Tony Adams: My life? It could have gone either way
NEW CHAPTER: In his latest autobiography, former Arsenal and England footballer Tony Adams looks back on 1996, a transformative year for him, both on and off the pitch. Pic: Tom Jenkins/Getty
As Arsenal prepare for the biggest game of their biggest season for over 20 years, it is it is worth listening to the man who led them to three league titles over three decades, whose story never fails to fascinate, and who is still celebrated as one of the Gunners' all-time greats.
Tony Adams was Arsenal's captain when they ended an 18-year wait to lift the old English League Championship in 1989, and went on to win three more titles, including the League and FA Cup double twice, in a glittering career that included 672 games for Arsenal and 66 caps for England Neither Arsene Wenger nor George Graham could boast that longevity of success, yet by his own admission, Adams' career – indeed his life – might have come to an end in 1996, a transformative year for him, and the subject of his latest autobiography.
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“1996 – Reflections on the Year that changed my Life” tells two stories, on and off the football pitch, which are inextricably intertwined. On the pitch, he captained England to the brink of glory in a home European Championship, welcomed the arrival of Arsene Wenger at Arsenal, and recovered from persistent injuries to begin a new, more successful period of his 19-year career at the club.
But off the field, his life was carnage. His first marriage fell apart as his ex-wife went into rehab, his children were taken away from him when his alcoholism got out of control and, after a 44-day bender following England's Euro 96 semi-final defeat to Germany, he finally hit rock bottom, the point at which addicts recognise they can go no lower, and need to seek help.
He talks with unnerving candour in person and in the book, written in collaboration with Ian Ridley, the sportswriter, his old friend and fellow recovering alcoholic.
When he sits down with the Irish Examiner at a book signing in London earlier this week, he is articulate, gracious and funny, in stark contrast to the contempt with which he would treat us as reporters in the first part of his playing career. 1966, the year of his birth, marked the zenith of English football when Alf Ramsey's team won the World Cup, something Thomas Tuchel is hoping to emulate this summer. So 1996, when they almost won a major tournament again, with Adams as captain, marks a mid-point for the country's football fortunes, but that is nothing compared to his own transformation, on and off the pitch.
Up to then, Adams greatest achievement had been winning the league with Arsenal in the final minutes of the 1988-89 season, when they went to Anfield knowing they had to beat Liverpool to pip Kenny Dalglish's side to the title. That they did it when Micky Thomas scored the winner in the dying minutes is the stuff of legends, the greatest finale to an English season bar none, even more dramatic than Manchester City's Aguero moment in 2012.
While many see Arsenal's game at the Eithad this Sunday as definitive, Adams says victory or defeat will not be as definitive as it was in 1989. “It's very different now. It's great if Arsenal win but it doesn't matter if they lose. It's kind of irrelevant to get over the line.
For us, the Anfield game was our last game of the season. We'd really struggled, drawing with Wimbledon and Derby at home, so it was a little bit more free away from home,.
“I''m kind of grateful that Liverpool was the last game of the season, not in the two or three beforehand, because it was like an all or nothing situation and we made up our minds just to go and do it.”
Mikel Arteta was criticised for taking a negative approach at City two years ago, when a goalless draw ultimately cost Arsenal the title, but Adams thinks they might just make it this time. “They're going through their own experiences and I'm sure they'll come through.Whatever will be, will be.”
He also says a difference in 89 was that half of Graham's side had Arsenal in their veins and had already won a trophy.
“I don't think we would even got that first title if we hadn't won the League Cup in 1987. We were just cocky kids, six of us from the youth team, all used to winning stuff at under 21s, under 18s, under 17s, you know.
“George made me captain and used to say: 'He's 21, lifting all these trophies' as if it was completely normal. It was not arrogance of youth but the confidence of the kids in that generation. We were used to winning stuff and we wanted to win stuff. So good luck to the guys this time.”
As Adams approaches his 60th birthday, he has a different perspective on success. As a recovering addict, each dry day is a minor triumph, and he has used his well-told tale of recovery to inspire others, setting up the Sporting Chance charity for fellow addicts from the world of sport, and taking the lead in a host of other initiatives.
He had written two previous books with Ridley. Addicted in 1998 charted his downfall and turning point, Sober, written ten years later recounted his life after football, and this is the encapsulation of one transformative year. “I think I needed to document it, hopefully change some lives, and working with Ian's always a joy. After Addicted and Sober, I wanted to do the last one. I always joke that if I relapsed, it would have been called Shitfaced! But thank God I haven't, and it's called 1996, and it did change my life that year.
“It could have gone either way, and I'm just so pleased that it turned out for the good. This is a celebration, a book about recovery and about a life saved rather than another one lost.
Some of the fresh revelations in this book are hair-raising. He talks about a tough childhood, his paternal grandfather's violent drunken rages, and while his own late father Alex steered away from drink, he also repressed his emotions, something he passed on to his son.
“I was a small nervous child who was bullied at school and had panic attacks, but never spoke about it. My Dad was working on the docks. He'd have said “Get a job.” I suppressed it, and that is where the drinking came from I think. Looking back years later, I realised I didn't have a drink problem, I had a me problem. I hated myself.
“My trauma was accumulated by my actions over the 12 years of drinking, all the blackouts and the guilt and the shame. My only solution was to drink again, so I got in that cycle, and I crossed the line.”
He was sentenced in 1991 to four months in Chelmsford jail for crashing his car drunkenly into a house at 85mph, a personal nadir, but the says: “There was no education in prison, no-one said, ‘Do you think you’ve got a problem with alcohol?’
“Now it's different for players. There's education at clubs, and my charity's been doing education seminars for the last 26 years, and hopefully we've made some progress there. But it seems to me that those addicts who cross the line like me, I think they've swapped their drug of choice.
“It's like swapping deckchairs on the Titanic. Players might be fixing on alcohol, all of a sudden they think, 'I can't do that, I've got a game at the weekend, I'll get on my phone and start gambling and stuff'. And porn as well. For the addict, it's dodgy territory.”
Adams had his sliding doors moment in 1996, but he prefers not to think about it. “Start to analyse and paralyse, as we say at AA. My journey? It is what it is, it was what it was, and I'm here today, a very grateful human being to have gone through that.”
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