The Arsenal soccer prodigy haunted by what he noticed in jail

I meet Anthony Stokes, one-time teenage Arsenal prodigy and Celtic striker, at a prison in the central belt of Scotland, two weeks into what will turn out to be a three-month sentence, and the experience already seems indelible. 

His acquaintances with the Real IRA have acquainted him with life on the wrong side of the lines long before he is sent here, for bombarding an ex-girlfriend with messages after they split, contacting her in breach of court orders and then absconding. 

But the casual acts of violence he encounters are something else. On the day we meet, he’s wandered out of the prison gymnasium to find a prisoner, suspected of having stolen from other inmates’ cells, lying in his own blood. Another inmate has been deliberated scalded by hot water from a kettle.

‘Things get disputed,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t happen on the landing because there’s cameras everywhere. You get people just dragged into a room.’

It’s the absence of hope, ‘the stalemate’, on his wing at HMP Addiewell, which causes the violence, he says. ‘People turn to drugs just to get through the sentence. They’re numbing themselves to get through every day. The drugs send everyone off their heads and that’s when the fighting starts.’

It’s so different to the life he’s known. ‘With football you’re always driving for something. Even when you get hammered, you come back again, working towards the next game. Here, they’re just wasting away. Marking time.’ Some are serving 20 years or more, including an inmate working in the prison laundry who attacked two men with a hammer.

Stokes thinks this will be a very brief experience. ‘I’ll be out soon,’ he says, sitting before me in all-grey prison wear, sun streaming through barred windows.

But he isn’t. A few weeks after we meet, he appears in court and is sentenced to five months. We speak by phone a few hours after he returns to his cell and his usual positive disposition has vanished. Four hours in a police holding cell after sentencing, awaiting a prison van, preceded the journey back, staring through the van’s small windows at a blue sky.

He’d imagined prison would be a time to reflect, draw a line and start again but just getting through seems as much as he can manage at this stage. He says he misses conversations which don’t explode into violence because of word taken the wrong way.

It’s a necessary lesson learned for him. Too often in a football career which saw him touted as a great Irish talent, he’s resorted to violence.

Stokes was released a fortnight ago, and when we meet again this week in Dublin, he dwells on how managers tried to drum some sense into him and show him the way. Roy Keane, at Sunderland, leaving him to figure things out for himself. ‘Giving you opportunities to better yourself without constantly saying, “do this, do that.” Neil Lennon, at Celtic, and John Hughes, at Hibernian, ‘understanding the kind of character I was.’

But prison has left him haunted by something which no analysis of management styles can explain away. A sense that all of this is on him. 

That he failed to fulfil the potential Arsenal’s Liam Brady saw, when signing him to Highbury as a 14-year-old in 2003, because his head was too full of fame to see that wages and the acclaim would be temporary.

‘You think it’s going to last forever,’ he says. ‘You’re on top of the world one minute and then it’s gone. You need to make something out of every minute. 

‘Surround yourself with people who are actually looking out for you, not those looking to take from you.’ 

It seems like a message written for, among many others, Manchester United’s Marcus Rashford, whose season has been a tragedy in plain sight for all who want British talent to flourish.

As his reflections tumble out, you feel that Stokes – erudite, sharp and wiser, with the road now travelled – would be a good mentor to have around young players, though he’s not sure football will want him back in. 

‘I picked up a certain kind of reputation, partly because of my connections here,’ he says. Redemption in public life is certainly harder to find these days and prison is not seen as part of a narrative arc. People don’t want to know those who’ve served time.

‘He could have been a rock star player,’ says my taxi driver after we’ve dropped Stokes at his mother’s house on our way out of Dublin. ‘He had everything. The League of Ireland could use someone like that.’

Stokes is just keeping his head down, trying to work out what happens next, coming to terms with the fact he’s 35, sitting in Dublin’s Temple Bar on a dreary May day, watching messages ping onto on his smashed mobile phone and discussing a career that’s in the past. ‘Football’s gone before you know where you are,’ he says. ‘I can see that now.’

Molango ‘non-executive’ Sampdoria role is a bad look for PFA

The £650,000-a-year PFA chief executive Maheta Molango continues to maintain that the boardroom role he’s been recruited for at Sampdoria, at a time when the union continues to face criticism over help for former players struggling with dementia, is ‘non-executive.’ To which, it has to be said that the Italian club certainly get their money’s worth out of their non-execs.

When the club’s shareholders approved the composition of the board on Monday, it transpired that Molango is one of only three people who sit on it, along with the club’s owner and chief executive. 

That very same Sampdoria board has also been working with 777 Partners – the would-be Everton owners who have failed to pay players at Standard Liege – on the construction of a new stadium with the club will share with Genoa. 777 own Genoa. 

Molango insists he’s not involved in the 777 collaboration. 

The PFA board are seemingly oblivious to the terrible look this creates for an organisation which was supposed to have got its house in order when Gordon Taylor left.

Grassroot coaches are the lifeblood of our game 

My eight-year-old grandson’s role in a successful junior cup final at Trafford FC’s ground in Manchester on Sunday lasted just five minutes, though he did not seem to feel the sting of that for one moment. 

The collective jubilation of the squad, both core and fringe, was down to a coach who is firm but has time for all of them. 

To watch the team’s ups and downs has been a joy these past nine months. The coach and so many like him are the lifeblood of our game.