When Arsenal stand on the brink of their biggest league game for more than 20 years, when the team is stuttering, when they are about to face Manchester City, their greatest rivals, away from home, in front of a hostile crowd, listening to Tony Adams assessing the leadership of the side is more valuable than ever.
Adams was the Arsenal captain for 14 years, from 1988 until his retirement in May 2002. He was handed the armband when he was 21 and kept it, even through his struggle with alcoholism, for the next 14 years. He took Arsenal to league titles in three different decades. He knows how to lead.
Adams said before the start of this season that he believed Declan Rice, not Martin Odegaard, should be the Arsenal skipper and that manager Mikel Arteta should step in to make the decision rather than leaving it to a players’ vote.
That did not happen and Odegaard retained the captaincy. But concerns about his lack of leadership persisted and, with Odegaard and Bukayo Saka struggling with injury, Rice has been given a battlefield promotion and has led the team in recent weeks.
Adams, though, remains concerned at both what he sees as a lack of decisiveness from the manager over the issue and the lack, until now, of a skipper who can carry out Arteta’s instructions on the pitch in times of adversity.
‘After I made the comment about Odegaard before the start of the season,’ Adams says, ‘Arteta went to the players and said: “Who do you want as captain?” And they all went…well, they’re not going to say it to him, are they? They said: “We love Odegaard. Hooray.”
‘Why do you need the manager then? You pick your captain, you get your rapport, you have got your vice-captains and stuff and you create a bond. I look at Pep Guardiola and Bernardo Silva in the Carabao Cup Final win over Arsenal and you can see an instant chemistry there.
‘There was a leader. He was there if there’s a problem. I didn’t see the same with Arsenal. I didn’t see Arteta going: “Right, we’re ten minutes into the second half. We’re struggling and we can’t get out, the left back’s out.”
‘Back in the day, we’re at Leeds away, and they were press, press, press, and we had their end behind us and they’re coming against us, and we’re trying to get the ball and trying to play it out at the back, and Arsene is shouting: “Tony, get up”.
‘I got it. We pushed up to the half-way line and we started to turn them. I got it. But there was no relationship with anyone on the pitch that Arteta could do that with, in my opinion, in that game.
‘When I said the stuff about Odegaard at the start of the season, I thought he just needed the freedom to go and play without the extra stuff added. And I think Declan is a super leader and super player, and I’ve said, I feel that he should be Arsenal captain anyway.’
Adams smiled when he was asked whether there were similarities between the set-piece excellence that Arteta’s team has perfected and the routines that his side practised under George Graham and, later, Arsene Wenger.
‘The levels of set-pieces – and the contacts and the blocks – it’s gone too far now,’ Adams says. ‘But we used to use blocks. Viv Anderson taught me how to do it, to be completely honest, when he came from Nottingham Forest.
‘He used to take people out. We had a little competition during the ‘89 season. He got five. I think I got six. We used to block for each other. But now, if you’re teaching defenders how to defend from corners…it used to be ball, player.
‘What’s that song? “Looking back over my shoulder?” Who sung that? But we used to do that all the time. Ball and player, ball and player. Now it’s just, “I’m going to grab hold of you”. How do you teach a defender to do that? What’s that about?’
Rice is likely to be skipper again at The Etihad on Sunday and there have been signs that the captaincy is inspiring him to even greater heights. If Arsenal are to pull off their greatest result for two decades, they will need leadership like they have never needed it before.
1996: Reflections on the year that changed my life by Tony Adams with Ian Ridley is published by Floodlit Dreams in paperback, £11.99 and in hardback exclusively at http://www.floodlitdreams.com, £14.99.
