LITMIR.BIZ

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took place in midweek. On the day of a match, we’d spend hours in the bookies before heading back to Niall’s place for a spicy pizza, which was our regular pre-match meal. His house was a bomb site. I’d regularly walk into his living room and see six or seven blokes lying on the floor in sleeping bags.

      ‘Who the fuck are these, Quinny?’ I’d ask.

      ‘Oh, I dunno. Just some lads who came over last night from Ireland.’

      It was hardly chairman of the board material.

      My Arsenal career had started with a few first-team games here, some second-string games there, but word was starting to spread about me. My life in the limelight had begun a season earlier in the 1985 Guinness Six-aSide tournament, which was a midweek event in Manchester for the First Division’s reserve team players and one or two promising kids. I loved it because the highlights were being shown on the telly.

      We lost in the final but I was in form and picked up blinding reviews whenever I played. I was performing so well that the TV commentator Tony Gubba started banging on about me, saying I was a great prospect. Then Charlie Nicholas did a newspaper interview and claimed I was going to be the next Ian Rush. Suddenly the Arsenal fans were thinking, ‘This kid must be good.’ Everyone else wanted to know what all the fuss was about.

      The only person who wasn’t getting carried away was George. After my debut against City I had to wait until April 1987 before my first full game, and that was a baptism of fire because it was an away game against Wimbledon, or The Crazy Gang as most people liked to call them, they were that loony. In those days they intimidated teams at Plough Lane, their home ground. The dressing-rooms were pokey, and they’d play tricks like swapping the salt for sugar, or leaving logs in the loos, which never flushed properly. It annoyed the big teams like Arsenal who were used to luxury. Then they’d make sure the central heating was on full blast in the away room; that way the opposition always felt knackered before kick-off.

      They were pretty hard on the pitch too. Vinnie Jones was their name player then, but Dennis Wise and John Fashanu could cause some damage. To be fair, they sometimes played a bit of football if they fancied it, but that day we won 2–1 in an eventful game. Vinnie got sent off for smashing into Graham Rix, and I scored my first goal for Arsenal, a header. As it was going in, their midfielder Lawrie Sanchez tried to punch it away, but he only managed to push it into the top corner. I thought, ‘The fucking cheek.’

      I played in another four games as George eased me into the swing of things, but nobody else was handling me with kid gloves. In the next match I played against Man City again, this time at Maine Road, and when we kicked off I ran to the halfway line. I was watching the ball at the other end when City’s centre-half, Mick McCarthy, smashed me right across the face. He didn’t apologise but instead gave me a look that said, ‘You come fucking near me again and I’ll snap you in half.’

      ‘No chance of that,’ I thought. I hardly touched the ball afterwards.

      George changed everything at Arsenal. In his first season, we won the 1986–87 Littlewoods Cup Final, beating Liverpool, 2–1, though I wasn’t involved in the game. At Wembley, Charlie scored both goals, but because he was a bit of a player in the nightclubs, George didn’t want him around. Three games into the 1987–88 season he was dropped and never played again. George later sold him. I was gutted when I heard the news, because he was such a top bloke to be around. I never saw him turn up for training with the hump. Even when things weren’t going well, or the goals weren’t going in, he always had a smile on his face.

      He wasn’t the only one to be shown the door. George could see a lot of the lads were going out on the town, and they weren’t winning anything big, so he decided to make some serious changes. During the 1987–88 season players like David ‘Rocky’ Rocastle, Michael ‘Mickey’ Thomas, Tony Adams and Martin Hayes started to make the first team regularly. I was getting a lot of games too, featuring 17 times and scoring five goals, though over half those appearances came as sub.

      Looking back, it was obvious what George was doing. He wanted to be around young players who could be bossed about. He wanted to put his authority on the team. Seasoned pros like Charlie wouldn’t have fallen in line with his ideas, not in the same way as a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears kids.

      Full-backs Nigel Winterburn of Wimbledon and Stoke’s Lee Dixon joined the club and were followed in June 1988 by centre-half Steve Bould. Apparently, Lee had been at about 30 clubs, but I’d never heard of him before. The team transformation didn’t end with the defence. He also signed striker Alan ‘Smudger’ Smith from Leicester City. All of a sudden we were a really exciting, young side and everyone was thinking, ‘Bloody hell, this could work.’

      We only finished sixth in the League in 1987–88, but the new Arsenal were starting to glue. Rocky, God bless him, was one of the best wingers of his generation. He had everything. He could pass the ball, score goals and take people on. But he was also hard as nails and could really put in a tackle. At the same time he was one of the nicest blokes ever and nobody ever said a bad word about him, which in football was a massive compliment. What a player – he should have played a million times for England and he was Arsenal through and through. When George sold him to Leeds in 1992, he was devastated, it broke his heart. It broke our hearts when he died of cancer in 2001.

      We used to call Mickey Thomas ‘Pebbles’, after the gargling baby in The Flintstones, because you could never understand what he was saying, he always mumbled, but he was an unbelievable player. When it came to training, George rarely let us have five-a-side games, maybe on a Friday if we were lucky. When we did play them, he always sent Mickey inside to get changed. Because he was such a good footballer, Mickey would always take the piss out of the rest of us, and George wasn’t having that. Everything had to be done seriously, or there was no point in doing it at all.

      Centre-half Steve Bould was the best addition to the first-team squad as far as I was concerned, because along with midfielder Perry Groves, who was signed from Colchester in 1986, he became one of my drinking partners at the club. His main talent, apart from being a professional footballer, was eating. Bloody hell, he could put it away. On the way home from away games, there was always a fancy table service on the coach, complete with two waiters. The squad would have a prawn cocktail to start, or maybe some salmon or a soup. Then there was a choice of a roast dinner or pasta for the main course, with an apple pie as dessert. That was followed up with cheese and biscuits. In the meantime, the team would get stuck into the lagers. If we’d won, I’d always grab a couple of crates from the players’ lounge on the way out.

      Bouldy was six foot four and I swear he was hollow. We’d have eating competitions to kill time on the journey and he would win every time. Prawn cocktails, soup, salmon, roast chicken, lasagnes, apple pies, cheese and biscuits – he’d eat the whole menu and then some. Everything was washed down with can after can of lager. By the time the coach pulled into the training ground car park, we’d fall off it. I’d have to call my missus for a lift because I couldn’t drive home, but Bouldy always seemed as fresh as a daisy as he made the journey back to his gaff. He probably stopped for a curry on the way.

      George worked us hard, really hard, and training was a nightmare. On Monday, we’d run in the countryside. On Tuesday, we’d run all morning at Highbury until we were sick. We’d do old-school exercises, like sprinting up and down the terraces and giving piggybacks along the North Bank. Modern-day players wouldn’t stand for it, they’d be crying to their agents every day, but George could get away with it because we were young and keen and not earning huge amounts of money. We didn’t have any power.

      Still, it was like Groundhog Day and I could have told you, to the drill, what I was doing every single day of the week for the first three months of the 1988-89 season. Most of it was based on the defensive side of the game, George was obsessed by it. We would carry out drills where two teams had to keep possession for as long as possible, then we’d work with eight players keeping the ball against two runners.

      In another session, George would set up a back six of John Lukic in goal, Lee Dixon and Nigel Winterburn as full-backs, and Tony and Bouldy as centre-halves, with David O’Leary protecting them in the midfield. A team of 11 players would

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