Paul Merson - How Not to Be a Professional Footballer

‘In the second half, you’ll go out and score. Then, with 15 minutes to go, I’ll change the team around, they’ll shit themselves, you’ll have a right old go, score again and win the game 2–0. OK?’

Everyone looked at each other with their jaws open. Remember, Liverpool hadn’t lost since New Year’s Day. I turned round to Bouldy and said, ‘Is he on what I’m on here?’

None of us believed it was going to happen, not in a million years, but we really should have had more faith in George. He was one of those managers who had so much football knowledge it was scary. People said he was lucky during his career, but George made his own luck. Things happened for him because he worked for it. He was always saying stuff like, ‘Fail to prepare, prepare to fail.’ He’d read big books like The Art of War . I couldn’t understand any of it.

When we kicked off, I thought George had lost the plot. In the first half, Liverpool passed us to death. I touched the ball twice and we never looked like scoring. They never looked like scoring either, but they didn’t have to. A 0–0 draw would have won them the title, so they were probably made up at half-time. The really weird thing was, George was made up as well.

‘Great stuff, lads,’ he said. ‘Brilliant, perfect. Absolutely outstanding. The plan’s going perfectly.’

I couldn’t make it out. George was never happy at half-time. We could have been beating Barcelona 100–0 and he’d still be angry about something. I turned round to Mickey.

‘You touched it yet?’ I said.

He shrugged his shoulders. Everyone was looking at the gaffer in disbelief.

Then we went out and scored, just like George had reckoned we would. It came from a free-kick. The ball was whipped in and Alan Smith claimed he got his head to it. I wasn’t sure whether it had come off his nose, but I couldn’t have cared less – we were 1–0 up. It could have been even better, because moments later Mickey was bearing down on Bruce Grobbelaar’s goal, one-on-one. In those days, you had to have some neck to win 2–0 at Anfield. Often the Kop would virtually blow the ball out of the net. It must have freaked Mickey out because he fluffed it. All I could think was, ‘Shit, we’ve blown the League.’

Then it was game over, well, for me anyway. George took me off and brought on winger Martin Hayes, pushing him up front. Then he pulled off Bouldy and switched to 4-4-2 by replacing him with Grovesy, an extra midfielder. This was where Liverpool were supposed to shit themselves, but I was the one who was terrified. I had to watch the closing minutes like every other fan.

We were playing injury time. Their England midfielder, Steve McMahon was running around, wagging his finger and telling the Liverpool lot we only had a minute left to play. Winger John Barnes won the ball down by the corner flag in our half. He was one of the best English players I’d ever seen, but God knows what he was doing that night. All he had to do was hang on to possession and run down the clock, but for some reason he tried to cut inside his man. Nigel Winterburn nicked the ball off him and rolled it back to John Lukic who gave it a big lump down field. There was a flick on, and suddenly Mickey was one-on-one with Grobbelaar again.

This time, he dinked the ball over him. It was one of the best goals I’d ever seen, one of those chips the South Americans call ‘The Falling Leaf’ – where a player pops the ball over an advancing keeper. It was never going to be easy for Mickey to chip someone like Grobbelaar, especially after missing a sitter earlier in the game, and he had a thousand years to think about what he was going to do as he pelted towards goal – talk about pressure. Mickey kept his head and his goal snatched a famous 2–0 victory and the League title.

When I think about it, that’s probably one of the most famous games ever. Even if you supported someone like Halifax, Rochdale or Aldershot at that time, you’d still remember that match, especially the moment when commentator Brian Moore screamed, ‘It’s up for grabs now!’ on the telly, or the image of Steve McMahon wagging his finger, giving it the big one. Afterwards he was sat on his arse. He looked gutted.

It was extra special for Arsenal. We hadn’t won the League for 18 years and the Kop later applauded us off the pitch. It was a nice touch. Liverpool were the best team in the land at that time. They probably figured another title would turn up at their place, sooner rather than later.

The celebrations started straight after the game. I cracked open a bottle of beer with Bouldy in the dressing-room, still in my muddy Arsenal kit. After that, we got paro on the coach home and ended up in a Cockfosters nightclub until silly o’clock. There was an open-topped bus parade on the Sunday, but everything is a blur to me. The next thing I remember it was breakfast time on Tuesday morning. I was trying to get my keys into my front door, waking up the whole street. I still haven’t got a clue what happened in those 72 hours or so in between. These days, whenever a 22-year-old comes up to me and asks for an autograph, the same thought flashes through my mind: ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, please don’t call me Dad.’

The lads at the club called me ‘Son of George’ because they reckoned I got away with murder. They were probably right. I certainly didn’t get bollocked as much by the manager as the others, even though I was probably the most badly behaved player in the squad. For some reason, George really took a shine to me.

I remember one time when we went to a summer tournament in Miami in 1990. It was a bloody nightmare. The weather was so hot we had to train at 8.30 in the morning. One day, I stood on the sidelines, yawning, scratching my cods, when George jogged over and looked at my hand. It was halfway down my shorts.

‘You all right, Merse?’

‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ I said.

George put his arm around my shoulder. ‘No, no, you sit down, son,’ he said, thinking I’d pulled a groin muscle.

He was worried I might have overdone it in training, but the only thing I’d been overdoing was a little dolphin waxing in my hotel room.

‘Sit out this session, and don’t worry about it,’ he said.

I could see what the rest of the lads were thinking as I lazed around on the sidelines, and it wasn’t complimentary. Moments later, Grovesy and Bouldy started rubbing their own wedding tackles, groaning, hoping they’d get some of the same treatment, but George was having none of it.

That was how it was with me and George, he was good as gold all the time. He always told me up-front when I wasn’t playing, whether that was because he was dropping me or resting me. He knew I couldn’t physically cope with playing five games on the bounce because I’d be knackered. He liked to rest me every now and then, but he always gave me a heads-up. With the other lads, George wouldn’t announce the news until he’d named the team in the Friday tactical meeting. It would come as a shock to them and that was always a nightmare, because the whole squad would make noises and pull faces. George would always pull me to one side on Thursday, so I could tell the lads myself, as if I’d made the decision. He’d never let me roast.

As I went more and more off the rails throughout my Arsenal career, he must have given me a million chances. God knows why. After my run-ins with the law and the drink-driving charge, word got around the club about my problems, and George started to get fed up with the drinking stories as they started to happen more regularly. I was forever in his office for a lecture. If I’d been caught drinking again or misbehaving, he would remind me of my responsibilities, but he’d never threaten to kick me out of the club or sell me, even though I was high maintenance off the pitch.