Tony Adams: The new drug of choice for the Premier League footballer is gambling

The first 45 minutes will be Tony, wandering the stage, describing his journey from first childhood panic attack, to being bullied at school, to becoming so deep in a world of drink that he once left his young son in a pub for three days, to go on a bender.

There were drugs, prostitutes, fights, regular times of soiling the bed; there was prison, a car crash, depression. He’ll tell self-deprecating stories of those times “that are hilarious — but only hilarious because I’m still alive and that’s part of the message, because there are a lot of people like me who are dead.”

The template is his second memoir, Sober, published in 2017, rather than his 1998 bestseller, Addicted. He prefers Sober. “It’s more grown up,” he says. “But sex and sickness sells. The purpose of Sober is to get people clean, to help with people’s mental health. It has more tools, more guidance, more emotional intelligence (for alcoholics and other addicts).”

The tour has five dates — in Wycombe, Portsmouth, Cheltenham, Islington and St Albans — and ticket sales are going well. “I should break just about even and if I make a profit I’ll probably give it to my charity,” he says. “It’s not about money, it’s spreading the message.”

His charity, Sporting Chance, founded in 2000 using the proceeds from Addicted as seed money, has helped more than 1,200 sportspeople through counselling and rehab treatment. “We get more gambling addicts through the clinic now than alcoholics,” Adams, 55, says. “The drug of choice for the Premier League footballer is gambling.” Porn and gaming are other growing “fixes” for young sportspeople with addictive personalities in today’s online-centric world.

I mention that I’ve just been to the EFL Awards, where it was announced that the British Red Cross is replacing Mind as the EFL’s charity partner, and this exasperates him.

“I’m doing no more mental-health days,” he says. “Charities like Mind, the Samaritans, the Red Cross do very well in raising awareness but they don’t have support services. They signpost to the NHS.

“Well, the NHS have 374,000 under-18s on the mental-health waiting list, which is nine months to a year. There’s only 17,000 registered BACP [British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy] practitioners. They can’t clear the backlog and the list is growing, and the thing with mental health is if you need that session, you need that session — and need it now. Six months down the road, you might be dead.

“There’s 18 people per day killing themselves, and that stat hasn’t changed in 50 years — 7.5 million of the adult population are on antidepressants, because not every GP surgery has a mental health nurse and GPs have 15 minutes per appointment, so the easiest thing is to hand out a pill.

“This mental health campaigning, it’s just noise. And it drives me insane.

“More training of practitioners, therapists, counsellors — that’s what we need. I did an NHS thing the other day and the woman organising said, ‘Tony, can you not mention addiction. Talk about your panic attacks, your PTSD, your anxiety, your depressions, but for f*** sake don’t talk about addiction, we’ve got no money and resources . . .” Sorry, Jonathan, I’ve gone off on one . . . ”

Hearing him addressing passionately a cause he has devoted himself to, since going sober at the age of 29, in 1996, takes you back in a funny way to the player Adams was. Front foot, fearless, a leader, a one-off. Those qualities underpinned his 66 England caps, 672 Arsenal appearances, four league titles and six cups won before retirement in 2002. His coaching career, at Wycombe Wanderers, Portsmouth, Gabala in Azerbaijan, Granada in Spain and Feyenoord (where he worked with the academy players), was more chequered, but no less colourful.

His show is “50 per cent mental health, 50 per cent football and should be fun. It’s called Sober, not Sombre.” In its second half, the audience can ask him anything about the game. They won’t find his answers boring.

The best player he played with? “Emmanuel Petit,” he says. Really? “He could play anywhere. We called him The Horse and his goal against Brazil in the 1998 World Cup final summed him up. Manu could play left back, left centre half, midfield. He could actually play as a No 10. The guy was awesome. If you’ve got a five-a-side team, you want him. He made me look good.”

Okay. Arsène Wenger and Sir Alex Ferguson: how do they compare to today’s best coaches? “It’s really interesting. Alex was solid, with a system of play, built three great teams and was very good at assistants — like Steve McClaren and Carlos Queiroz, who were the Peps and Klopps of their day. Alex was a manager, like a director of football, who oversaw everything.

“Arsène kept things very simple. His team-talks were short. Offence, defence, set plays, go and play. Because we had great players — and it always comes back to the players.

“People think, ‘What are you talking about Tony?’, but it’s true. George Graham, in some ways, was very offensive. With him it was a full press. I was up to the halfway line, a very high line, and our front two was our first press and I used to scream from the back, ‘press, press, press, press’.

“When Arsène came, the first pre-season we had up in Scotland he said, ‘Tone, I want you to drop off a bit. We’re going to counterattack. We had very quick forwards — Marc Overmars and Nicolas Anelka — a link man in Dennis [Bergkamp] and people who could carry the ball distances in Ray Parlour and Manu and Patrick [Vieira]. We practiced winning the ball in our own defensive third or midfield and counterattacking. In some ways we were quite defensive under Arsène and offensive with George.”

Adams bumped into Paul Scholes recently and reminisced about the great Arsenal-United rivalry of their era. He met Ferguson and told him that the year United won the treble (1998-99), Arsenal should have won the double. “Aye, but the year you did the double [1997-98] we should have done the treble,” Ferguson replied.

Adams believes Arsenal’s 2001-02 double-winning side were possibly better than the 2003-04 Invincibles — but that Graham’s 1990-91 title-winners were better than both. “We lost one game and I was in prison,” he says. “I say to people, ‘I was invincible in 91’. That squad was incredible.”

He tells a funny story about Wenger trying to ban offsides in training games. “I walked off in Switzerland at a training camp. I said, ‘No that’s not for me’. I got so angry. I was newly recovering and didn’t have the booze to suppress my feelings.

“Why was I angry? It made me look silly, and I don’t like looking silly. It was great for the forwards, there were people all round the place scoring goals and the score was 10-10. That’s not my game. I want to keep a clean sheet here and I want to have offsides. I’m not having forwards stand behind me. That’s schoolboy stuff.”

We end, talking about Steve Rowley, the great former Arsenal scout who died a fortnight ago. Adams was his first discovery. “It was 1979 and he’d just started working for the club. He invited me to go training as a 13-year-old on a Thursday night at Highbury, so my dad took me up there and we went in through the marble hall. Tommy Coleman, the youth team coach, said who sent you? I don’t know Steve Rowley.

“My dad said let’s go. We were walking out and Tommy shouted us back ‘you’ve come all the way in from Dagenham, while you’re here, go on…’ I was that close to never being an Arsenal player.

“And then Steve was there for 35 years, building the best scouting system on the planet. In these days of agent and technical-led recruitment, Steve showed there’s no substitute for the old graft of watching matches, and face-to-face dealings with the player’s family. He’d get my mum flowers every year, he came to Sunday lunch.”

Until very recently — four decades on from spotting him — Rowley was still coming to Sunday lunch, driving from his house in Emerson Park to the home in the Cotswolds Adams shares with his wife, Poppy, and their children Atticus, Hector and Iris. “You talk about my statue [outside the Emirates]. Steve Rowley should have one,” Adams says. “He was Arsenal through and through, the DNA.”