“When I first came to Arsenal, I realised the back four were all university graduates in the art of defending. As for Tony Adams, I consider him to be a doctor of defence.”
– Arsene Wenger, 1997
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Had any of Arsenal’s famous back four actually been university graduates, or Tony Adams been in possession of a doctorate, for that matter, their specialist subjects would surely have been arts, film and the humanities. While they may have been scientific in their approach to defending and practically mathematical in their use of the offside trap, it was their pervasive artistic influence which elevated them above their contemporaries as footballers and renaissance men. While many still laud them for their impeccable positional play, their determination, organisation and penchant for unerring tackles, there are even more who remember them subconsciously from film, literature, music and media. They are amongst that rarified group of footballers who have transcended the normal bounds of the sport, and been splashed in broad red and white brushstrokes across the canvas of British pop culture as well.
Without their mutual understanding of the sweet science of miserly defending, the famous back four might never have burst forth onto the cultural scene. Aided ably by David Seaman in goal and eventually open to an auxiliary member in the simian guise of Martin Keown, the original line-up of their creative collective consisted of Tony Adams and Steve Bould in the centre of the defence, with Lee Dixon and Nigel Winterburn at right-back and left-back respectively. These men made up the canonical back four, and together they conquered English football. Surveying their late eighties and early nineties heyday in hindsight, theirs was an incredible record. Under the pragmatic management of George Graham, they helped Arsenal to win two league titles, a League Cup, an FA Cup and a UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup, which is still the club’s only piece of major European silverware to date.
While they suffered something of a lull after Graham’s departure in 1995, the arrival of Arsene Wenger revitalised their prospects. Famously, though some had written them off as increasingly uncultured and unsuited to the demands of modern football, Wenger’s expansive approach to the game saw Bould and Adams cultivate new roles as ball-playing centre-backs, while Dixon and Winterburn were also given a new lease of life on the flanks. Ageing at this point, Bould was increasingly usurped by Keown, and was first to leave the club in the summer of 1999. Winterburn left a year later, with Dixon and Adams retiring in 2002. In that time, the constituent members of the famous back four had added another two league titles and two FA Cups to their name.
With the famous back four first coming together in 1988, they graced the pitch altogether for just over a decade. This was something of a golden age for English football more generally, with the national team still exciting people at tournaments – barring the 1994 World Cup, of course – and the popular appeal of the Premier League at perhaps an all-time high. Adams, Bould, Dixon and Winterburn all made appearances for England, though Bould and Winterburn were restricted to only two apiece. That said, the famous back four were a feature of the national consciousness at both club and international level. As such, it’s hardly a surprise that they accumulated serious cultural cachet.
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Adams was no doubt the most celebrated of the back four, with his dual captaincy of Arsenal and England giving him a semi-religious aura. He was an icon, and like any icon he had a close relationship with the high arts. He has inspired musical tributes, not least serving as the muse for Tony Adams by Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros as well as featuring in the lyrics of Ali in the Jungle (“Like Ali in the jungle… / Like Adams in the dock) by former soft rock darlings The Hours. While there has been much debate over whether or not The Hours intended to reference Tony Adams as opposed to Sam, Gerry or indeed Ansel – mainly on internet forums circa the late noughties – the general consensus is that the lyric pertains to the Arsenal legend’s arrest and subsequent jail sentence for drink driving in 1990, this at the height of his struggle with alcoholism.
Once his alcohol dependency became public at around the same time that Wenger arrived at the club, Adams started to make his own forays into the world of art, music and literature. In an interview with Sky Sports in 2008, former teammate Ray Parlour described how Adams channelled his creativity as part of his recovery process. “We went from closing the curtains at seven o’clock and trying to get rid of our hangovers from two days before, to Tony going all scientific,” Parlour said. “He started reading literature to me and poems and I’d be like: ‘Tony, we’ve got a big game tomorrow mate, and you’re reading me a poem – you’re supposed to be kicking the players!’”
With rumours of Adams reading poetry in the dressing room soon doing the rounds in the media, his cerebral evolution became common knowledge. Perhaps this influenced later creatives and inspired them to make artistic homage to him, in that they knew he was a kindred spirit and an author of sorts, too. This would explain why, more than any of his fellow defenders, Adams has attracted so much cultural appreciation. He has been the subject of statuary, prints and paintings as well as songwriting, though his reputation as a theatre-goer is yet to yield a dramatic adaptation of his life and times.
While Adams might be the most highbrow of the famous back four by reputation, he was not the only literary bod amongst them. In an interview with Nick Hornby in The Guardian at the turn of the millennium, Adams admitted that he had recommended Yasmina Reza’s play Art to Lee Dixon and his wife, “and we had a good chat about that afterwards.” While Adams, Bould, Dixon and Winterburn are yet to be immortalised on stage, they have managed the next best thing and been at the heart of at least one screenplay. Having entered the literary cannon via Hornby’s book Fever Pitch, their heroics in keeping a clean sheet at Anfield ’89 served as part of the denouement to the feature film.
Early on in Fever Pitch, protagonist Paul Ashworth says of the youth side he trains: “We might make an Arsenal defence of them yet.” With the film released eight years after Arsenal’s triumph at Anfield, the performances of the famous back four in the interim no doubt earned them the scriptwriters’ praise. Ahead of the 2012 Kicking and Screening football film festival at the Screen on the Green in Islington, Adams introduced Fever Pitch alongside Dixon and several other former teammates. If the film has done much for the cultural significance of the famous back four and their first league title together, then at least they have been suitably appreciative in return.
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Though Fever Pitch is doubtlessly the film in which the famous back four feature most heavily, two of them also make an indirect appearance in nineties cult comedy Plunkett & Macleane. Starring Robert Carlyle and Jonny Lee Miller as a zany pair of eighteenth-century highwaymen, the film also features two minor characters known as Dixon and Winterburn, played by Ben Miller and Alexander Armstrong respectively. This is apparently an oblique tribute to Arsenal’s dogged full-backs, though whether the real Dixon and Winterburn have any knowledge of this whatsoever is doubtful. Nonetheless, it counts as a cultural hat tip, even if it is rather more obscure than their contribution to the dance routines in The Full Monty.
While learning their moves early on in the film, the unemployed steelworkers-come-strippers of Sheffield decided to base part of their routine on the Arsenal offside trap. Drilled into the famous back four during the George Graham era, the sight of their arms shooting up in perfect synchronisation became an icon image of eighties and nineties football. In The Full Monty, Horse says of one of their dance moves: “It’s the Arsenal offside trap, isn’t it? Whenever any bugger looks like scoring, we all step forwards in a line and wave our arms about like a fairy.” If that’s not the most memorable pop culture tribute to an iconic group of footballers, we don’t know what is.
When it comes to the biggest artistic tribute to Arsenal’s famous back four, there can be only one winner. In a literal sense, that accolade goes to the depictions of them on the outside of the Emirates Stadium. Of the 32 club greats included in the stadium’s external imagery, all of the canonical back four are present, as are Martin Keown and David Seaman. While the group of greats, arm in arm, is meant to represent the unity of the club, the fact that Adams, Bould, Dixon and Winterburn aren’t standing together feels like a missed opportunity. Likewise, as far as symbolism goes, it seems a shame that they aren’t all raising their arms as if making a perpetual appeal for offside.
