Post by QPR Report on Dec 22, 2008 7:34:43 GMT
Glad he's not manager of QPR. And Portsmouth fans might be wondering why he's manager of Portsmouth 
Guardian Amy Lawrence Big interview
My job is just brutalTony Adams knows that time and statistics are not on his side in his job as Portsmouth manager, but believes he has made all the right moves to rise to the challenge.
Tony Adams appears not to have settled in too comfortably in his new office. His room, inside one of the temporary cabins that make up Portsmouth's training facility, is so spartan there is next to nothing to show that this is the think tank of the most important person at the football club. Where are the notebooks, the videos, the correspondence? The desk does not look used. On it is a landline telephone he claims he never answers. When it buzzes he picks up the receiver and yells: "Go away!"
On the pinboard behind him is the only personal touch on view in Adams's working space. He has ripped a page from a magazine that illustrates the terrifying statistics about managerial sackings. "The average tenure of a club is 1.53 years," he reads, wincing. "There were 34 dismissals in 2007-08. There have been 601 dismissals over the last 15 years. Puts it in perspective, doesn't it?" Adams flashes a knowing smile. The next day, those figures need to be amended. Paul Ince's number is up.
After a morning on the training ground, Adams has his tracksuit on. The hassles of management have not aged him yet and he still looks young, lean and strong enough to determinedly thump the ball away from a lurking striker. If you did not know that he suffered from acute back pain as a consequence of 22 years putting his body on the line for Arsenal and England, you could still mistake him for a current player.
Convincing people you are something different, that you are ready to be a boss, is not easy. And in Adams's case there is an extra dimension. Perhaps it is the fact we all know he is a vulnerable soul who went through a personality change in a very public arena when he confronted his alcoholism. There is something about him that makes you wonder whether he is cut out for the hothouse of football management. Is he too pensive now?
Has he moved too far away from the traditionally macho vocabulary of the dressing room? Adams laughs out loud as he recalls how Jamie Redknapp summed up his new mode of communication by saying: "Tony used to be a cockney but I ain't got a clue what he is now."
In answer to people who think he quotes poetry to his players, he promises he can eff and blind and give as good a bollocking now as he ever did as a captain.
As Roy Keane and Ince have discovered this season, it is tough for a lauded footballer, and leader of his peers, to reinvent himself as a manager. "What I am doing now is brutal," Adams says. "Let's be honest. Already this season the wolves have been at Keane's door, at Incey's door, and next week they will be here. It really is brutal."
Adams is concerned the modern football environment might just cull an entire generation of managers before they have had the chance to grow into the job. "That it the danger," he says. "It has happened before. Glenn Hoddle is probably one of the best technical coaches in the country. Top, top guy. I think he got the England job too early - he was 38 when he was managing England. We had our differences, but I still respect him and think he was excellent. From Glenn's generation Bryan Robson and Peter Reid have been marginalised. They have been chewed up and spat out.
"Certainly for players who have a career behind them, you get judged extremely quickly. You get chewed up fast. It is not conducive for development in this country. Not at all.'
Adams starts to reminisce about how he was able to learn how to be a player away from the spotlight. He recalls graduating from schoolboy, youth and reserve-team football, even making a handful of appearances for the first team, all without much fuss. "Until I was ever-present at the age of 20, I don't think anyone outside the club knew anything about me. It was all free learning. Until you were playing regularly as an Arsenal player, you weren't judged. Going into management is completely different. You still have to learn the job but... bang! It's on you.
"You need to develop a thick skin. I take a lot of pressure and shift it out the window. I've got people I talk to. I've been working with a psychologist, and for 12 years I have been working with what some people call a psychotherapist. I call him my mate. It is best to throw pressure away."
He evidently finds it easier to let go than his wife, who keeps a 'grudge book' in which she notes down all the people who have said nasty things about her husband's job. "She's going to take revenge!" Adams says, like a cartoon villain.
"I am going to stop her coming to games now. It's just too much to have two people in the household all over the place. It's all right just me coming home when we've had a bad result, but you do need someone who is emotionally stable in the house. We don't need two of us plotting our revenge on Mr X who has written a bad thing about me."
So how thick is your skin just now, Tony? He pauses. "It hurts when I hear things like: whatever I do it's Harry's team. Then if we do poorly it's my team all of a sudden. The whole self-esteem thing has to be right up there. I have always struggled with that, but in the last few years it has grown. My skin is quite thick now."
Adams has not yet been on the receiving end of abuse from the supporters. In fact he was amazed by the encouragement that came readily to Pompey fans, even when they were getting whipped 3-0 at home by Newcastle last weekend. Considering how it is increasingly common to hear fans booing their own in the Premier League these days, he is quite right to describe Portsmouth's cheerleaders as remarkable.
Adams approves of the police intervention that has identified some of those responsible for aiming offensive chants at Sol Campbell. "That is just not acceptable. You have to get the ringleaders. People follow the main men like sheep, and if you get the main culprits you've got a chance of dealing with it. You have to remember that most fans love to come in and cheer on the team they love. But people join the pack. The feature on Match of the Day 2 about the blind fan was insightful. He couldn't even see but because some other people were shouting, 'Get him off' he shouted, 'GET HIM OFF! HE'S RUBBISH!'"
Adams observes that fans have changed radically and are much more demanding in terms of expectations than when he was starting out at Arsenal. "I remember we lost 4-0 away from home at Maine Road in the 80s, and our fans did the conga around the stand. There were 22,000 hardcore, week in, week out. They are still going, just because it's the Arsenal and they love to go every weekend, but I think the club has accumulated quite a lot of [he chooses the word carefully] consumers, who if the steak-and-kidney pie is not good enough they will want a new one. But I think you'll find that similar things have happened all over the country."
Adams will take his managerial bow in front of his old admirers at the Emirates next weekend. Seeing their iconic No6 will doubtless make fans old enough to have danced round Maine Road's terraces very misty eyed.
How they would love a centre-half of such bravery, and with such hatred of conceding goals, in the team now. Adams is excited: "I think it will be great. Of course I am looking forward to it. You must remember it is not my home. Highbury was my home. I still feel slightly foreign when I am going to the new stadium, as if I'm going to Paris Saint-Germain. I must say the circle is kind of strange. The people are my people, but the stadium is not my stadium. It might be mine one day, who knows?!"
Does he want Arsène Wenger's job eventually? "Of course I do. Who wouldn't? It is a fantastic football club and I loved every minute there. But Arsène will go on forever, won't he?"
What about the England job? "Yes, I'd love to have a go."
Isn't it particularly brutal? "It's all brutal!"
Adams's managerial apprenticeship began with a difficult year at Wycombe, who were in financial crisis and ended up relegated. After that he made the deliberate decision to move to Holland to continue his education in Feyenoord's youth set-up. "It was amazing for me. I went into their academy and the spotlight was off. They knew me as a coach. The whole shebang disappeared and I was left alone to learn this industry," he says. Then, after two years as an assistant to Harry Redknapp, he was chomping at the bit to have a go.
Portsmouth Football Club are treading on very delicate ground. The club are saddled with debt, up for sale, and - most worryingly for a rookie manager - so are most of their assets. Lassana Diarra's impending move to Real Madrid, coupled with Lauren's scathing assessment last week that the squad was disassembling and "the majority of them are going to leave", suggests Harry Redknapp extricated himself before the situation became intolerably sticky. Nice one Tone. All yours, son.
Most managers take a new job because their predecessor was struggling. Not only is Adams having to follow a success story, he is also in charge of a project that looks more troublesome by the day. If Adams becomes another casualty, everybody knows it will not be easy to climb aboard the managerial ladder again. Is it fair to judge him on the Portsmouth experience alone? He shrugs and accepts the harsh reality for what it is.
Adams feels relaxed about swooping vultures who see players such as Jermain Defoe and Glen Johnson as easy pickings. "I feel OK with it," he says. "It will be my decision whether I let them go or not. We don't need the money, but I realise I would never stand in anybody's way of going to do something exceptional. Would they stand in my way if the Arsenal job became available? I don't think they would. So I have to look my players in the eye every day and be honest with them. If I get a massive offer for one of my players to go to a massive club, what can I say?"
He is prepared to recruit if needs be and has targets in mind. His 16-year-old son, Oliver, has been busily recommending signings to dad. Adams expects to bring in two or three players even if no more leave in January.
Coping with the many demands at the club means forging a strong relationship with the man in charge of the business side, in this case executive chairman Peter Storrie, who is a long-time ally of Redknapp.
Adams acknowledges that they do not share close working practices automatically. "But the most important thing I want, and you need in that relationship, is for the manager to make the call on who he wants to buy and sell."
Does Adams have that? "Totally. Wouldn't do the job otherwise."
The other assistance Adams was keen to get right was his right-hand men. Another coach will join in January, but in the meantime he is delighted to have brought Johnny Metgod to Fratton Park.
"Arsène said something interesting to me the other day. He said, 'Tony, you need someone around you who is always up. You do need your downtime.' He told me I was a bugger during the week, I was hard work, but that he couldn't wish for a better captain on Saturday afternoon. He said I needed someone who was 24/7 out there, buzzing."
Metgod called Adams the moment he got the Portsmouth job. "I met John at Feyenoord and I always had him in the back of my brain," he explains. "John is a mad Dutchman. He is very up. I do have my down moments and he is a sounding board for me. He has been around the block, has taken a few knocks, knows the game inside out. He also has the Dutch influence on the technical side. I trust him. That's the biggest issue."
Another thing Adams learned from Wenger was that ranting and raving is not always the way to provoke a reaction. "Arsène used to give the best bollockings in the world by not saying anything and just walking away and leaving you with your fears and insecurities. The best bollocking I ever got wasn't from George Graham, it was from Arsène. It is a very powerful tool. But you have to strike a balance because otherwise they will walk all over you." Having said that, Adams grins that his style is "more George than Arsène".
The salaries and celebrity that players attract make it more difficult now than ever to get through to them, motivate them, discipline them. "It is a very difficult job in that respect," Adams reckons. "The power is theirs. I'll never take the players on. There are too many of them. Players are not scared of managers any more. The clubs have done that. Society has done that. The game has done that. It has taken away the power of the manager. You have got to be their mate now.
"When I played for England in 1988 I could walk down Oxford Street. I could go around the whole day, get my pair of jeans, go to Cecil Gee, do what I wanted to do. That's gone now. But on the whole footballers are good people and they don't try to make mistakes. The guys here are good pros."
Good pros, good fans, good assistants, good autonomy to buy and sell the players he needs, a good thick skin. What could possibly go wrong www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/dec/21/sportinterviews-portsmouth
Guardian Amy Lawrence Big interview
My job is just brutalTony Adams knows that time and statistics are not on his side in his job as Portsmouth manager, but believes he has made all the right moves to rise to the challenge.
Tony Adams appears not to have settled in too comfortably in his new office. His room, inside one of the temporary cabins that make up Portsmouth's training facility, is so spartan there is next to nothing to show that this is the think tank of the most important person at the football club. Where are the notebooks, the videos, the correspondence? The desk does not look used. On it is a landline telephone he claims he never answers. When it buzzes he picks up the receiver and yells: "Go away!"
On the pinboard behind him is the only personal touch on view in Adams's working space. He has ripped a page from a magazine that illustrates the terrifying statistics about managerial sackings. "The average tenure of a club is 1.53 years," he reads, wincing. "There were 34 dismissals in 2007-08. There have been 601 dismissals over the last 15 years. Puts it in perspective, doesn't it?" Adams flashes a knowing smile. The next day, those figures need to be amended. Paul Ince's number is up.
After a morning on the training ground, Adams has his tracksuit on. The hassles of management have not aged him yet and he still looks young, lean and strong enough to determinedly thump the ball away from a lurking striker. If you did not know that he suffered from acute back pain as a consequence of 22 years putting his body on the line for Arsenal and England, you could still mistake him for a current player.
Convincing people you are something different, that you are ready to be a boss, is not easy. And in Adams's case there is an extra dimension. Perhaps it is the fact we all know he is a vulnerable soul who went through a personality change in a very public arena when he confronted his alcoholism. There is something about him that makes you wonder whether he is cut out for the hothouse of football management. Is he too pensive now?
Has he moved too far away from the traditionally macho vocabulary of the dressing room? Adams laughs out loud as he recalls how Jamie Redknapp summed up his new mode of communication by saying: "Tony used to be a cockney but I ain't got a clue what he is now."
In answer to people who think he quotes poetry to his players, he promises he can eff and blind and give as good a bollocking now as he ever did as a captain.
As Roy Keane and Ince have discovered this season, it is tough for a lauded footballer, and leader of his peers, to reinvent himself as a manager. "What I am doing now is brutal," Adams says. "Let's be honest. Already this season the wolves have been at Keane's door, at Incey's door, and next week they will be here. It really is brutal."
Adams is concerned the modern football environment might just cull an entire generation of managers before they have had the chance to grow into the job. "That it the danger," he says. "It has happened before. Glenn Hoddle is probably one of the best technical coaches in the country. Top, top guy. I think he got the England job too early - he was 38 when he was managing England. We had our differences, but I still respect him and think he was excellent. From Glenn's generation Bryan Robson and Peter Reid have been marginalised. They have been chewed up and spat out.
"Certainly for players who have a career behind them, you get judged extremely quickly. You get chewed up fast. It is not conducive for development in this country. Not at all.'
Adams starts to reminisce about how he was able to learn how to be a player away from the spotlight. He recalls graduating from schoolboy, youth and reserve-team football, even making a handful of appearances for the first team, all without much fuss. "Until I was ever-present at the age of 20, I don't think anyone outside the club knew anything about me. It was all free learning. Until you were playing regularly as an Arsenal player, you weren't judged. Going into management is completely different. You still have to learn the job but... bang! It's on you.
"You need to develop a thick skin. I take a lot of pressure and shift it out the window. I've got people I talk to. I've been working with a psychologist, and for 12 years I have been working with what some people call a psychotherapist. I call him my mate. It is best to throw pressure away."
He evidently finds it easier to let go than his wife, who keeps a 'grudge book' in which she notes down all the people who have said nasty things about her husband's job. "She's going to take revenge!" Adams says, like a cartoon villain.
"I am going to stop her coming to games now. It's just too much to have two people in the household all over the place. It's all right just me coming home when we've had a bad result, but you do need someone who is emotionally stable in the house. We don't need two of us plotting our revenge on Mr X who has written a bad thing about me."
So how thick is your skin just now, Tony? He pauses. "It hurts when I hear things like: whatever I do it's Harry's team. Then if we do poorly it's my team all of a sudden. The whole self-esteem thing has to be right up there. I have always struggled with that, but in the last few years it has grown. My skin is quite thick now."
Adams has not yet been on the receiving end of abuse from the supporters. In fact he was amazed by the encouragement that came readily to Pompey fans, even when they were getting whipped 3-0 at home by Newcastle last weekend. Considering how it is increasingly common to hear fans booing their own in the Premier League these days, he is quite right to describe Portsmouth's cheerleaders as remarkable.
Adams approves of the police intervention that has identified some of those responsible for aiming offensive chants at Sol Campbell. "That is just not acceptable. You have to get the ringleaders. People follow the main men like sheep, and if you get the main culprits you've got a chance of dealing with it. You have to remember that most fans love to come in and cheer on the team they love. But people join the pack. The feature on Match of the Day 2 about the blind fan was insightful. He couldn't even see but because some other people were shouting, 'Get him off' he shouted, 'GET HIM OFF! HE'S RUBBISH!'"
Adams observes that fans have changed radically and are much more demanding in terms of expectations than when he was starting out at Arsenal. "I remember we lost 4-0 away from home at Maine Road in the 80s, and our fans did the conga around the stand. There were 22,000 hardcore, week in, week out. They are still going, just because it's the Arsenal and they love to go every weekend, but I think the club has accumulated quite a lot of [he chooses the word carefully] consumers, who if the steak-and-kidney pie is not good enough they will want a new one. But I think you'll find that similar things have happened all over the country."
Adams will take his managerial bow in front of his old admirers at the Emirates next weekend. Seeing their iconic No6 will doubtless make fans old enough to have danced round Maine Road's terraces very misty eyed.
How they would love a centre-half of such bravery, and with such hatred of conceding goals, in the team now. Adams is excited: "I think it will be great. Of course I am looking forward to it. You must remember it is not my home. Highbury was my home. I still feel slightly foreign when I am going to the new stadium, as if I'm going to Paris Saint-Germain. I must say the circle is kind of strange. The people are my people, but the stadium is not my stadium. It might be mine one day, who knows?!"
Does he want Arsène Wenger's job eventually? "Of course I do. Who wouldn't? It is a fantastic football club and I loved every minute there. But Arsène will go on forever, won't he?"
What about the England job? "Yes, I'd love to have a go."
Isn't it particularly brutal? "It's all brutal!"
Adams's managerial apprenticeship began with a difficult year at Wycombe, who were in financial crisis and ended up relegated. After that he made the deliberate decision to move to Holland to continue his education in Feyenoord's youth set-up. "It was amazing for me. I went into their academy and the spotlight was off. They knew me as a coach. The whole shebang disappeared and I was left alone to learn this industry," he says. Then, after two years as an assistant to Harry Redknapp, he was chomping at the bit to have a go.
Portsmouth Football Club are treading on very delicate ground. The club are saddled with debt, up for sale, and - most worryingly for a rookie manager - so are most of their assets. Lassana Diarra's impending move to Real Madrid, coupled with Lauren's scathing assessment last week that the squad was disassembling and "the majority of them are going to leave", suggests Harry Redknapp extricated himself before the situation became intolerably sticky. Nice one Tone. All yours, son.
Most managers take a new job because their predecessor was struggling. Not only is Adams having to follow a success story, he is also in charge of a project that looks more troublesome by the day. If Adams becomes another casualty, everybody knows it will not be easy to climb aboard the managerial ladder again. Is it fair to judge him on the Portsmouth experience alone? He shrugs and accepts the harsh reality for what it is.
Adams feels relaxed about swooping vultures who see players such as Jermain Defoe and Glen Johnson as easy pickings. "I feel OK with it," he says. "It will be my decision whether I let them go or not. We don't need the money, but I realise I would never stand in anybody's way of going to do something exceptional. Would they stand in my way if the Arsenal job became available? I don't think they would. So I have to look my players in the eye every day and be honest with them. If I get a massive offer for one of my players to go to a massive club, what can I say?"
He is prepared to recruit if needs be and has targets in mind. His 16-year-old son, Oliver, has been busily recommending signings to dad. Adams expects to bring in two or three players even if no more leave in January.
Coping with the many demands at the club means forging a strong relationship with the man in charge of the business side, in this case executive chairman Peter Storrie, who is a long-time ally of Redknapp.
Adams acknowledges that they do not share close working practices automatically. "But the most important thing I want, and you need in that relationship, is for the manager to make the call on who he wants to buy and sell."
Does Adams have that? "Totally. Wouldn't do the job otherwise."
The other assistance Adams was keen to get right was his right-hand men. Another coach will join in January, but in the meantime he is delighted to have brought Johnny Metgod to Fratton Park.
"Arsène said something interesting to me the other day. He said, 'Tony, you need someone around you who is always up. You do need your downtime.' He told me I was a bugger during the week, I was hard work, but that he couldn't wish for a better captain on Saturday afternoon. He said I needed someone who was 24/7 out there, buzzing."
Metgod called Adams the moment he got the Portsmouth job. "I met John at Feyenoord and I always had him in the back of my brain," he explains. "John is a mad Dutchman. He is very up. I do have my down moments and he is a sounding board for me. He has been around the block, has taken a few knocks, knows the game inside out. He also has the Dutch influence on the technical side. I trust him. That's the biggest issue."
Another thing Adams learned from Wenger was that ranting and raving is not always the way to provoke a reaction. "Arsène used to give the best bollockings in the world by not saying anything and just walking away and leaving you with your fears and insecurities. The best bollocking I ever got wasn't from George Graham, it was from Arsène. It is a very powerful tool. But you have to strike a balance because otherwise they will walk all over you." Having said that, Adams grins that his style is "more George than Arsène".
The salaries and celebrity that players attract make it more difficult now than ever to get through to them, motivate them, discipline them. "It is a very difficult job in that respect," Adams reckons. "The power is theirs. I'll never take the players on. There are too many of them. Players are not scared of managers any more. The clubs have done that. Society has done that. The game has done that. It has taken away the power of the manager. You have got to be their mate now.
"When I played for England in 1988 I could walk down Oxford Street. I could go around the whole day, get my pair of jeans, go to Cecil Gee, do what I wanted to do. That's gone now. But on the whole footballers are good people and they don't try to make mistakes. The guys here are good pros."
Good pros, good fans, good assistants, good autonomy to buy and sell the players he needs, a good thick skin. What could possibly go wrong www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/dec/21/sportinterviews-portsmouth