Paul Merson - How Not to Be a Professional Footballer

I was saved by the fact that I never had any problems training. No matter how paro I’d got the night before, I rarely had a hangover the next morning, I was lucky. I could always tell when some players had been drinking by the way they acted in practice games – they couldn’t hack it. Me, I could always get up and play. I didn’t enjoy it, but I could get through the day, and George knew that come Saturday I’d be as good as gold for him.

Well, most of the time. In some games I played while still pissed from the previous night. In 1991 we faced Luton Town away on Boxing Day. On Christmas Day, the players had their lunches at home with the families, then we met up at Highbury for training. Afterwards, we piled on to the coach to the team hotel and I knocked back pints and pints and pints in the bar. I couldn’t help it, it was Christmas and I was in the mood. The next day, I was still hammered. During the game, a long ball came over and I chased after it. As I got within a few yards I tripped over my own feet, even though there wasn’t a soul near me. I could hear everyone in the crowd laughing and jeering. I couldn’t look towards the bench.

Even though I was Son of George, the manager would always bollock me really hard whenever he caught me drinking. I was even the first player ever to be banned from Arsenal when I caused a lorryload of trouble at an official dinner and dance event for the club at London’s Grosvenor House Hotel. The ban was only for two weeks in 1989, but it caused one hell of a stink all the same.

I was hitting the booze pretty hard that night, and this was a fancy do with dinner jackets, a big meal, and loads of beers flying around. I got smashed big-time, drinking at the bar and having a right old laugh. I was so loud that my shouting drowned out the hired comedian, Norman Collier, who was entertaining the club’s guests – including wives, directors and VIP big shots. People turned round and stared at me as I knocked back drink after drink. George and the Arsenal board were taking note.

Later, a big punch-up kicked off in the car park outside the hotel and somehow I was in the thick of it. To this day I still don’t know what happened, because I was so paro. The papers got to hear about the scuffle, and so did the fans. The next day, George told me to sort myself out and not to come back for a couple of weeks. I wasn’t even allowed to train and being shut out scared me.

I spent a fortnight lying low, trying to convince myself that I’d get back on the straight and narrow. For a while it worked. When I came back I was as good as gold, then I started downing the beers again. The Tuesday Club was into the swing of things and I was back on the slippery slope.

I got worse, and whenever I messed up and George found out, he would do me. On New Year’s Day in 1990, we were playing Crystal Palace at Selhurst Park. I was told I wasn’t in the team.

‘Nice one,’ I thought. ‘It’s New Year’s Eve and I’m in a fancy hotel with the rest of the team, let’s get paro.’

I figured being dropped was a green light for me to go out for a drink and a party. This time, I got so smashed I couldn’t even get up in the morning. George found out and named me as sub for the match just to teach me a lesson. When I fell asleep on the bench during the game, he brought me on for the last 10 minutes to give me another slap. I couldn’t do a thing – I was like a fish up a tree. I couldn’t control the ball and I felt sick every time I sprinted down the wing. We won 4–1, but after that night George vowed never to name a team on New Year’s Eve again. On a normal Saturday he would have got away with it, because I’d have behaved, but I was becoming an alcoholic and it was New Year’s Eve. It had been a recipe for disaster.

Lesson 4

Do Not Shit on David Seaman’s Balcony

‘More boozy disasters for our football dynamo; Perry Groves nearly drowns.’

Oh my God, Gus Caesar was as hard as nails. When he played in the Arsenal defence he always had a ricket in his locker and the fans sometimes got on his back a little bit because he made the odd cock-up, but what he lacked in technique he definitely made up for in physique. He was the muscliest footballer I’d ever seen. I reckon he could have killed someone with a Bruce Lee-style one-inch punch if he wanted. A lot of the time, I got the impression he was just waiting for an excuse to try it out on me. I had a habit of rubbing him up the wrong way.

It all kicked off with me and Gus in 1989, when Arsenal took the players away to Bermuda for a team holiday. The whole squad went to a nightclub and got on the beers one night, messing around, having a laugh. All of a sudden Gus started shouting at me. A drunken argument over nothing, a spilt pint maybe, had got out of hand. A scuffle broke out – handbags stuff, really – and Gus poked me in the eye just as the pair of us were being separated.

It bloody hurt and I was proper angry, but because I wasn’t much of a fighter I knew that poking Gus back would have been stupid. He would have torn me limb from limb. I reckoned on a better way to get my own back, so I let the commotion calm down, staggering away, bellyaching, checking to see if I was permanently blind. Then Bouldy and me went back to the hotel, leaving everyone behind. We walked up to reception, casual as you like, and blagged the key to Gus’s door. It was party time, I was going to cause some serious damage to his room.

In hindsight it was a suicidal move, because Gus was sharing with midfielder Paul Davis, who was hardly a softie. He’d infamously smacked Southampton’s midfield hardman, Glenn Cockerill, in the middle of a game in 1988. The blow knocked him out cold and the punch was all over the papers the next day because it had been caught on the telly. Paul was banned for nine games after the FA had viewed the video evidence, which was unheard-of in those days, and Glenn slurped hospital food through a wired jaw for the best part of a fortnight. We all knew not to cross Paul, but that was in the sober light of day. I was well gone and angry that night, so I didn’t care.

Once I’d got into Gus and Paul’s room, I went mental and trashed it. I stamped on a very expensive-looking watch and smashed the board games that were lying around on the floor. Footballers didn’t have PlayStations in those days, Monopoly was the closest thing we had to entertainment without draining the minibar, and we’d done that already. Then I threw a bucket of water up on to the ceiling, leaving it to drip, drip, drip down throughout the night. It was a five-star hotel, but I couldn’t give a toss. I threw a bed out of the balcony window, then me and Bouldy laughed all the way back to our room.

I woke up not long afterwards, still pissed. Everything was swimming back to me – the fight, Gus jabbing me in the eye and the red mist coming down. An imaginary crime scene photo of the trashed hotel room slapped me around the face like a wet cod. In my head it looked like it was CSI: Merse . I sat up in bed with that horrible morning-after-the-night-before feeling and started moaning, my head in my hands.

‘Oh no, what the fuck have I done?’ I whispered.

In a panic I got dressed and padded across the corridor, hoping I could tidy up the mess before the lads got back, but it was too late. Paul Davis had pinned a note to the door.

‘Gus, the little shits have busted the room up. Just leave it and go to sleep somewhere else. Paul.’

I crawled back to bed, knowing I was done for. Hours later, the phone in our room started ringing. It was George. He was not happy.

‘Room 312. Now!’ he shouted.

Bouldy got up. I tried to pull myself together, splashing my face with water and hauling on my shorts and flip flops. It was a lovely day outside, the sun was scorching hot and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but it might as well have been a pissing wet morning in St Albans for all I cared. I felt sick to the pit of my stomach as we made the Walk of Death to Room 312, which I knew was Paul and Gus’s room.