four with a rope, so when they ran out to catch a striker offside, they would get used to coming out together, arms in the air, shouting at the lino. It wasn’t a fluke that clean sheets were common for us in those days, because George worked so hard to achieve them.
We did the same thing every day, but the lads never moaned. If anyone grumbled they were soon dropped for the next match, and so we worked every morning on not conceding goals without a murmur. Everyone listened to George, because we were all frightened of what he would do if we didn’t live up to his high standards. He was nothing like the laid-back player everyone had heard about.
As a tactician he was brilliant, and his knowledge was scary, but he was even scarier as a bloke. If you didn’t do what he’d said, like getting the ball beyond the first man at a corner, he’d bollock you badly. When George walked into a room, everybody stopped talking, and nobody ever dared to challenge him if they thought what he was doing was wrong or out of order.
Our defender (or defensive midfielder, depending on the line-up) Martin Keown was the only person to have a go at George in all the time I was there. I remember we went to Ipswich and had a nightmare. God knows why the argument started, but it ended up with Martin shouting at George in the dressing-room – giving it, trying to start a ruck.
‘Come on, George!’ he yelled as the lads stared, open-mouthed. ‘Come on!’ He didn’t play for ages after that.
Fans wondered why George didn’t stay around the game much longer than he did, but it’s pretty obvious really – the players wouldn’t stand for his methods of management today. They earn too much money, they wouldn’t have to listen to him. They’d be moaning in the papers and asking for a move as soon as he’d got them giving piggybacks in training.
Wednesdays were great because George always gave the squad a day off. That meant I could get hammered on a Tuesday night, which I did every week. Often I was joined by some of the other lads, like Steve Bould, Tony Adams, Nigel Winterburn and Perry Groves. We’d start off in a local pub, then we’d go into London and drink all over town. We wouldn’t stop until we were paro. The pint-o-meter usually came in at 15 beers plus and we used to call our sessions ‘The Tuesday Club’. George knew about the heavy nights, but I don’t think he cared because we were always right as rain when we arrived for training on Thursday.
Bouldy was always up for a drink in those days, as was Grovesy, but he was a bit lighter than the rest of us. Sometimes he’d even throw his lagers away if he thought we weren’t looking. I remember the night of Grovesy’s first Tuesday Club meeting. It took place during his first week at the club, and we went to a boozer near Highbury. He stood by a big plant as we started sinking the pints, and when we weren’t looking he’d tip his drink into the pot. Grovesy threw away so much beer that by the end of the evening the plant was trying to kiss him. When we went back to training on Thursday, everyone was going on about what a big drinker he was, because he’d been the last man standing.
The following week we went into the same pub and one of the lads stood next to the plant. I think they’d worked out that Grovesy wasn’t the big hitter we’d thought he’d been, and he was right. After three drinks, Grovesey was paro and couldn’t walk. As he staggered around the pub an hour later, he confessed that he’d been chucking his drinks because he was a lightweight. That tag didn’t last long, though. After one season, he’d learnt how to keep up with the rest of us. He joined Arsenal a teetotaller and left a serious drinker.
It wasn’t just Tuesday nights that we’d go for it – I’d take any excuse for a piss-up. My problem came from the fact that I used booze to put my head right, to calm me down or perk me up. When I was a YTS player, drinking stopped the panic attacks, but when I started breaking into the first team, beer maintained the excitement of playing in front of thousands of Arsenal fans.
It’s a massive buzz playing football, especially when everything is new, like when I got my first touches against Man City at Highbury, or that goal at Plough Lane. The adrenaline that came with playing on a Saturday gave me such a rush. And if I scored, it was the best feeling in the world, nothing else came close. The problems started when I realised the buzz was short. I felt flat when I left the pitch, and I’d sit in the dressing-room after a game, thinking, ‘What am I going to do now? I can’t wait until next Saturday.’ And that’s where the drinking came in. It kept my high up.
I should have known better, because before I’d made it into the first team regularly, boozing had already got me into trouble. When I was 18, I got done for drink-driving. It was in the summer of 1986, I went to a place called Wheathampstead with a few people and we rounded the night off in the Rose and Crown, a lovely little boozer near my house. After a lorryload of pints, I decided to drive home, pissed out of my face, though I must have crashed into every other car outside the pub as I reversed from my parking spot. I missed the turning for my house, went into the next road and ploughed into a lamppost, which ended up in someone’s garden.
I panicked. I ran back to the Rose and Crown and sat there with my mates like nothing had happened. My plan was to pretend that the car had been stolen. It wasn’t long before the police arrived and a copper was tapping me on the back.
‘Excuse me, Mr Merson,’ he said. ‘Do you know your car has been crashed into a lamppost which is now in some-one’s garden?’
I played dumb. ‘You’re kidding?’
‘Has it been stolen?’ he asked.
I kept cool. It wasn’t hard, I’d been taking plenty of fluids. ‘Well, it must have been,’ I said, ‘because I’ve been here all night.’
The copper seemed to believe me. He offered to take me to the car, which I knew was in a right state, but just as I was leaving the pub a little old lady shouted out to us. She’d been sat there for ages, watching me.
‘He’s just got in here!’ she shouted. ‘He tried to drive his car home!’
That was it, I was done for and the policeman breathalysed me. In the cells an officer told me I’d been three times over the limit.
‘Shit, is that bad?’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘But it’s not the worst one we’ve had tonight. We’ve just pulled a guy for being six times over. But he was driving a JCB through St Albans town centre.’
I was banned from driving for 18 months; the club suspended me for two weeks and fined me £350. Like that JCB in St Albans town centre, I was spinning out of control.
George said the same thing to me whenever I got into trouble: ‘Remember who you are. Remember what you are. And remember who you represent.’
That never dropped with me, I never got it. I was just a normal lad. I came from a council estate. My dad was a coal man. My mum worked in a Hoover factory at Hangar Lane. We were normal people and I wanted to live my life as normally as I could. I had the best job in the world, but I still wanted to have a pint with my mates. Along the way, that attitude was my downfall.
The club never really cottoned on that the drinking was starting to become a problem for me. They would never have believed that I was on my way to being a serious alcoholic. I didn’t know either. I thought I was a big hitter in the boozing department and that it was all under control. The first I knew of my alcohol problem was when they told me in the Marchwood rehab centre.
I used to put on weight because of the beer, but the Arsenal coaches never sussed. I’d worked out that when I stood on the club weights and the doc took his measurements, I could literally hold the weight off if I lent at the right angle or nudged the scales in the right way. The lads used to give me grief all the time. They used to point at my love handles and say I was pregnant, and when George walked past me in the dressing-room I’d suck my tummy in to hide the bulge. I could never have worn the silly skin-tight shirts they wear now, my gut was that bad.
People outside the club would see me drinking, and George would get letters of complaint, but I used to brush them aside when he read them out to me.
‘Paul Merson was in so and so bar in Islington,’ he’d read,