, over the years, that has brought a new mindset and different approach to life. Life is no longer the battleground I perceived it to be and which I made it, even if you can never escape bad times – only learn how to deal with them when they arrive.

  It was James who took me through the Steps and, whenever we met, we would treat our sessions together differently. One would be designated for therapy and the next to work on a Step. Step One is about admitting your powerlessness over alcohol and that your life has become unmanageable. I had to get a dictionary out to go through words like powerlessness and unmanageable. And acceptance.

  One thing I did know was that, during that summer of 1996, I was broken and had no sense of myself. James was practical about the remedy. He got me to write down three examples of my powerlessness over alcohol and the unmanageability it caused – in other words, that once I started drinking I didn’t know where I would end up or the damage I would cause in my own life and to people around me.

  Those examples came to me easily enough, as they do with most alcoholics – in my case, episodes such as smashing up the car and going to prison, falling down steps and getting my head stitched up, and ending up in a urine-soaked bed somewhere. Then I would go back and discuss them with James. Talking them through, gradually my shame would lessen.

  In the early days, I didn’t even know what to wear as I stood there in front of a mirror with a wardrobe full of clothes, such was my lack of confidence as a person. Do black and yellow go? Yellow and red? I used to ring up Steve Jacobs at Arsenal, the guy who was helping Paul Merson with his recovery from gambling addiction and who I was also using for guidance then, and ask him for his advice. He said just to do heads and tails with a coin – and that was how I lived my life for the first six months after giving up drinking. Then I would wear something and think the alternative looked better.

  I was told in meetings that AA was a programme of change, so I would do anything to change. I was that eager to stay off the booze. If I was going out for a walk, say, I would turn left out of my front door instead of right to do something different from the day before. And the more work I did on myself, the more I learned. And the more I kept going to meetings, the more I met great people who could help me.

  There was Frank O, who went off to Tibet and lived as a Buddhist monk for months at a time. I admired him so much for his serenity and calmness. He taught me a lot about prayer and meditation and yoga and breathing. But I was impatient. Sometimes in those days, in fact, I would jump up and do something at home just because I had to. When the gardener came, I would feel guilty and go out and help him, even though I was a professional footballer who needed his rest. It’s a guilt thing too, a bit like having to tidy up the house before the cleaners come so they won’t think badly of you.

  I shared some stuff with Frank about not working hard enough at the prayer and meditation, and said that I was agitated in my work. It was around the time that autumn of ’96 when I came back from injury after quitting the drink and got sent off at Derby County as I was getting in touch with how angry I was.

  ‘Tony, do your job,’ Frank said. ‘That’s what you were put on God’s earth to do. I go to Tibet and I’m in silence for three months. Of course I am going to be better at prayer and meditation than you. But I can’t play football. In time you will get a balance and find your path. You just can’t be totally serene in the job you do.’

  There were so many other pearls of wisdom that I clung on to – and for those who have suggested that AA might be like brainwashing, I describe it more as brain-cleaning. I recall one occasion when I was in so much emotional pain that I was lying in the passage at the house in Putney crying. I rang Robert P, a doctor who was in AA and who was then my sponsor – that is, a person in the AA programme with longer sobriety time than you and who helps you out. ‘Have you read page 449 about acceptance in the Big Book?’ he suggested. And so I did.

  ‘. . . Acceptance is the answer to all my problems today,’ it said. ‘When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing or situation – some fact of my life – unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment.’

  I would never have believed that reading could fix anything. But it did – along with the open-mindedness and willingness to do something I wouldn’t normally do – and it kept me sober for that day.

  Those early days of sobriety were very special but it can’t be denied that life does kick in. It’s said that the good news is that you get your feelings back. And the bad news is that you get your feelings back.

  Fortunately, in my job, I felt a drive and a passion come back as I recovered from injuries. It went hand in hand with the new determination I had in my recovery. As they say, ‘You don’t take a drink even if your arse falls off.’ But there did come a time when the ‘pink cloud’ of relief I felt at giving up drinking disappeared and the realities of life hit home. It happens to all in recovery. And it is why you need the Steps to help you get over these things and take you to the next phase of recovery.

  Step Two is about finding a Higher Power so that our sanity – that is, our health and balanced thinking – returns. I love the book Came to Believe, which AA has put together, containing 50 stories of people who have had spiritual experiences. I identified so much with people who had hit rock bottom –
for me, it was that time in a Romford pub when I could drink no more and was too scared of living, too scared to kill myself – and found that moment of surrender and clarity when it all just clicked.

  I had tried so hard to find a Higher Power in my life but, when I did, it was because I had given up trying – that surrendering to win. I don’t know if it was a God I found – or who found me – but I do know there was a power stronger than me that appeared in my life. This was not about religion but spirituality. Religion, I was told, is for people who don’t want to go to hell. Spirituality is for people who have been there.

  Then Step Three, which talks of the need to turn our lives and our will over to the care of a Higher Power. It sounds difficult but all I had to do was make a decision to do it. I did know that under my own management, my life hadn’t been working out too well, so I decided it couldn’t be any worse with someone or something else having a go.

  I have to admit that sometimes I can forget some of the intricacies of the AA programme when I am not feeling great or things are going badly – though never Step One: that I am an alcoholic who doesn’t drink, one day at a time. It is usually when I am doing things my way instead of the way the God of my understanding has in mind for me. I can occasionally turn the title of the book As Bill Sees It, based on the writings of the organisation’s co-founder, Bill W, into ‘As Tony sees it’.

  But even if I can feel disconnected and I go off path, AA has given me the tools to recognise when and to do something about it. When I stop trying to force events and let God – my Higher Power – take over, the help I need always materialises. He’s never let me down to this day. I remember early on, the Footprints in the Sand poem by Mary Stevenson, given to me by Mandy Jacobs, having a deep effect on me. It tells of a doubting person looking at their life and seeing only one set of footprints at the darkest times. They are actually those of God, carrying the person.

 

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