get any bigger, we won’t be signing you as a professional,’ he said, looking proper serious.
I didn’t care, I was made up. I prayed to God that I’d fill out. I stuffed my face with food and pumped weights during the week like a mini Rocky Balboa.
In a way, getting a YTS place was like Charlie finding the golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, because it was a bit of a lottery really. Any one of a dozen kids at the club could have got that spot, but they gave it to me. The YTS players in Division One were also a bonus ball for the youth system. The government paid my wages (that oner a month), so it wasn’t like the club had to fork out any cash for me. In the meantime, I was playing football and handing cash back to Maggie Thatcher in gambling taxes. Happy days all round.
But I still moaned. Being a YTS or apprentice player was a pain in the arse at times and I had to travel across London from Northolt to Highbury. Every morning without fail I’d get on the underground for 16 stops to Holborn, then I’d change to the Piccadilly Line and go the last stretch to the club. I lost count of the times I had to get off at Marble Arch to go to the loo. I had to run up the escalators of the station, nip into the khazi at McDonalds and then run back for another train.
Once I got to the ground, I’d help the other apprentices put the kit on the coach. We’d then drive 50 minutes into the countryside, train for a couple of hours and come back home again. I was constantly knackered. On the way home I’d always fall asleep on the tube. Luckily for me, Northolt was only a few stops from the end of the Central Line, so if I fell akip and woke up in West Ruislip, I didn’t have far to travel back.
It didn’t get much better for me when it came to playing football either. Because of my size I was never getting picked for the team and I was always sub. Sometimes I even had to run the line. During a pre-season game against Man United I was lino for the whole match and I had the hump, big-time. It didn’t help that my mates were getting £150 a week for working on a building site when I was only get £25.
My attitude was bad. I kept thinking, ‘I ain’t going to make it as a footballer. I’m not even playing now. What chance have I got?’ At that point I would have strolled over to the nearest construction foreman and said, ‘Give us a job’, but my dad kept saying the same thing to me again and again: ‘Keep on going.’ The truth is, I could have packed it in 50 times over.
Arsenal weren’t much of a team to look at then. When I watched them play at Highbury, which the kids had to every other Saturday, they weren’t very good. They had some great players around like Pat Jennings in goal, plus internationals like Viv Anderson, Kenny Sansom, Paul Mariner, Graham Rix and Charlie Nicholas, but Don couldn’t get them going. They were getting beat left, right and centre and the fans weren’t interested. These days, Arsenal tickets are as rare as rocking horse shit. In 1985, that team was playing in front of crowds of only 18,000.
At the same time, I started getting physically bigger and tougher in the tackles, which was a shock for everyone because my mum and dad were small. Suddenly I could look over the heads of the other fans on the North Bank. In matches I started being able to read the game, and I became what the coaches would call ‘intelligent’ on the pitch. Off it I was a nightmare, but when I was playing I was able to see the game unfolding in front of me. I could picture where players would be running and where chances would be coming from next, which a lot of other footballers didn’t. And I was lucky, very lucky, because I didn’t get injured.
See, this is the thing that people don’t tell kids about professional football: it’s so much down to luck, it’s scary. If you don’t play well in that first district game, the scout from QPR or Charlton isn’t coming back. If you get injured in your first youth team match at Wolves and miss seven months of action, chances are, you’re not getting signed. I was lucky because I avoided the serious knocks. My only bad injury came when I ripped my knee open on a piece of metal when I was 12 years old (before I’d joined Arsenal), and that now seems like a massive stroke of luck when I think about it.
I was playing football with my mates on some park land at the back of our house in Northolt. I was stuck in goal and as a ball came across I rushed out for it, quick as you like, sliding across the turf. The council were still building around the estate then, and there was rubble and crap everywhere. A piece of metal wire sticking in the ground snagged the skin on my knee and tore it right down to the bone.
It was touch and go whether I’d play football again. The doctors gave me a Robocop knee with 30 stitches on the inside, another 30 on the outside. With medical science, they pieced me together with catgut, the wire they used in John McEnroe’s tennis rackets. It gave my right leg some kind of super strength. After that I never had to use my left peg, because I could kick the ball so well with the outside of my right thanks to the extra support in my knee. When I was at Villa, our French winger David Ginola said to me, ‘You are zee best I ‘av ever seen at kicking with the outside of your foot, Merz.’ That’s some compliment coming from a great player like David, I can tell you.
As a trainee at Arsenal, I had the odd twisted ankle, a few bruises, but that was it. And then things started happening for me in the youth team. It took about seven months, but as I got bigger I became a regular in the starting line-up. I was scoring goals and playing well, while the lads in the year above me, like Michael Thomas, David Rocastle, Martin Hayes and Tony Adams, started playing in the reserves, knocking on the first-team door. I was offered a second year on my YTS contract and began training with the first team shortly afterwards. It was Big Boy stuff, but I really fancied my chances of getting a proper game. I even dreamt of watching myself on Match of the Day.
Then I made it into the reserve team. Once a youth footballer gets to that stage in his career, it can get pretty brutal. The pressure is really on to get a pro contract. Players are often chasing a place in the first-team squad with another apprentice, someone who could be their best mate. I spent a lot of time worrying whether I was going to make it or not, and it got to me. The panic attacks came back. During a reserve game against Chelsea I latched on to a through ball and rounded their keeper Peter Bonetti, who I’d loved as a kid because I was a Chelsea fan (though Ray Wilkins was my idol). But as I was about to poke it home, I got the fear and froze like a training cone. A defender nicked the ball off me and I was left there, looking like a right wally, feeling sick. A few days later I went to the doctors again, but the GP was like a fish up a tree. He told me to give up football, but I wasn’t going to do that. I loved the game too much.
At training I managed to hold it together, which was a relief because I was playing with some proper superstars. Charlie Nicholas was one of them and he was a god to the Arsenal fans. He’d come down from Celtic, where he’d smashed every goalscoring record going. Graham Rix was there too, as was Tony Woodcock and top England centre-forward Paul Mariner, who was a player and a half. It was a massive deal for me. I remember being on the training ground and thinking, ‘My God, these people are legends.’
The biggest shock was that they were all so normal. None of them were big-time, none of them were Jack-the-lads. It was a help, because I was a normal bloke too. I was determined never to become a flash Harry, which was probably what got me into trouble in the long run, and I could never say no to my mates at home. I’d already smoked weed in the park with them, but I’d packed it in when I signed Don Howe’s YTS contract. I liked it because it relaxed me, but it gave me the munchies. I’d always end the night at the counter of a 24-hour petrol station buying bars of chocolate and packets of crisps, which wasn’t the best for someone with an ambition to make it in the First Division.
I also liked a drink, which was something I was better suited to than grass. I found that the more I drank, the fewer panic attacks I’d have. I started in my early teens, knocking back the Pernod and black with mates, which was always colourful when it came back up. It didn’t put me off, though. If my mum and dad went out on a Saturday night they’d often come back and find me passed out on the sofa, surrounded by a dozen empty cans of lager.
I suppose it was good training. After I’d been working with the first team for a while, Charlie Nicholas and Graham Rix took me under their wing, but this time it was off the pitch as well as on it. They had showed me the ropes at the club and told me how to handle myself during games,