We look back at The Tuesday Club, Arsenal's infamous weekly meeting in The Orange Tree for a piss-up of legendary proportions. The drinking club landed Arsenal's biggest names on front pages, in court and in jail. We look back at how it all unfolded.
The Tuesday Club. It began on the back of George Graham giving the players Wednesdays off. Every Tuesday, Arsenal’s biggest characters gathered - not at the training ground, but at The Orange Tree. Tony Adams, Lee Dixon, Paul Merson, Perry Groves, Steve Bould, Ray Parlour…it became sacred. A ritual. A release. A piss-up. Chaos dressed as camaraderie.
Graham sensed something wasn’t right. Every day the lads arrived in their tracksuits, Tuesdays they came dressed in their going-out clobber. Adams was the Pied Piper. Parlour recalled, “He was just too much fun to be around. If Tony said he was going out, I followed him like a little puppy.”
The stories were endless. Adams crashing into a garden wall at 70mph and serving 56 days in the slammer. Adams and Parlour soaking a Spurs fan with a fire extinguisher who cried to the press, “I looked like a drowned rat.” Adams dancing naked on stage with a ripper in Billericay. Parlour glassed in Butlins. Bould devouring nine dinners on the coach. David Seaman leaving his wife for a promotions girl from Highbury. Adams and Parlour chased through a Hong Kong red-light district by an axe-wielding taxi driver.
Not everyone followed. Martin Keown refused to join in and found himself on the fringes. New signings struggled to keep up, with the exception of Jimmy Carter, who earned his stripes by pissing on Perry Groves twice at the bar on his first night.Then came Wenger. Training on Wednesdays. Nutrition, not negronis. The Tuesday Club was dismantled, but not overnight. Bould ordered “35 pints and a small glass of wine” when inducting Gilles Grimandi. The ghosts didn’t go quietly.
Adams reflected later on how the drinking culture at the club sunk its teeth into him:
“All my mentors took me down the pub or took me to the bookies, that’s what we did and I didn’t need much dragging, let’s just say that.
“It was like a light switch turned on for me. It was like, ‘this is my world, this is unbelievable this stuff’. The way it surprised all my thoughts and feelings, it was like ‘hallelujah!’
“My life off the pitch was a complete mess but I took that drink and I was king for a day, it was like ‘wow, fantastic!’”
Lee Dixon managed to dip his toe and mostly resist its destructive charms:
“I used to join the Tuesday Club once a month, but others like Tony would be there every week. It was an important part of the team, where the strong bonds were formed that took us to a couple of league titles.
“And if you didn’t join in, then you would be ostracised. I remember Martin Keown was an example of that. He told me that in his first spell at the club it was expected of him to have a drink with the lads from time to time. He is very strong-minded and didn’t join in with the drinking sessions. He might have a pint but he wasn’t part of the group and as a result he was cut off a little. At the time, that must have been very difficult for him. I admired him for having that strength of character.”
Ray Parlour simply found the fun of it all too much to turn down:
“The drinking was relentless. Saturday night after a game, then Sunday afternoon was the best drink of the week, usually in the pub down our way.
“We were probably drinking too much but the enjoyment of it, and just being around Tony at that time, was far too much fun to turn down."
The drink brought them together, bound them like brothers, but like all the best things in life, it gives less than it takes. Arsenal lifted the league trophy in ’91 before a long period in the wilderness. They became a cup team. The Tuesday Club ran parallel to that. Adams’ decision to sober up was as much the catalyst for Arsenal’s later success as anything else. One year later, in a full circle moment, he lifted the trophy as captain.
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