Liverpool wanted him. Roy Keane couldn’t tame him. A career that started with the Arsenal first team at 14 now ends with ANTHONY STOKES behind bars. On the way he head-butted an Elvis impersonator, knocked out a Rangers fan who kicked his car and mixed wi
ANTHONY Stokes is facing a stretch of time in prison when we meet and is superficially philosophical about that. ‘It’s not going to break me, going in there,’ he says — and by the time we reach the question of the criminal system catching up with him, he has casually related the kind of details that give cause to imagine that no environment would hold any real fear for him.
Acquaintances with the paraphernalia of IRA paramilitaries as a child. the uncompromising figures who would approach him in Glasgow, where he was a star for Celtic, asking if his adoptive father, a Real IRA man, might furnish them with weapons. Rangers fans offering him out of his car to fight in central Glasgow and Stokes obliging them on one occasion.
yet there is something about him which tells you that the prospect of going behind bars is not quite the breeze he claims.
And, sure enough, the day on which he says he will return from Dublin to Glasgow, where he absconded last year after jumping bail, comes and goes. So does the next appointed day and the next. then finally, last month, he took a ferry from Dublin and presented himself at a police station, where he was held in the cells. ‘Will be
‘Will be out of contact for a short while,’ his text reads. Then he’s sent down
out of contact for a short period. Speak sooner rather than later,’ his last message to me reads — and after that, things do not go quite as he had anticipated.
he is walked, handcuffed, into court the next day. A judge, Sheriff Diane turner, sends him to hMP Addiewell, between Glasgow and Edinburgh, for at least 30 days — more than he expected — ahead of a sentencing, later this month, on charges to which he has admitted.
It is entirely fair, because Stokes has shown a casual disregard for the need to answer those charges.
A few hours sitting in his easy company, in Dublin, listening to him relating the story of an extraordinary football life, belie five years of chaos and disregard for the legal system.
his conduct after splitting with partner Eilidh Scott, during a period playing club football in Iran in 2018, was not acceptable. only now, six years on, is he paying the price.
that split, he says, was distressing enough for him to abruptly leave an Iranian club named tractor and a lucrative salary, to return home to Scotland, leading the Iranians to go after him for breach of contract.
But it also prompted him to send a barrage of messages to Ms Scott and her mother and to receive a non-harassment order forbidding him to contact them, which he breached. Stokes’ approach to the judicial system after that, which he accepts was wrong, demands time to take stock of.
Some will not empathise with a person for whom poor behaviour has been an intermittent part of their life. But there is some story to tell and lessons to impart to the next generations of players if Stokes — who left Ireland for Arsenal aged 14
— can now, aged 35 and retired, reflect a little and belatedly grow up.
he was one of those prodigious young players for whom there is no time to enjoy normal adolescence, as a group of top-flight English clubs queued up to sign him in the early 2000s.
he had played for the renowned west Dublin club, Cherry orchard, then Shelbourne, with their links to Manchester United, who have sent many young players over the water. United badly wanted to sign him and he got the
Sir Alex Ferguson treatment when he was contemplating a move.
Stokes describes stepping into Ferguson’s office with his adoptive father — who he refers to as his dad — for the conversation which United were convinced would seal his signature, given the additional influence of the club’s academy manager John Devine, an Irish former player and manager.
It says something about the teenager’s assuredness, even then, that he asked for Ferguson’s autograph, though he had nothing to ask him to sign.
‘I didn’t want to ask him, “Can you get a bit of paper to sign?”. So my dad had a £5 note and I just said, “Can you sign that?”. I’ve still got it in the house.’ Liverpool had heard about Stokes, too. there was a phone call to the family home on Christmas Day from their manager Rafael Benitez.
‘ you’re 13, 14, and you’ve got the Liverpool manager on the phone,’ Stokes says. ‘he said, “I just wanted to wish your family a happy Christmas. We’ve been in contact and hopefully I’ll be seeing you soon”. All my family were Liverpool fans.’
It was a classic Benitez manoeuvre. But though Stokes’ heart had been set on United — ‘I was a massive United fan, but only because of Roy Keane,’ he says — he chose Arsenal because of the influence of Liam Brady, the legendary Irish player who was running their academy. Brady’s close connection with the Dublin District Schoolboys League convinced him that Stokes was one for Arsenal, where Arsene Wenger had him mix with the first team.
‘they brought me over, I went on a trial, they brought me back and Wenger just said, “Look, I’m going to train you with the first team”,’ Stokes relates. ‘I trained with them for a full session at 14.’
FOR a boy who spent all his formative years trying to bunk off school, this sounds heaven-sent. But his yearning for Ireland which followed fits a pattern which so many young Irish prodigies, from the tragic Adrian Doherty to George Best, have experienced across the water.
‘you go to Arsenal, you’re on a youth training scheme, you’re getting 180 quid a week,’ he explains. ‘you then go to sign your pro contract. I think I was on £2,500 or £3,000 a week at 17.
‘But I was back in Dublin every weekend. I didn’t want to be in London. I genuinely would have given up football.
‘I hadn’t been too keen on school, even though I’d done quite well academically and was quite good. But I dunno… once I went over there, I missed school. I just missed my day-to-day routine at home. I missed my mates. I just missed my little cocoon.’
There had been no cocoon of any kind during some inauspicious early years in which there were
genuine fears for his health and development. His mother, Ann, had handed him, as a three-year- old, to her sister and brother-in-law, Joan and John Stokes, in 1991. Ann was unable to bring him up because of a heroin dependency, which seems to have affected his neonatal health.
A heroin-addicted mother who carries a baby exposes the child to the opioid in a way which can cause withdrawal symptoms after birth.
‘The heroin epidemic in Dublin went back to the 1980s and it was still rife at the time,’ Stokes says.
His adoptive parents moved to London with him and were employed by Arsenal to act as foster parents in a house for young players at Cockfosters.
But his adoptive father had been born and raised in the staunchly Republican city of Cork, was steeped in the IRA’s cause which he would subscribe to years after the Troubles were over, and left Ireland with mixed feelings.
‘He had gone back to Trinity
College (Dublin) as a mature student to do a psychology degree which he was three years into and he ended up leaving it,’ says Stokes. ‘I think that was something he really wanted to follow through with.’
Stokes was initially so unhappy in London that he told Brady this life was not for him and Arsenal suggested he go home for a few weeks and think things over.
His parents’ pastoral responsibilities for the other Arsenal boys meant they stayed in London while he took the ferry home. But it was those Arsenal digs and the company he found there which helped him along the way when he returned.
Among the residents were future Switzerland international Johan Djourou and a young Nicklas Bendtner, who had brought his huge self-confidence from Copenhagen for a shot at stardom.
Bendtner’s cars made more of a mark on north London than his football though.
‘I went out and got a C- class
Mercedes which was a bit flashy,’ Stokes says. ‘But Nick came into training with an £80,000 Audi A6, blacked-out windows and spinners on the wheels.
‘That was Nick. He was his own man. He had all the attributes, but he was a bit peculiar.’
Stokes laughs at the memory of how Bendtner, off the back of a couple of goals in the reserves, informed their little group that he was better than Dennis Bergkamp. They egged him on to suggest this to the man himself as the Dutchman headed in their direction at London Colney.
‘Dennis has a serious face on and I’m thinking, “he’s not going to say it, is he?”,’ Stokes recalls. ‘But he rattles off about five things to Bergkamp’s face — “I’m better than you. Look at my attributes. I’m taller, I’m stronger”.’
Bendtner did not really make it, though at least he had some Arsenal moments to remember. Stokes came on two minutes from the end of a Carling Cup game against Sunderland in 2005, a 3-0 win, and never played again. ‘I thought I’d done quite well,’ he says. ‘ I was regularly in the reserves at about 15, 16.
‘But by that stage you’re looking at the team — Thierry Henry, Robin van Persie, Jose Antonio Reyes, Bergkamp — the list of strikers went on. Jeremie Aliadiere couldn’t even get a game in the reserves, never mind the first team.’
Desperate to play, he went on loan to Falkirk (‘I hadn’t a clue where it was’), scored a lot of goals and would have signed for Celtic had not Keane, then managing Sunderland in the Championship, called him.
‘Can I just ask you one thing?’ Keane said. ‘Will you have a think about it and call me back.’
Stokes’ father looked at his adoptive son, saw the liking for girls, fast cars and the Funky Buddha nightclub in London and thought Keane was the man to instil the discipline he needed.
T‘You’re looking at the team... Henry, Van Persie, Bergkamp and Jose Reyes’
O some extent, he did. ‘He wouldn’t hammer you for nights out,’ Stokes says of his idol, neglecting to remember the manager’s observation that Sunderland’s Glass Spider nightclub was his downfall and that he ‘could be a top, top player in four or five years, or he could be playing non-League’.
He scored one Premier League goal for Keane, against Derby, but it was at Celtic — reached by way of a couple of loans and a brief move to Hibernian — that he found the success which had eluded him.
He and manager Neil Lennon’s volatile relationship did not get in the way of a great six years in which Stokes scored 58 goals in 135 league games and wrote himself into Celtic history. There were some indelible moments — an over-the-shoulder volleyed goal at Hibs, a hat-trick in the 9-0 annihilation of Aberdeen and a stellar display in the 2013 Scottish Cup final, also against Hibs.
But his arrival at a club with such a distinct Irish Catholic identity brought links back to the Republican cause in Dublin, which did not help Scottish football’s attempt to bury sectarianism.
Stokes’ adoptive father, now back in Ireland, did him no favours. He owned the Players’ Lounge in Dublin, which was frequented by members of the Real IRA, the Republican paramilitary group.
It was there, in 2011, that Stokes Snr was ordered to take down a banner declaring that the Queen was not welcome ahead of her visit to the city. His son’s role as a Celtic striker gave this huge publicity.
‘My dad mentioned to me, “I’m going g to put a banner up”,’ Stokes says. ‘And I thought he meant maybe over the bar b in the pub.
‘But I woke up the next day — I think we were playing Hearts — and it’s a 60ft banner with a picture of the Queen’s head saying, “As long as the British Forces are in Ireland, Ir she and her family are not no welcome in this pub”.
‘I don’t know if that’s even tr trying to be funny or what, bu but obviously it’s all over the papers pa in Scotland and I’m getting ge it left, right and centre. ce The Rangers fans. Messages off the UDF (Ulster Defence e Force) listing details of a flight I was taking and threatening th to shoot me. I had to go to the police over that.
‘I It was getting very hostile. I mean, me I support my dad 100 per pe cent, but for f*** sake mate, come on! I’m up to my neck as it is! I don’t need any of this!’
Stokes’ father’s Real IRA connections also positioned him at the centre of a vicious gangland battle with a Dublin crime cartel during his son’s time at Celtic.
Stokes Snr’s associates included the leader of the Dublin brigade of the Real IRA, Alan ‘the Model’ Ryan, who was responsible for two murders before he too was shot dead by an assassin who despatched six shots from a Glock handgun in 2012.
Stokes attended a tribute night for Ryan in Dublin and tweeted condolences about his death, to the bewilderment of Lennon and Celtic who disciplined him.
‘I am not going to moralise to him, but you can’t damage the reputation of the club,’ Lennon said of Stokes’ decision to legitimise a gangland killer.
Stokes, however, stands by those decisions. ‘He would have been around my dad every day,’ he says of Ryan. ‘He was the leader of that group. I knew him well. To me, he was a normal guy. I would also be sympathetic to my dad’s beliefs about Irish Republicanism.
‘It was a different era 30 years ago, where Catholics in the North didn’t have the same civil rights. Treat people equally, fair enough, but you put a dog in a corner long enough it’s going to bite you.’
Stokes’ father was steeped in the Republican fight from his Cork childhood days, when men with revolvers would turn up at the house. That was passed down to Stokes. He describes days as a boy when ‘someone might pull up in a car outside and you might see tools inside — you kind of get normalised by certain things’.
Stokes’ father has not shed his association with violence. He stood trial on charges of extortion and blackmail, a case which collapsed. Neither, in his own way, has Stokes. A year after leaving Celtic, he was convicted of headbutting an Elvis impersonator at a pub in Dublin.
Stokes also describes with some alacrity taking on a Rangers fan who invited him out of their cars
to fight. ‘ This fella pulls up, Rangers top on, hat and all. He started kicking my door up. I knocked him clean out and left him on the bonnet.’
Then came the text messages, sent to his ex-girlfriend as he looked to extend his career in Iran. He learned of the split while out there, he says.
‘I couldn’t get back for six weeks because we had Asian Cup games in Qatar.
‘My head was all over the place and I knew this was going on at home.’
There have been times, over these past 20 years, when the uncomplicated joys of football have taken over and life has seemed as simple as it did when the 14-year-old stepped out on to the manicured pitches of
London Colney. His face brightens as he journeys back to a Saturday at Hampden in May 2016 when he, on loan at Hibs from Celtic, scored two goals in the 3-2 Scottish Cup final win over Rangers to help the club record their first triumph in that competition for 114 years.
‘Edinburgh that night was something I’ll never forget,’ Stokes relates.
‘I’ve played at the San Siro and we’ve had Celtic Park on Champions League nights, but I’ve never seen anything like that.’
As we part company in Dublin, he expresses a wish to draw a line under three chaotic years since quitting football.
‘I went off the rails,’ he says. ‘All this stuff — the police charges, avoiding them, has been draining. I want to move on from it, hand myself in and draw a line.’
After his imprisonment, word comes back from HMP Addiewell, which is in West Lothian, of Stokes having access to a gym three days a week and using it.
The prison’s website states an aim to make those in custody ‘address their offending behaviour and the circumstances which led to imprisonment’.
His lawyers are hopeful that he will not be sent back into custody when his case is dealt with later this month, though there are no certainties.
In the meantime, Stokes must wait in his cell and hope. Time will tell if his vow to change will hold when he is released back into the real world.