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Tottenham temperance rings last orders

Sean O'Conor

O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! Othello Act II, Sc 3.

Tottenham Hotspur boss Harry Redknapp has announced he will ban alcohol from his club next season, after defender Ledley King ended up in handcuffs following a nightclub fracas this week.

"I'll implement a strong rule next season that drinking is a no-no here," Redknapp said, heralding a new era. "There's still too much of a drinking culture in English football but it's not as bad as it used to be."

King's drunken delinquency is only the latest in a long, long line of alcohol-inspired misbehaviour, stretching back through English football history. More than soccer violence, excessive drinking is the real English disease, an unwelcome limpet on the body of the beautiful game in its homeland, a hanger-on who pretends to be your best buddy but succeeds in messing you up.

A precocious adulthood, too much money to spend, hours of idle time, the lack of a settled home life or emotional maturity coupled with the role of the pub in British working-class life has led generations of footballers from these isles to join forces with the bottle.

Jimmy Greaves, the outstanding English goalscorer of his generation, was poached by AC Milan in 1961 after netting 124 times in 157 games for Chelsea. But strangled by the monastic discipline and the lack of an alehouse culture in Italy, Greaves was back in London only 12 games later. During his brief sojourn in Milan, Greaves learnt to give his club chaperone the slip at night to hot-foot it to the nearest bar for liquid reassurance.

Fast forward half a century and England's first foreign coach, Swede Sven-Goran Eriksson, confesses he learnt a new word from his time with the FA - "session".

Surely no other soccer nation has such an ingrained allegiance to the drink as its motherland, but the tide has turned as men from other cultures have become the majority of players and coaches here. When Terry Venables took over Barcelona in 1984, he confessed he was amazed none of the players drank, but twelve years later his England squad at Euro '96 famously trashed an aeroplane with their 'dentist's chair' antics, a drunken revelry they repeated following

As long as a team is winning or a player is performing, is it ok for him to indulge off-field? Whoever has coached Brazil legend Romario aside, this has been a conundrum for English managers over the years - how not to disturb the equilibrium of their star players while ensuring their performances and fitness do not suffer by an excess of the amber nectar.

Venables tolerated off-field drinking with England because the team was playing well, the same argument George Best's various coaches would presumably have profered if pressed to explain why they had not sacked him for hitting the bars every night. In 1979, Brian Clough famously made his Nottingham Forest team, including current Aston Villa boss Martin O'Neill, clear a table of drinks the night before their League Cup Final with Southampton, to the point that some of them had to be carried up the stairs: They won 3-2. Forest goalkeeper Mark Crossley tried the same trick the night before an FA Cup quarter-final in 1990 and unbeknownst to Clough, spent the night in a police cell; but the next day he dropped a clanger and Forest lost.

Paul McGrath was one of the outstanding players of the 1990s and a winner of the 1993 PFA Player of the Year Award, no mean feat for a defender. He also played 83 times for Eire and wore the green in two World Cups, memorably neutralizing the otherwise stratospheric Roberto Baggio in USA '94. Yet McGrath was alcoholic, sometimes played drunk and at one point even slashed his wrists, before turning out to play on the Saturday.

His autobiography, 'Back from the Brink', was one of a string of confessional memoirs released in the 1990s revealing the darker side of life as a top footballer in England, alongside Tony Adams' 'Addicted', Paul Merson's 'Rock Bottom' and Tony Cascarino's 'Full Time'.

A common theme among them was how alcohol masked an inner turmoil which came back to haunt the drinker. As McGrath put it, "If you are out for a session with the boys, you are not going to talk to them about these underlying problems."

McGrath states that Manchester United boss Ron Atkinson turned a blind eye to players drinking as long as they gave their all for 90 minutes once a week. By contrast, Atkinson's successor at Old Trafford Alex Ferguson clamped down on player drinking and adopted a boarding-schoolesque discipline over his boys when they hit the town, a surveillance strategy which failed spectacularly however when his players went on a 13-hour bender at Christmas in 2007, which ended with a rape allegation against one of them.

It is a culture which bewilders foreigners to this day. Lars Leese, Barnsley's goalkeeper in their Premiership season of 1997-'98, wrote a charming, yet jaw-dropping account of English player antics in his book 'The Keeper of Dreams'. And Leese came to Yorkshire from Germany, which should not have been too high a cultural leap. But there remains something exceptionally hedonistic and primitive about the English when it comes to drinking. Like hooliganism, alcoholism is not a football problem but a social habit. Just go to any provincial city on a Friday night and you have all you need to know.

But the game has changed even if its location has not. Foreign players outnumber Brits in the Premier League. Fitness coaching has come on in leaps and bounds from the days of the magic sponge 'physio', such are the riches at stake in winning trophies or avoiding relegation. What passed for a performance analyst in the 1980s was Ronnie Moran, from Liverpool's 'Boot Room', pen and notepad in hand at the side of the field. Now the urbane sports science graduate pores over ProZone statistics on his laptop.

Bryan Robson was perhaps the last of the old school when he fostered a drinking culture at Middlesbrough in the late 1990s, an attitude which seemed out of step with the zeitgeist and led to open condemnation in the press from recovering alcoholic Merson. Robson's penchant for a pint was well known when he was a player, but it did not seem to matter when he was captaining United and England so magnificently. As a manager however, it was time to call last orders on his cultural beliefs, particularly after Merson's outburst and Boro's Paul Gascoigne checking in to a drying-out clinic in 1999.

English football's imbibing culture was largely ushered out of the door in the late 1990s and early noughties, but as Ledley King proved this week, it is far from extinct. Pick up one of the toilet rolls masquerading as free London newspapers any day after a big Chelsea game and you will see images of Blues players staggering out of exclusive capital hotspots.

Players' bars I have frequented in recent years are now booze-free zones for the playing staff. While their families, friends and assorted hangers-on knock back the drinks after the final whistle, I have never seen a footballer touch a drop. Twas never thus. The post-match pint was the norm for decades.

From speaking to players, I have concluded there seems to be a tacit understanding with coaches now that the odd big night out is good for morale, but no more than once a week will be tolerated and only then the night before a day off training. One Premier League player told me he once turned up for training without having slept the night before, but vowed never to do it again. Even in the close-season, when footballers enjoy the only freedom they have all year, they still have to watch what they are drinking and go jogging to burn it off every morning. Turning up overweight and out of shape for pre-season is no longer an option.

But while the drink-dragon has yet to be slain, the darkest days are probably in the past. When Redknapp, the most traditional coach working in the Premier League today, a manager who would not have looked out of place in the 1970s, commits to an abstinent regime, it really does confirm a sea-change is afoot.

Abusing alcohol is nothing new in football, let alone in England. It is a social problem which has existed here since written records began. As far back as 98 A.D., the great Roman historian Tacitus described the English's continental forefathers as a warlike race who when they were not fighting liked nothing more than feasting, drinking and sleeping. Two thousand years later, debate on Britain's wassailing and its negative consequences is still raging, as if the temperance and prohibition movements never happened.

Like it or not, this is the nation born of drunken Vikings on the rampage, of Hogarth's Gin Lane, Oliver Reed, booze cruises and teenage binge-drinking. It is too ingrained in our identity to eliminate. Imagine a team winning a trophy and not spraying champagne around in celebration, or a bride's father not toasting the happy couple with alcohol. Actually, I spoke to Reading's Shane Long, then 17, after his team's promotion to the Premier League in 2006, and he swore he would give the bottle of bubbly he was clasping to his mother rather than drink it; while my teetotal American ex-father in law toasted our nuptuals with a can of Diet Coke!

Even at the height of Liverpool's success in the 1970s and '80s, the greatest club side in Europe would stop off for fish and chips and swill cans of beer on the bus back from games they had invariably been victorious in.

So what makes Redknapp's conversion to teetotalism interesting is that it has happened within what used to be one of the most trenchant corners of domestic life. English football proudly wore its dinosaur credentials on its sleeve until the globalisation of the 21st century and billions of pounds of TV money woke it up from its drunken haze.

This game has changed. And while fans are not about to forsake the taverns before and after games and breweries are loath to withdraw sponsorship from teams with such a target audience of potential quaffers, for Ledley King and the other players in the spotlight at the centre of it all, the future is surely dry.

Sean O'Conor

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