The Cult: Ray Parlour

In everything Ray Parlour did as a footballer, he was fundamentally Essex. In everything he did, and does, as a man, he is fundamentally, innately Essex. Ray Parlour is spiritually Essex; he is existentially Essex; he is brilliantly, sublimely, divinely Essex. Were the people of Essex to elect their own Pope, their own religious pontiff, they would elect Ray Parlour to be God's representative on earth. If God is an Englishman, then he is an Estuary Englishman, and there is no mortal being who speaks the language of Estuary English quite like His Holiness – the Esteemed, the Venerable, the Revered Ray Parlour.

Were one to need proof of Parlour's Essex credentials, they might look to three crucial details of his life. First, he co-owns a pub on the Dengie peninsula, which is right in the heart of ye olde county of Essex. Second, in the early nineties, he was reported to have set off a load of fire extinguishers in Hornchurch Pizza Hut alongside an inebriated Tony Adams, which is probably the most Essex public scandal there has ever been. Third, and most important, his nickname as a player was 'the Romford Pelé'. For those who don't know, Romford is one of those towns to the far east of the capital which, although technically part of Greater London, is further out than Dagenham, and therefore definitely, definitely, definitely Essex. Indeed, much like Romford itself, Parlour the footballer maintained his Essex identity long after being ensnared by the bright lights of London town.

While Parlour has credited Marc Overmars for his 'Romford Pelé' nickname ("I took him down the social club there, and he loved it," Parlour told The Guardian in 2010), it was taken up by Arsenal fans with positive glee in the late nineties. There was good reason for that, in that no nickname in the history of mankind has ever been more brilliant or more apt. In the comic bathos of it – the contrast of the flair, finesse and footballing romance of Pelé with the profound mundanity of suburban Romford – the moniker summed up Parlour's reputation. Off the pitch, he was the class clown and resident joker. On it, he did the donkey work: winning the ball, breaking up attacks, hustling the midfield and allowing his flashier teammates to shine.

Those weren't Parlour's only gifts as a footballer, however. While he was certainly happy to get his hands dirty, he was also an excellent midfielder, and chronically underestimated at times. He could pass, he was good on the ball and he could chip in with the odd goal when necessary. Without such a rounded skillset, without genuine technique and talent, he would never have survived the end of an era in North London, and the cultural and sporting revolution that followed.

Parlour joined Arsenal as a trainee in 1989, and made his first senior appearance for the club three years later. It was not a particularly auspicious start, given that he conceded a penalty on his debut against Liverpool and the team went on to lose 2-0. That said, he showed his tenacity the following season, when he returned to Anfield, played a blinder, and notched up an assist apiece for Anders Limpar and Ian Wright. He had shown that he had the mentality to be an Arsenal regular, even if there were still some questions over his consistency week on week.

This was the end of the golden age of George Graham, and Arsenal were in a strange place as a team. Having won the First Division in electrifying fashion in 1989, and romped to the title again in 1991, their league form was increasingly erratic, though they continued to pick up silverware elsewhere. Parlour received winners' medals for Arsenal's domestic cup double in 1993, while he was part of the squad which won the UEFA Cup Winners' Cup final against Parma the following year. That was the last of Graham's great achievements as manager, however, and he was soon to be sacked by the club for his part in one of the nineties' biggest bung scandals. Parlour would soon find himself under a very different managerial regime, and would have to adapt both his football and his lifestyle to survive.

When Parlour graduated to the Arsenal first team, it was in an age of booze, bruisers and general excess. He was mentored by Tony Adams who, at that point, was coming to the nadir of his struggle with alcoholism. Parlour soon became part of the infamous 'Tuesday Club', the name given to Highbury's hardened drinking society. Alongside the likes of Adams, Steve Bould, and Paul Merson, Parlour was a tearaway off the field as much as he was a talent on it. When times were good, it must have been exhilarating. By 1996, with his club captain speaking openly about his debilitating drinking problem, Parlour must have felt the fun was ebbing somewhat.

Luckily, at that time, the club was facing monumental change. So was English football, in fact, faced as it was with the arrival of Arsène Wenger. While the narrative of Wenger turning up, making everyone drink isotonic sports drinks and consequently prolonging everyone's career by several decades might be a touch simplistic, he certainly championed discipline and professionalism, and that – combined with his interest in sports science and nutrition – changed the way things worked at the club. Wenger had stepped up Arsenal's standards, and the players had to step up accordingly. To his credit, and perhaps against the odds, Parlour went on to do just that.

In the new age of Arsenal, there would be no more charging around Hornchurch with fire extinguishers. There would be no more pints-in-double-figures benders, or at least not every night, or at least not on the night before matchday, or matchday itself, mon dieu. Parlour had to curb his drinking and, with the help of his wife Karen, he began to better manage his habit. That would be the basis of her high-profile divorce settlement just under a decade later. In a landmark case, Karen was awarded a considerable sum of money and a percentage of Parlour's future earnings, but that's a story for another time.

To the amazement of many, probably including himself, Parlour not only survived in the Wenger era, but actually thrived. He had been in and out of favour towards the end of George Graham's spell at the club, and his time under Bruce Rioch had been similarly patchy, so the fact that Wenger believed in Parlour's talent is testament to his desire to turn things around. Few would have been surprised had he been earmarked for an early departure by the urbane Frenchman, whose radical ideas on pre-match preparation included not getting absolutely smashed all the time. Instead, Wenger took to Parlour. Having promised to give him a fair hearing on his arrival at the club, the new manager soon found that Parlour was a player on whom he could rely. While it is difficult to imagine two more contrasting personalities, Wenger and Parlour overcame the Romford-Strasbourg divide.

With a blend of London grit and French elan now in the squad, Parlour began to fulfil that crucial role in the midfield. He facilitated the success of Wenger's foreign imports, alongside the revitalised, ball-playing back four. Over the next eight years, Parlour would make over 300 appearances, winning three league titles and three FA Cups in the process. Meanwhile, his number of drunken tabloid scrapes fell dramatically, with the correlation between the increase in trophies and decline in piss artistry statistically significant, to say the least.

As such, the thing that makes Parlour most worthy of his cult hero status is not the prodigious drinking, or the madcap stories, or the self-effacing sense of humour, or the combative, sleeves-rolled-up midfield orchestration. It is that he managed to bridge two eras at Arsenal, and improve his game under Arsène Wenger in a way few would have been able to predict at the time. In the end, with the Premier League at its absolute peak, Parlour showed that he could play with the best of them, and flourish alongside the likes of Dennis Bergkamp, Patrick Vieira, Robert Pirès and Thierry Henry. Perhaps the lad from Romford wasn't so far from Pelé, after all.

While things turned out well in the end for Parlour, his Arsenal career could have been over before it had even really begun. His happy-go-lucky, one-of-the-lads attitude might have been endearing enough when he was clowning about but, like anyone with that streak of laddishness about them, there was always the potential for things to go a bit far. That was precisely what happened on a pre-season tour of Hong Kong in 1995, when he was fined in court for a drunken brawl with a local taxi driver. The story goes that Parlour threw an empty packet of prawn crackers into the open bonnet of a parked taxi, presumably for a laugh. He was then involved in a scuffle with the irate owner, before making an inept escape and being arrested by a policeman on a motorcycle a few blocks away.

While this perhaps showcased the rather more problematic side of Tuesday Club culture, Parlour at least seemed genuinely contrite about his behaviour. He pleaded guilty to assault, paid the required damages, and was quickly smuggled on to a plane and brought back to the UK. The club hierarchy were livid and deeply embarrassed by the press coverage, which left Parlour hanging on to his place in the squad by a thread. That was the point that Parlour tore into the national consciousness like an Essex whirlwind, even if it wasn't exactly his finest hour.

Getting his head down for the next few months, Parlour did manage to retain his place at the club. Soon enough, George Graham was gone, and such indiscretions became a thing of the past. When he is asked about the incident now, Parlour does tend to look rather sheepish, even if it has become part of his repertoire of after-dinner stories. It perhaps wasn't the best way to announce himself as a footballing wild child but, then again, it was almost certainly less dramatic than what went on in Romford town centre on the average Saturday nightin the mid-nineties.

Even at his personal peak as a player, Parlour was almost always disarmingly modest. When he speaks about the most important goal of his career, he usually makes it sound like the luckiest of flukes. He laughs it off, he chuckles about it, he disparages the whole thing to the point that he sometimes sounds semi-apologetic. It's hard not to warm to a man who has such a propensity for laughing at himself, and that's doubtlessly a huge part of why he's held in such fond regard at Arsenal as well at his other, subsequent, clubs.

That said, Parlour's modesty was one of his greatest weapons. Combined with his sense of comic timing, it practically won Arsenal the FA Cup. He underestimated himself in ingenuous fashion, and the opposition underestimated him in turn. The opposition in this case were Chelsea, and they were contesting the 2002 final in Cardiff against their bitter cross-town rivals. It was a couple of years before Chelsea's mega money would arrive, but the Blues could still field a team that included Marcel Desailly, Gianfranco Zola, Jimmy Floyd-Hasselbaink and the like.

In the 70th minute, with the game flowing back and forth, Sylvain Wiltord threaded Parlour through the Chelsea lines. He galloped towards goal, got into position, and shaped himself to shoot from 25 yards. What happened next was a moment of sheer brilliance, and barely anyone in the stadium was expecting it. Parlour sent a thunderbolt of a shot past Carlo Cudicini, before charging off towards the ecstatic Arsenal fans with arms outstretched, his auburn locks bouncing in the wind and his cheeky Essex grin plastered wide.

The goal was magnificent in and of itself, but also provided a fitting comic denouement. Even when he was inspiring the team to silverware, Parlour couldn't help but take the absolute piss. He may have been oblivious to the fact but, over in the press area, arch-bellend Tim Lovejoy had written him off mere seconds before. That meant that, with the greatest strike of his career, Parlour had not only downed Chelsea but also ensured that Lovejoy would be the target of ridicule forevermore.

"It's only Ray Parlour"

– Tim Lovejoy, seconds prior to Parlour's screamer against Chelsea.