There's only two Keowns: Gunner invincible on being a 'Paddy' outsider, brutal Arsenal and Van Nistelrooy

Martin’s song at Arsenal became ‘There’s only one KEY-own’, but there were always two. “I do feel you can be as much Irish as English.” 

First time he arrived on the Match of the Day radar, John Motson collared him. “He asked me before a match, ‘look, how we do we say the name? I've heard KEY-own and I've heard Keown’. And John said, you know, ‘can we go with KEY-own, it might be easier’.” 

Taking into account that he struggled to make out what his own father Raymond, from Fermanagh, was saying a lot of the time, Martin accepted the practicalities and another centre-half got rebranded, like Kevin MoRAN and Paul MaGRATT.

He laughs now, in his car en route to Manchester for a Match of the Day appointment. “I say that this book is written by Martin Keown, but it's about Martin KEY-own.” 

His autobiography, On The Edge, is an entertaining, thoughtful read and differs significantly from many sporting autobiographies in so far as it leans less on the details of glory and achievement and more often on the feelings of those doing the achieving.

There’s a brilliant chapter about Tony Adams, where two kids from the same youth team, who eventually played well over 1,000 games for Arsenal between them, explore the tension, rivalry and insecurity that meant they were never quite close friends. At least until very different routes led them to become harmonious partners in one of Arsene Wenger’s great sides.

Keown comes across as an often spiky, tough character, but also as someone keen to prosecute exactly why he is that way. He writes well about his Irish background. Of how it shaped what he became for much of his life, an outsider, forever ready to fight his corner. He played Gaelic football in Oxford even while an apprentice at Arsenal, the family took long summer holidays back to Fermanagh and Galway. “I'm very proud of it. You know, when we go to Ireland, everybody, as soon as you arrive, says, ‘welcome home’. And it does feel like home.” 

But the two Keowns often sat uneasily with each other. During the IRA’s bombing campaign in the 70s, their small grocery shop in Oxford became a target for vandals and boycotts.

“It was difficult for a certain period. When the Birmingham bombing and all those sort of things were taking place. That's when, I suppose, it hit home to a young child, seven, eight years of age, that we were different from everybody else. People aren't coming through the doors of the shop. There's a bit of racism. It was a tricky one growing up.

“Whenever we went back to Ireland, the Irish would call you a plastic Paddy, and then the English would call you something worse. And it was kind of like, well, I'm certainly not plastic anything… ” 

Later, before Italia ‘90, when David O’Leary was still in the cold, Jack Charlton pestered Fifa to release Keown from his youth team ties to England. “If Fifa had allowed it, I would have said yes, 100%,” he writes in the book. He chuckles at how he could have changed Irish history. “I’d probably have missed the penalty. But maybe I’d have got to meet the Pope.” 

Declaring for England in the first place attracted plenty of commentary in Oxford’s small Irish Catholic circles, some aghast that his dad allowed it to happen. But Raymond was strong on the need to assimilate.

“I didn’t really make a decision, I just went along with it. And my father always used to say, ‘Look, son, I’ve come here, I’ve taken the benefits of this country. You’re English, so you should embrace that and play for England.’ 

“I think the Irish are very good at making a home somewhere else, but always pining for home at the same time. But my dad didn't put that on me.”

Angela did pine for home. Keown writes movingly about his mother’s Alzheimer’s, diagnosed in her fifties, when erratic behaviour began. 

“She packed her car full to the brim with her belongings one day and headed to Holyhead to catch the ferry to Ireland. She thought she was going to start a new life out there, but when she arrived, none of it existed and then she had to come back.” 

*** 

When Martin began his new life as an apprentice at Arsenal, it wasn’t how he expected either. Though his father had mapped it all out.

Keown was still an outsider, now a country bumpkin rather than a ‘fackin Paddy’. Every time he opened his mouth, the Londoners asked him where his combine harvester was. He didn’t acclimatise easily to the “relentless banter” so beloved of footballers. But mostly, he couldn't get his head around the drinking culture.

“It was the alcohol. It was like my dad had looked into a crystal ball. It was the Irish saying really, ‘don't pee your money up against the wall’. He was very guarded about religion, telling me not to discuss religion, but also not to play cards and gamble. And he told me that people will be bored and homesick and they’ll want to go out… and all these things quickly came to pass.

“I took a look at it, but I was shocked by it. We were all earning 20 pounds a week. If you bought a round of drinks, there's a week's wages gone, even then. And then, when you rub shoulders with the pros, I didn't necessarily always like what I saw. I've got to make a judgment on these people and I'm 15 years of age.

“My father had mapped it out for me, and gave me a bit of principle. I just trod my own road. But I didn't get it right, because I left Arsenal Football Club, the only club I really wanted to play for, because of those principles.” 

Arsenal’s ‘class of 83’ delivered eight players to the first team. Keown, Adams, Paul Merson, Niall Quinn, David Rocastle, Michael Thomas, Martin Hayes and Gus Caesar.

Keown had running battles with Niall Quinn in training and was almost thrown out of the club for fighting with him. “It wasn’t Quinn’s fault. He was just part of the environment that had been created.

“Arsenal was a hard place to be back then, a brutal, tough environment, as elite sport often is.

“I was a part of a youth team that was really quite remarkable, and I guess it was quite cut-throat. It was about trying to feel like you belong there. Because so many fall by the wayside and get shown the door and so they create this fear. Because every single day it seemed as if they discussed your ability, or some inefficiency you had.

“And it did push me over the edge, you understand? You're not getting maybe a lot of love, yeah? I had personal issues with a youth team coach. And then you finally think you've climbed that mountain. You get in the team. You're looking for a little bit of trust, or acknowledgement of what you've done.” 

A kind word in the ear would have gone a long way. Keown tells a story about Liam Brady, Arsenal’s prodigal son, by now in Italy, but who’d come back at Christmas, during the Serie A shutdown, to see old pals.

“As apprentices, we'd all rush down to watch him play in the indoor area. Everyone would go and watch. He’d come and watch the first team and me and Tony played. Apparently Liam pulled Tony to say that he and I were the future of the club. But I never got that message. I'm getting a different message. I’m hearing from others, ‘who do you think you are asking for 100 pound a week?’” 

Adams was always earmarked as Arsenal’s chosen one. While Keown famously left the club over 50 quid, feeling unvalued and unloved. He missed the George Graham title wins, became a top pro at Aston Villa and Everton, a full England international, then returned to Arsenal at the tail end of the Graham years, when the edge had dulled on that successful period.

“I think he lost the dressing room a little bit towards the end. It was almost like a sermon every week. It was the same sermon that everyone had been listening to, whereas for me it was all brand new because I had obviously stepped out of the building for seven years.” 

By now, Adams and Merson were fighting public battles with addiction. “These guys have gone through all this success and adulation, and it had an effect on both of them. I'm seeing very different people when I come back, not necessarily enjoying everything I'm seeing.

“It's kind of like a circular story where I end up getting back to where I want to be. And even then, you know, I have financial issues. Even then, the club reneges — an Irish term if you play 25s — they renege on paying me the fucking wage they promised to pay the second time.

“But I just thought, okay, stay here. This is where I want to be, there's some unfinished business. And then, of course, Arsene Wenger walked through the door, which, for me, was just life-changing.” 

*** 

He devotes a full chapter to the incident. To Ruud. “I sometimes wonder whether people would even remember me if I hadn’t been involved in the incident with Ruud van Nistelrooy.” 

He puts in context the rage that saw him leap on van Nistelrooy’s back in celebration and provocation after the Dutch striker missed a last-minute penalty to keep Arsenal unbeaten during the ‘Invincible’ season. In Keown’s mind, at least, he and Arsenal were still the outsiders, fighting the establishment.

“Fergie was so good at influencing power, and referees were no different. It was a game within a game with them; they’d surround the referee and we knew we had to do all of these things to match them everywhere. So if they were around the referee, we were around the referee.

“For one of their players to get booked against us, it felt like they’d almost need to commit GBH. Referees seemed to just turn a blind eye to it. It was absolutely shocking, some of the missed fouls on our players. Their fans would always shout, ‘Same old Arsenal, always cheating,’ but it certainly wasn’t us doing that.

“Man United were running English football. And when you’re in a rivalry like that, you have to fight every inch of the way to be champions.

“I just wanted to let him know that his plan hadn’t worked. To make him realise who the real devil on the pitch was and that we weren’t going to stand by and let him win.”

If many people associate him with that moment of aggression, Keown, ironically, says that by then he had chilled out, that the man he calls his “football father”, had “unwound” him.

If there are two Keowns, perhaps there are two Martins — before and after Wenger.

“He loved his players more than any other manager I’ve played for. Any of the tension went out of my game the minute I met him.

“George always told me to ‘give it to someone who can play’. With Wenger, it was so different and liberating. He told us to be free in our minds. ‘You can play, Martin.’ 

“It's belief. It was kind of like he made me feel that without me in the team, the team couldn't be successful. You're the single most important player in this team. That is a gift, really, to be able to do that in management, and he was doing that for every player.” 

Nor did the Wenger regime have any place for three-day benders. And with people like Dennis Bergkamp now setting the tone off the field, Keown no longer felt like an outsider. He even had one or two.

“Suddenly the alcohol now is, well, it's in the minority. You're actually more likely to have a drink. There's a balance there. People control themselves. So you're not excluded from anything.” 

For a year after he retired from playing, Keown volunteered as a coach at Arsenal, working with the defence when they reached the Champions League final without conceding a goal.

“I knew I was working with a genius every day, one of the greats of the game. I wasn’t contracted. I was just doing it every day, having an injection in my knee to train.

“It was something new for Arsene to employ a player. It was very close to happening. But I stepped away. Because my father needed me more to look after my mum.

“The old fella is saying, you just spent 22 years in the game, fella, I’m caring for your mum, we’re trying to keep her at home, I need you at the end of the phone. I just stepped away.” 

The punditry life is good, but there’s a pinch of regret that he once more left the one club he wanted to be part of because of his principles, and that Wenger didn’t talk him out of it. “We never really had a proper fucking conversation because it was always about the group.” 

In the book’s final chapter, he meets Wenger for that proper conversation and hears the kind word he needs.

“I should have made you one of my assistants. I realise that today, Martin. You would have kept the team alert. But I didn’t think you were sure you wanted to stay in the game.” 

*** 

He remembers how his mam always knew when one of the Connollys had scored, though the rest of them could never keep track of the commentary.

Angela did get her new life. In 1998, she and Raymond moved back to Fermanagh and did up the farmhouse he was born in.

“They did about three years out there and we had some lovely summers with them when we took our sons, Callum and Niall, and they would meet all of their Keown cousins.” 

Niall playing for Ireland U21s ranks among his father’s most cherished moments. An equaliser for the Keowns against the Key-owns. “The family were very proud of that, sort of proving a point as well.” 

Sadly, as Angela’s health declined, the Keowns had to return to Oxford to get her the help needed. With his son on the end of the phone, Raymond fought to keep Angela out of a care home, a battle eventually conceded.

“It’s so heartbreaking watching someone suffer with that disease. Mum’s 83 now, and I’m convinced she still knows it’s me when I visit.

“We didn’t tell her when my dad died. She still doesn’t know. Until he got really ill, he would go every day and he’d be there most of the day. And then, all of a sudden, he didn’t come so maybe, deep down, she understands.”