‘Fuck, I like this,’ I thought. ‘I want to be like him.’
This was at a time long before Stringfellows became a strip club, but it might as well have been one. The girls were wearing next to nothing and there were bottles of bubbly everywhere. Tears for Fears and Howard Jones blasted out from the speakers. I looked like the character Garth from Wayne’s World because my eyes kept locking on to every passing set of pins like heat-seeking radar, and I couldn’t believe the amount of booze that was flying around. Graham Rix’s bar bill would have put my gambling binge with Wes to shame.
I crashed round at Charlie’s house afterwards, a fancy apartment in Highgate with an open-plan living-room and kitchen, plush furniture, the works. I wanted all of it. Luckily, the club had decided to sign me as a pro, and I couldn’t scribble my name down quick enough because there was nothing more I wanted in the world than to be a professional footballer. And I fancied another night in Stringfellows.
I got my contract on 1 December 1985 and at the time I thought it was big bucks, all £150 of it a week. Oh my God, I thought I’d made it, even though I was earning the same amount of dough as my mates on the building site. That didn’t stop me from celebrating. I remember going round to my girlfriend Lorraine’s house with a bottle of Moët because I reckoned I was on top of the world. The first-team players had given me a sniff of the high life available to a top-drawer footballer, and how could I not be sucked in by the glamour? I’d tasted bubbles with Champagne Charlie before we’d shared half-time oranges.
Arsenal were having a ’mare in 1986. Don resigned after a lorryload of shocking results, and George Graham turned up in May. I was gutted for Don. He was a top coach, one of the best in the world at the time. I worked with him again when he was looking after the England Under-19s, and he was phenomenal, really thorough and full of ideas. When he talked, you listened, but Don’s problem was that he didn’t have it in him to be a manager. Really, he was just too nice.
As a coach he was perfect, a good cop to a manager’s bad cop. If a manager had bollocked the team and torn a strip off someone, I imagine Don would have put his arm around them afterwards. He would have got their head straight.
‘Now don’t you worry about it, son,’ he’d say. ‘The gaffer doesn’t really think you’re a useless, lazy fuckwit, he just reckons you should track back a bit more.’
Being a coach and a manager are two very different jobs. When someone’s a coach they take the lads training, but they don’t have the added pressure of picking the team or running the side, and that makes a massive difference. I don’t think Don could hack that. He wasn’t the only one, there have been loads of great, great coaches who couldn’t do it as a manager. Brian Kidd was a good example. He was figured to be one of the best coaches in the game when he worked alongside Fergie at United. He went to Blackburn as gaffer and took them down.
Our new manager, George Graham, was a mystery to me. I didn’t know him from Adam, apart from the fact that he was an Arsenal boy and he wanted to rule the club in a strict style. I’d heard he’d been a bit casual as a player. Some of the lads reckoned he liked a drink back in the day, and they used to call him Stroller at the club because he seemed so relaxed when he played, but when he turned up at training for the first time he seemed a bit tough to me. Straightaway, George packed me off to Brentford because he thought some first-team football with a lower league club would do me good. Frank McLintock, his old Arsenal mate, was in charge there and George was right, it did help, but only because we got so plastered on the coach journey from away games that some of the players would fall into the club car park when we finally arrived home. It prepared me for a lifetime of boozing.
I signed with Brentford on a Friday afternoon. Twenty-four hours later we played Port Vale, and what an eye-opener that was. To prepare for the game, striker Francis Joseph sat at the back of the bus, smoking a fag. We were comfortably beaten that afternoon and Frank McLintock was sacked on the coach on the way back. I thought, ‘Nice one, the fella who’s signed me has just been given the boot.’ I couldn’t believe it.
After that, though, it was plain sailing. Former Spurs captain Steve Perryman took over the club as player-manager and got us going. We didn’t lose again, and after every game we celebrated hard. I remember we played away at Bolton in a midweek match, and when we got back to the dressing-room at 9.15, a couple of the lads didn’t even get into the baths. They changed and ran out of the dressing-room so they could get to the off-licence before it closed. On the way home we all piled into a couple of crates of lager and got paro. It was a different way of life than at Arsenal. I learnt at Highbury that you could have a drink on the way home, but only if you’d done the business. At Brentford you could have a drink on the way home even if you hadn’t played well.
Going to Brentford back then was probably the best thing that could have happened to me, because it made me appreciate Highbury even more. By looking at Brent-ford I could see that Arsenal was a phenomenal club. The marble halls at Highbury, the atmosphere, the way they looked after you was top, top class. I went everywhere in the world with them during my career. We played football in Malaysia, Miami, Australia and Singapore. When we played in South Africa a few years later, we were presented with a guest of honour before the match, a little black fella with grey hair. When he shook my hand, I nudged our full-back, Nigel Winterburn, who was standing next to me.
‘Who the fuck’s that?’ I said.
Nige couldn’t believe it.
‘Bloody hell, Merse, it’s Nelson Mandela,’ he said. ‘One of the most famous people in the world.’
I’m not being horrible, but I never got that treatment at Aston Villa. They were a big club and we might have gone to Scandinavia for a pre-season tour, or played in the Intertoto Cup, but it was hardly South Africa and a handshake from Nelson Mandela. I never got that at Boro or Pompey either, and I definitely didn’t get that at Brent-ford. A couple of days after the Port Vale game, following my first day training there, I went into the dressing-rooms for a shower and chucked my kit on the floor. Steve Perry-man picked it up and chucked it back at me.
‘What are you doing?’ he said. ‘You’ve got to take that home and wash it.’
I couldn’t believe it. At Arsenal, one of the kids would have done that for me. I’d train, get changed and the next day my kit would be back at the same place in the dressing-room, washed, ironed, folded up and smelling as fresh as Interflora, even though I didn’t have a first-team game under my belt.
I loved it at Brentford and I was so grateful to them for starting my career. I go and watch them whenever I can, but I wasn’t there for long as George soon called me back. Steve had wanted to keep me for a few more months, but I knew that getting recalled to Highbury so quickly meant one thing only. It was debut time.
I was right as well. I made my first appearance against Man City at home on 22 November 1986, coming on as a sub in a 3–0 win. I ran on to the pitch and all the fans were cheering and singing for me. Then with my first touch, a shocker, I put the ball into the North Bank. It was supposed to be a cross. Instead it went into Row Z. The Arsenal fans must have thought, ‘What the fuck have we got here? This guy looks like a right Charlie.’ They didn’t know the half of it.
Lesson 2
Do Not Drink 15 Pints and Crash Your Car into a Lamppost
‘Our teenage sensation drinks himself silly and gets arrested. Tony Adams wets the Merson sofa bed.’
That’s when the boozing really started. Under George, I got to the fringes of the first team at the tail end of the 1986–87 season, and whenever I played at Highbury I’d always go into an Irish boozer around the corner from the ground afterwards. The Bank of Friendship it was called. In those days, my drinking partner was Niall Quinn, who had signed for the club a few years earlier. If you had said to me then when I was 17 or 18, ‘Oh, Niall’s going to be the chairman of Sunderland when he’s 40-odd,’ I’d have thought you were having