Harry's Games

by John Crace

  I talked to a football club chairman about my plan. I was expecting him to knock it, to wheel out the usual canards that only those who have played the game or been on the inside of it are qualified to talk about it. But he didn’t. ‘The supporters who watch the team week in, week out, home and away, aren’t stupid,’ he said. ‘They know their club and can see quite clearly what’s working well and what’s not. You can’t pull the wool over their eyes. People sometimes try to make out football is a tremendously complicated game. It’s not. If it was that complicated, most of the players wouldn’t be able to make a living out of it.’

  Traditional methods of biography hadn’t really come close to pinning Redknapp down. He had remained everyman and no man, an elusive character in whom everyone saw the reflection that suited them. So maybe a less orthodox approach might just work. It might not reach the whole truth of Redknapp, but it would hopefully capture a truth – a recognizable, if different, truth. And if it didn’t, then I’d be no worse off than anyone else who’d looked for the meaning of Harry Redknapp. At the very least, the journey couldn’t fail to be fun and interesting. Just like Redknapp.

  Some of the material I obtained in this way was eye-opening. Another chairman of a football club Redknapp had managed – he, too, would only speak anonymously – said, ‘Harry is a nice enough guy. You can have a lot of fun with him and he’s certainly no worse or better than any other manager. What you’ve got to remember, though, is this: football isn’t as bad as people say it is. It’s ten times worse. The manager and the players are all in it just for themselves. The game should be called “selfish” not “football”. The only way to survive is to trust no one. That was my mistake. I did trust and it just about bankrupted me.’

  Other stories and observations were just too potentially libellous to use. They may or may not have been true. But no one would put their name to them and, as Redknapp generates at least as many fictional stories as factual, I couldn’t take a chance.

  One remark did stand out, though, because it just about summed up everyone’s feelings about Redknapp. It came from a former player who had been managed by Redknapp: ‘He’s the best manager I ever played for and I can’t help loving him. If I had a chance to sign for him again tomorrow, I would. But he can also be a complete arsehole.’

  1

  Harry Kicks Off

  ‘A true Cockney’ . . . ‘Times were hard but we never went without’ . . . ‘Always had a smile on his face’ . . . ‘There was always a lot of love around’ . . . These are just some of the standard, catchall phrases that everyone – Redknapp included – tends to trot out to describe his childhood, an easy shorthand for the typical working-class East End, post-Second World War upbringing that has become lodged in the national consciousness of those who didn’t have to live it. Remember those feel-good Pathé newsreels of cheeky ten-year-old boys in shorts playing on old bomb sites without a care in the world? One of them could have been our Harry.

  That isn’t to say that Redknapp didn’t have a reasonably happy childhood, or that his was any better or worse than many others growing up in the East End at the same time. Rather, that to sugar-coat it in a familiar sentimental gloss is to miss an important part of the picture. Redknapp was born on 2 March 1947, the only child of Harry (senior) and Violet. His father was a docker and decent amateur footballer and his mother worked for the Co-op. His grandmother, Violet, who made Harry his dinner when he came home from school, was a bookie’s runner and often in trouble with the law. ‘Quite often my nan would be getting carted away in a police car,’ Redknapp once said. ‘ “Your dinner’s in the oven,” she’d shout to me. “These bastards won’t keep me for long. I’ll be home in an hour, boy.” The police would have her down the station for a couple of hours, warn her off, and then she’d be back and do exactly the same again. They never put her off. She loved it.’

  You couldn’t have come up with a more stereotypical East End version of Redknapp’s childhood: the ducking, the diving, the smooth-talking patter to dodge trouble . . . here it all was, handed down from one generation to the next. Redknapp makes it sound attractive – fun even – to have been a working-class boy in postwar London. So it probably was at times, but the more so in memory because it must also have been tough growing up in a family where rationing was severe and money was short. It must also have been frightening for him to see his grandmother being carted off by the cops on a regular basis. What ten-year-old child wouldn’t be a bit scared? What most kids want most is to feel secure, for life to be predictable. Redknapp’s was anything but.

  And what of his parents? Harry’s father had been a Prisoner of War and must have returned home scarred in some way. He must have seen and experienced things that would have had a profound impact on his subsequent relationships. The same would have been true of his mother, to a lesser extent, having experienced the uncertainty, terror and personal loss that the war meant on the home front. No one could go through something as extreme as that and expect to emerge easily able to form normal, healthy relationships; indeed, a whole generation was similarly traumatized.

  Something had to give and the breaking point varied from person to person. But it’s worth observing that those who work hardest to create an image of happiness about themselves are often those in whom the need to do so is greatest, as they are those for whom the idea of unhappiness is least bearable.

  Taking Redknapp at face value is almost always a mistake; he’s a far more complex man than he would want the world to think. Listen to Redknapp talking to the media with a big smile and his easy one-liners and you might be lulled into thinking he’s a man with boundless self-confidence, a man who can handle himself in any situation. And so he can, but what if the way he handles himself isn’t through self-confidence so much as learned bravado? Perhaps a big smile and a smooth patter were the principal tools of his trade out on the streets, the way he dealt with awkward situations. And perhaps he learned to keep his more vulnerable feelings hidden and chose instead to present to the outside world the versions of himself he thought people wanted to see. It would certainly make Redknapp a more interesting and attractive character; someone for whom it is easier to feel empathy. And it would also make a great deal more sense of the apparent contradictions his critics are often only too quick to expose.

  Many Spurs fans gave a hollow laugh when Redknapp went out of his way to stress his connections to the club after his appointment as manager in 2008 by saying, ‘I am a big follower of the history of the game and Tottenham have been a great club over the years. I followed Tottenham, I trained there as an eleven-and twelve-year-old so I know the history of the club . . .’ Those Spurs fans remembered that in earlier versions of his life he had claimed he and his father were ‘avid fans’ of the North London club’s main rival, Arsenal, and suspected it was this attachment that was the more real.

  Redknapp’s bullshit was soon smelt out. Most fans have little time for false protestations of loyalty; they understand that everyone in football is in the game to make a living and much prefer a manager who talks straight – ‘I’ve come to the club because it’s a good move for me and I’ll do my best to get the results everyone wants’ – than one who trades in pathos and sentiment. Those two qualities are the preserve of the fans alone. So Redknapp’s arrival at Spurs immediately caused suspicions that he was a man not necessarily to be trusted, a man whom the fans should handle with caution.

  Was it bullshit? His long-term affection for Spurs was unquestionably, at best, a very partial truth, but bullshit requires some intentionality. Was Redknapp deliberately trying to hoodwink the fans or was he just saying something he thought would go down well? There is a distinction to be made. Redknapp wouldn’t thank anyone for suggesting he had anything less than an idyllic childhood – he has an image to protect – but, given everything that was going on, he can’t have felt as secure as all that. And insecure children tend to grow into people-pleasing adults. They have learned the necessary mechanisms to hide th
eir vulnerability, and the automatic response to any new and unfamiliar situation is to avoid any possible conflict by saying whatever they feel is required: a joke, a half-truth, whatever. It’s worth bearing in mind, given the question marks raised over his loyalty and integrity at various points throughout his career.

  What is for certain about Redknapp’s childhood was that school didn’t feature highly on his list of priorities, other than as a place to showcase his football talent. That he would go on to play professionally seemed self-evident to most people who watched him as a slightly built, but devastatingly quick, teenager. But then these same judges often have a tendency to forget the many other youngsters for whom they predicted great things and whose football careers never got further than schoolboy trials.

  So just how good a player was Redknapp? These days, it’s much easier to reach an objective assessment of a player’s ability. Every game in every division is televised and, for those with the time and inclination, you can make a detailed analysis of every minute of a player’s entire career. Not just the goals scored and the assists made, but the yards run, the tackles missed, the passes uncompleted and the team-mates blamed. It may not give you the player’s whole story, but it will give you more than enough to make an informed judgement.

  You can’t do that with Redknapp. When he began his professional playing career, very few matches were televised; fewer still were shown in their entirety. The BBC’s Saturday-night Match of the Day programme featured the highlights of just one, sometimes two, of the afternoon’s First Division fixtures. ITV’s Sunday-afternoon show, The Big Match, had just one game. A bit of bad luck with an injury or loss of form and even one of the best footballers could go through a whole season without appearing on television once. Search all the available archives, and you’d be lucky to come up with even ninety minutes of Redknapp’s career on film.

  What you’re left with then are memories of those who played both with and against him, of those who paid a few shillings at the turnstiles to stand on the terraces of Upton Park and Dean Court. And memories fade over time, so that the distinctions between what’s real and what’s imagined become more blurred. This is especially true for a player like Redknapp, whose contributions, even at the time, were frequently overshadowed by those of his more famous team-mates, in particular Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters, the triumvirate of World Cup winners. Some memories will be rose-tinted, some unduly negative, and a great deal more almost certainly blank. There are few clear ways to differentiate between questionable contemporary evidence and hard fact. So whose word is to be believed – that of Redknapp’s friends and admirers, which is likely to be spun in the most favourable light, or that of his detractors, which will most definitely not be? And where does this leave Lord Macdonald, Milan Mandaric’s defence QC – a man who one would hope would favour evidence over opinion – who described Redknapp in court as a not very good footballer?

  The bare bones of Redknapp’s career are 149 first-team appearances for West Ham between 1965 and 1972, 101 for Bournemouth between 1972 and 1976 and just 26 for Brentford, Seattle Sounders and Bournemouth (again) in the final six years up until his retirement in 1982, with a total of just 12 goals for all clubs. It does indeed appear to confirm the ‘below-average journeyman’ of Lord Macdonald’s description. But what the statistics don’t provide is an answer to the more interesting question: Was Redknapp a talented player who underperformed, or an unskilled makeweight who did well to play professional football at all? Here, as is so often the case with Redknapp, the waters quickly become very muddied.

  One long-time West Ham fan remembered that Redknapp arrived at the club as a youngster with a big reputation. ‘Harry was a local Cockney boy so everyone knew he had been a good sprinter and a very promising right-winger at school,’ Dave Newton told me. ‘We all had high hopes for him.’ As did others, as Spurs and Chelsea had also been in the mix to sign Redknapp as an apprentice teenager in 1963.

  Initially, his career at West Ham flourished; he was an integral member of the team that won the FA Youth Cup in his first season, was picked for the England Youth team the same year and had a promising first couple of seasons in the first team. But, somehow, the sparkle vanished and he struggled to hold down a regular first-team place.

  John Sissons, the left-winger who joined West Ham at much the same time as Redknapp in the early 1960s, is still not entirely sure why Redknapp’s career didn’t flourish more. ‘When I played alongside Harry in the youth team, he was always the quickest player on the pitch,’ he says, ‘and we all had him marked down as someone who would go far. He was outstanding in our FA Youth Cup run, a real live wire who was more than a handful for anyone. But then he didn’t quite develop in the way we imagined.

  ‘I think he may have been a bit unlucky. Harry was a winger, pure and simple; he’d push the ball past defenders and outrun them. And he was a good crosser of the ball. But wingers began to go out of fashion in the game . . . Ron Greenwood started to play 4-3-3 and Harry couldn’t adapt his style of play so he gradually became marginalized.’

  Sissons isn’t alone in reckoning Redknapp was a bit unlucky. Several other ex-footballers have voiced a similar opinion that Redknapp just didn’t get the right breaks every player needs at certain points of his career. Luck only gets you so far as an explanation, though. To dismiss the random completely is to misread the universe, to fail to understand what it is to be human; it is equally so to throw up your hands and, like the hero of Luke Rhinehart’s satire The Dice Man, leave every decision to a metaphorical roll of the dice and relinquish all personal responsibility. The timing of the winger’s decline in English football may have been beyond Redknapp’s control, but his ability to adapt his game to the new reality wasn’t.

  Redknapp’s loss of form wasn’t a particularly unusual phenomenon. Kids develop at different rates, both physically and emotionally, and many child prodigies fade into obscurity; very few England schoolboys go on to play for the full international side. In his autobiography, Redknapp offered his own explanation: ‘Looking back,’ he wrote, ‘I know I should have done better, but the game was changing a lot then. Full-backs suddenly weren’t slow any more. Now they were as quick as wingers, not giving you a yard to control the ball. Suddenly, whenever you got the ball you were clattered within a split second. It was getting harder to play in that position, unless you played in a dominant team which enjoyed a lot of possession and could feed the winger regularly. We stayed out wide, never came in, and were expected to do something with the ball on the few occasions we got it. Suddenly, wingers died out, as Sir Alf Ramsey underlined with his England side. As my form dipped, so did my popularity at Upton Park. My confidence was draining and, for a long spell, the punters hated me.’

  All of which makes sense, yet doesn’t quite tell the full story. It’s the comments Redknapp almost throws away as asides that are the most fascinating. Consider his phrase ‘unless you played in a dominant team which enjoyed a lot of possession’. West Ham was unquestionably not a dominant team at that time. In the years that Redknapp played for the club, it only had one top-ten finish – eighth in 1968–9; in the other seasons, it finished twelfth, fourteenth (twice), sixteenth, eighteenth and twentieth. That’s a horrible series of results for a club that was generally lauded for the style of its football and, in Ron Greenwood, had one of the league’s most respected managers. It’s even worse when you take into account the team had Bobby Moore (one of the best centre-backs in the world), Geoff Hurst (one of the two best strikers in the country), and Martin Peters (one of the country’s best mid-fielders). With these players at its spine, West Ham was a team that ought to have been contesting the league title, not propping up the division. If Redknapp was underperforming, he wasn’t alone; underperformance was endemic in the club culture.

  ‘It’s the million-dollar question every one of us is always asked about that team,’ says Sissons. ‘With the players we had, we should have achieved far more than we did. You co
uld argue that in some cases Ron Greenwood just wasn’t ruthless enough and failed to accept some players were past their best until a couple of seasons too late. You could also say Ron didn’t control the team as firmly as he should have done . . . he was too nice and he let the bigger personalities dominate him. But the bottom line is that it was our fault. We knew we were a talented team but we just weren’t professional enough.’

  You have to be careful making judgements across generations. Back in the 1960s, diet and fitness weren’t taken nearly as seriously as they are now. A pre-match steak and chips followed by a couple of cigarettes to get the lungs working properly was considered fairly standard, almost self-denying. And a post-match drinking binge was often obligatory for some players. But even by these standards, West Ham acquired the reputation of being a party club. And wherever there was a party, Redknapp seems to have been at its centre. ‘It was a good time,’ Rodney Marsh, another footballer noted as much for his fondness for the high life as his on-field brilliance, said in Les Roopanarine’s biography of Redknapp. ‘We drunk a lot and ate a lot and we laughed a lot, and Harry was at the forefront of all that.’

  Bobby Howe, a West Ham team-mate of Redknapp’s, also agreed that Harry was the life and soul of the dressing room. ‘Harry was a real product of the East End,’ he said. ‘His wit and story-telling were fantastic. He was also a prankster and incredibly street smart.’ In his autobiography, Redknapp tried to play it both ways; he couldn’t resist telling great stories about how he and the lads – Bobby Moore in particular – would go out on the lash but still turn up for training on time and play out of their skins. As far as Harry was concerned, he was doing nothing wrong; he wasn’t ‘giving it large’ in the West End like some of the glamour boys, he was just going out and having a few bevvies down the local with the lads. He didn’t help his cause, though, by calling that particular chapter ‘Win or Lose – on the Booze’.