And it is my pleasure to welcome to the Arsecast, Martin Keown. Very good. Pronunciation.

Yes. You did well there. Keown, I've been called Keown for years. But if you read the book, John Watson made me say Keown, it should have been Keown. So anyway, the Irish can say it, but the English have a trouble.

Well, we have a very similar sort of background, even if you're a couple of years older than I am. But I was born in England to Irish parents in the 70s, which I think goes some way to explain why I became an Arsenal fan at that time because of all the Irish players. I was absolutely fascinated. I know we're sort of going to jump around a little bit here, but I was fascinated by, you know, what your dad said to you at one point about, he came to England, he enjoyed the benefits of the country, and he said to you, you're English. This is when you were deciding about, well, not deciding, but when your international career was discussion, you know. And my father would have been completely the opposite. He would never have said, you're English, but it is a sort of quirk of the football world at that time that you represented England at a very young age and therefore couldn't change. I

think my father was, he was ahead of the. And it was quite magnanimous of him, really, because the Irish, there's no one that pine for home like the Irish. There's no one who talks about so fondly of their homestead than the Irish. So, you know, although maybe the other people out there who claim just to be his home sweet home is the same for everyone. But my dad was like he said it it was quite a big message really and i've it's something i've actually shared with other people that arrive in england and don't really see themselves as english maybe in america it's a lot more open you know america you know everyone's like suddenly they become american as that when they arrive there maybe there's something good about that and the english can be a bit, you're a blow in, you know, and you have to take time to be accepted. Sure. And so, but you have to want to feel part of the place as well. And so my father helped me to feel that way. Although growing up in England, you know, around those problems with the IRA bombings, and, you know, we saw those real things happening, didn't we? We were coming in for a lot of stick and discrimination from local people we had a small supermarket come off license people started to boycott that yeah and i was very much known as an irish so and so within the area so not english no

it's english yeah it's funny because um when i was in school in england till till 10 when we moved back to ireland i, you know, I was Irish in school in England. The minute I went back to Ireland, I was a Brit for a while, you know, until you lose the accent. Yeah, you're kind of a

plastic paddy, aren't you, when you arrive in Ireland and they don't see you as one of theirs. Yeah. The English don't certainly see you as, we had that name up on the front of the shop you know kewin it was uh it was advertising where we were from sure so that made it difficult for people to kind of accept us in but i was that's where kind of my character is being built and standing up for myself and not being um you know allowing people to try to bully me i'm a father you know as young kids you know guys you need to get your fists up and protect yourself maybe went a bit too far in that direction but you know there were issues there were a lot of issues growing up and um yeah in the football world you have to look after yourself as well it's a ruthless business sure culling exercise of trying to get into the top level you know it's doggy dog situation we know you've got to be the best but then you've got to become a team player do you know like at one stage you're treading on everybody to get where you need to then you need everybody to be successful in a team of 11 so yes it's a change of mindset once you get to the professional level i

mean that was what struck me when you talked about that when you talked about those formative experiences and and you know the the challenges let's say of being an Irish family in England at that time, where there was a level of confrontation, let's say, from an early age. And it, you know, having read the book, it's a sort of a running theme through the book with you, which is part of your character, which is what made you such a great player. But those confrontations, whether it's about not being, as you said a bit earlier, not being bullied, or about standing up for what you think is right, or standing up for what you think is the best way to do things on the pitch and off the pitch. Like, you know, the idea that there are maybe, let's say there are two sides to a person. There's the guy that's on the pitch and the guy that's off the pitch. Is there somewhere in the middle as well where there's the guy that's on the pitch, there's the guy that's off the pitch, but even when you're not necessarily on the pitch, there's still a part of that in your character when you're dealing with the sort of the rigors of professional football, you know, from contracts and transfers and injuries and physio, all those kinds of things? Well,

if we look at, you know, I was obviously, I had a set of principles that I tried to adhere to. I talk about what my father said about, you know, where I belong. But in terms of when I went to live in London, I was sent there with a clear message of not to, you know, pee my money up against the wall, which, you know, a drinker son don't discuss religion uh don't gamble don't play cards you know like it was kind of a surreal conversation thinking why do I need to know this but really within a few weeks of being at the club I realized I needed to know all of it and I tried I tried tread a certain path. And really the principles of what I was about kind of, you might say got in the way a little bit. But if I was to say to you, you know, like I'm fighting for my livelihood, I'm fighting for my standard of living, and I will sit in a boardroom to do a contract, and I'll fight just as hard as I do on the pitch. I don't separate the two. I probably got a bit too emotional around that negotiations with George Graham at the beginning, but I felt that I'd seen a lot of good men tried and failed to make it at Arsenal, but there I was, sticking to the criteria, being in the first team, playing all these games, 23 on the bounce, and only being offered a £50 a week rise. Now, in football in terms, that is not a great deal of money. So I just felt, okay, then I'm going to decide now, not you, I'll decide my future. So I stepped off. How old were you at that point? 19, 20? 19. And it's like, what makes it about a 19 year old that that does that and what you know it's kind of like also the first thing we talked about was not my my money that was earning was talking about what i saw as a lack of professionalism the likes of charlie nickler's you know getting changed into his leathers on the way back from old trafford for us to detour through the west end so he could be dropped off, so he could join the nightlife.

And I thought, hold on

a minute, this is unprofessional. So I knew right from wrong from a very young age. And that's what we discussed with George Graham. And then, oh, by the way, Martin, your contract, here you go, 50 pounds. No, no, no, sorry. You know, I'm here. We want to make the club, you know, be successful, but now you need to talk about me. He had no time to talk about me at all. George had to rush off. He was going on holiday with his wife. He'd just arrived at the club. So I leapt, but I didn't look really where I was leaping, and I ended up at Aston Villa. So watching all these guys, this youth team that I played in, the club doesn't really celebrate. Not that I want to be celebrated, but the group that came out of that 83 group was quite astonishing. Six players went to play full international football, eight in the first team. And, you know, I was like, OK, I'm off. And I waved goodbye to, you know, what was a lot of good players. I thought every club was stopped with youth teams, with that sort of group. But when I got to Villa, that wasn't the case. I mean, just to put it in context

again, you're 19. I think players these days have a lot of advisors. They've got family members around them even, or they've got agents who are looking after all of this kind of stuff for them. But this was sort of you going to bat for yourself. And it is when you're that age, when you're coming up against authority, which George Graham had at Arsenal Football Club, and you're also trying to balance the opportunity that you know you have at this amazing club, which you love. That must be really difficult to then sort of say, I could be causing myself a problem here. It might backfire on me, but I believe that what I'm about to say is the right thing to say and I'm adhering to my principles. But maybe if I just don't say anything and just take the 50 pounds and then, you know, I get these chances in the first team and then I can sort it out a bit later on. Like, I think there would be a lot of 19-year and I probably would have been among them who would not have been happy necessarily with that situation but in order like maybe not to jeopardize the chance wouldn't have said anything no

but this was my sort of third contract that I was about to sign for the club we were I was in competition with Tony Adams as well the two of us really the sensible thing to do was to sat us both down and say, look, you two are going to be the future of the club. You're already ahead of the curve. Tony was in the team at 17. I was in at 19. When I left, we played the same number of games. We were playing the last three or four matches together with O'Leary with us. So, you know, that would have been the sensible thing to do. But I just felt, look, guys, you know, been a difficult journey for me i've now proved to you what i can do and now someone else is going to benefit from my services i have to be as ruthless as you are you've so you've you've sent a lot of guys out the door here telling them not good enough i'm telling you i am good enough you know i'm good enough i've meet the criteria i've ticked all the boxes i'm off i don't think they expected that and fryer when he opened this you know this ledger huge great big ledger and arsenal in the red didn't expect me to turn around and say no no don't don't pay me any money i don't want my you know my beloved arsenal to be in debt he didn't expect that you know um so i was thinking a little bit differently i i mentioned this all to tony where you sit down and you'll hear that in the audit the actual meeting of me and tony and he talks about my principles were you know he wished he had principles because he didn't um and i sort of stood up to it um but the thing was at least i get a second chance i get to come back to relive it all. It's unfinished business. And it's not a smooth journey on the way back. You're never going to be when you, you know, you turn your back on the club, because that's how some fans would have seen it. But once it came good for me, it tasted, you know, it counts for double for me, in a way. When you go and have that kind of success to come back, it was really sweet in the end. I mean, let's

talk about that then. You went to Aston Villa. You explain a scenario in the book where Doug Ellis, who is the Aston Villa chairman, at one point, I think you're sitting in the back of the car and he says, well, I paid more for Martin than I really wanted to. And again, you're a really young man and you're finding your way in the game and self-belief and talent are unquestionable, but there is something to deal with when the chairman of the football club that you've gone to has basically said, I don't think you're worth as much as I paid for you. Some might say that's like a thing. I'll prove this guy wrong. The way you tell it, I'm not necessarily sure that's what he was getting at. It was just, you know, an off the cuff remark and not a nice thing to say. We'll talk about Everton as well, where you've gone there and maybe the support you need as a young player to develop and to grow in the best possible way isn't there from some of your more senior teammates. How did you view those challenges, you know, from Doug Alice, from players at Everton like Kevin Ratcliffe, you know, who looked at you and didn't necessarily try and help you in the way that you might expect. Disdainful

is the word you're really about. That could be the word. Disdainfully, yeah. Let's start with, to keep it in order, Doug Ellis. You know, so I was sat in the back of that car and Doug had gone too far. I mean, Arsenal were looking for half a million pounds for me, you know, at that time. £500,000 was a lot of money, but the wages just didn't stack up. Again, that was something in the book that I really wanted to underline because it was kind of made to look as if I was pushed. But no, I jumped. I didn't. You know, Arsenal wanted to keep me but they couldn't get that figure for a reason they couldn't get or convince the tribunal to pay that money because the wages they'd offered me was so low that the fee was set for 125 000. and every time i played 50 games it would rise to 200 grand and that's how it was set out so i thought aston villa actually they've got a hell of a deal for me a hell of a deal so i i thought it was really disrespectful from doug ellis and i just thought i need to tell him now we joked about that many times um in in the future about how i reminded him and he would say to me i never i never put this in the book because i i didn't want to that i was the best signing he ever made, value for money signing he ever made. But I wanted to prove that, and I knew he'd made a mistake in that comment. But I also knew the pressure the manager was under, and he was sacked within six matches. Graham Turner was sacked. I arrived there. The pre-season, for me, was really poor. We were hardly running. We were just jogging. No intensity, no real direction. I went to see the assistant manager. Again, I'm still 19 years of age. Went to see the assistant manager to say, look, hold on, what are we doing here? We're going to get relegated. I was the first person who mentioned the word relegated. And that's what happened. It was far too good a group to go down. It was stocked with really quality players. Tony DiRigo went on to play for England, Mark Walters, Paul Elliott. You had an ageing Andy Gray there, but could still have offered something. Nigel Spinks, you're a pin-cut winner. There were some, you know, Alan Evans. There were good players in there, so it was a travesty that we got relegated. But if you're not right and you take liberties, you're not successful. And I could smell it a mile off. So the thing was, what made me a bit unpopular was actually mentioning it before everyone else. Although, to be honest, I enjoyed my time at Villa. And when Graham came in, Graham Taylor rescued that football club. It was on a slippery slide. He said to me afterwards that three divisions if he hadn't gone there. He was an incredibly successful type personality. His first meeting with the players was really impactful, probably the most impactful of any manager that I came across, and he turned that football club around.

The picture you paint of professional football at that time is night and day, obviously, from where we are today and the kind of environments in which players work and train and grow. And in particular, young players, where there are things that you were asked to do and your peers were asked to do as young players, as trainees and apprentices that, you know, no young player is ever going to be asked to do these days. What do you make of the, I suppose, the more modern outlook on that, the more holistic approach to developing players? Is there something in the come up hard and it kind of teaches you life lessons and teaches you how to be on the pitch? Or are maybe the methods today more conducive to getting the best out of a young footballer? Sure, you don't have that hardship, but what you do have is a more rounded approach to coaching, to life, to dealing with the pressures of the job.

Yeah, but I think that you can, if you're not careful lose out on some of the skill set that the player needs you know because like don how used to say to me we had we used to do duties so someone would do the passageway someone would do the home home dressing room someone would do the aways and someone would the i'm listening to you and someone would do the small the gaffer's office and the medical room there's's four sets of duty that we'd all do. There'd be four first year apprentices and four second. And every Friday we'd arrive back at the ground, we'd train at the ground and we would do those duties. We would clean the floors, we would polish the dressing rooms. And in doing so that we were building a sort of an affinity with what is to be our second home in the future so playing at highbury held no fears for me because it was i spent many an hour there you know respectfully cleaning we we would go onto the pitch we would you know the ground staff needed us we had to repair the pitch we'd be in the terraces looking out from you know okay they can't even see us from the back end of the east stand that's interesting you know clearing out litter or whatever it was we would do these extra jobs um and don now used to say well if i can't ask you to you know to go and clean the bath or the dressing room floor you do it properly how can i ask you to mark the best player in the opposite opposing team from set place set pieces if i can't give you, you can't carry out a small task in the dressing room. So everything was sort of linked to carrying out the job properly. We moved half with Steve Berkenshaw. I'll put that in the book. Steve, bless him. He was a great man. He was in charge of recruitment for this incredible youth team. We moved house for him. I didn't know he had a piano that we had to take over the back wall but we did he had he even had a model aircraft in the in the roof in the attic i don't know how he got it through that i mean everything went through the small play the small piece sure um so but we you know we got what did we get 20 quid, five reach for doing it. Uh, we could, we, we weren't allowed to go home. We had to stay there for three days extra, but these were all on the list of things to do. Sure. Um, guys, you got, you thought you were going home. You're not, I'm moving house and you're going to do it for me. So it was endless, you know, cleaning the manager's car. Um, but looking back, they were, they were good days, you great to be around. Everyone would want to do the away dressing room because you've got a chance to go in and see. Maybe if Liverpool or Man United were in town, you'd go in and see some of the players. There'd be a right mess, the away team dressing room. Some of the clubs left it, but Liverpool always left it tidy and nicely. You kind of judge the opponent by the way they left the away team dressing room.

Okay.