Harry's Games

by John Crace

  Because the England team wasn’t very good might have been one answer. The so-called golden generation of Rooney, Gerrard, Lampard and Ferdinand hadn’t exactly covered itself in glory at the previous few international tournaments, and now that most of them were coming to the end of their careers there weren’t any obvious superstars-in-waiting to take their place. So there was no expectation of improvement. Misplaced optimism – the belief that you are the one who can overturn historical inevitability – is a necessary part of any manager’s make-up, so you can understand Redknapp’s qualified bullishness. But there was still something crucial missing. Where was the gung-ho ‘This is the job I’ve always wanted since I first started out in management’ that was supposed to be seared on the tongue of every new England manager?

  ‘There’s an assumption that often comes with any high-profile job that the person in line for it must really want it,’ says Martin Perry, a sports psychologist and confidence coach who has worked with a great many football managers and players. ‘The ambition for a particular job is seen as one of the requirements for getting it. We don’t always like obvious signs of ambition, but we have come to expect them. The idea that someone might just slip into an important job almost by accident and without having dedicated themselves to getting it just doesn’t feel right.

  ‘This expectation is passed on to, and understood by, every candidate. It feels wrong to be half-hearted or ambivalent about a job you know thousands of others would dearly love to have. You feel unworthy, as if you have let yourself and everyone else down, by not being utterly focused and desperate for it. So there can be a temptation to pretend that you care more than you do. Only the individual himself can truly know just how much he wants something, but asking yourself just how ambitious you think Redknapp really was for the England job seems to me to be a very interesting question to start with.’

  It was a question almost no one had given any proper consideration, having been swept along by the mantra that being England manager was a job to which any right-thinking English football manager must have automatically aspired. It was also one that drew out some unexpected answers. Redknapp was forty-five when he resigned/was forced out as Bournemouth manager, the age by which many men will have hoped already to have made their mark. He had also already turned down supposed offers to join West Ham, Aston Villa and Stoke. He then went on to West Ham as number two to Billy Bonds before inheriting the top job at Upton Park a couple of years later. After that, he returned to the south coast to manage Portsmouth and Southampton, both clubs – like West Ham – with no great expectations of instant success. He had turned down the job at Newcastle and the Spurs job had also rather landed in his lap. He hadn’t been actively seeking it and a significant factor in his accepting it seemed to be that London was close enough to his home in Sandbanks for him to commute daily.

  This may have been the career of a hard-working and talented manager, but it wasn’t one driven by the vaulting ambition of a Fergie, a Wenger or a Mourinho, the alpha males of football for whom anything less than 110 per cent, heart-on-sleeve commitment to being the best is an intolerable admission of weakness. Redknapp’s ambition appears to fall somewhere well short of theirs, somewhere comfortably and recognizably classifiable within the well-adjusted band of the spectrum. He wants to do well, he’s prepared to work hard to succeed, but the bottom line is that there are other things that mean more to him than football. Redknapp’s main aim had always been to make a living out of football, to earn enough money to provide for his family while doing something he enjoyed.

  His ambition had been measured in his career’s longevity rather than its trajectory and he’d long since been satisfied with what he had achieved. Doing a job he liked and being able to return home to Sandra and the dogs and stare out across the harbour through the telescope he had mounted in his living room was all he had ever dreamed of when he first went into management. Redknapp had been perfectly happy at Portsmouth the second time around when the Spurs job landed in his lap and he had been perfectly happy at Spurs – despite the odd bust-up with Daniel Levy – when the England job was apparently being handed to him on a plate. He had to pretend the England job meant the world to him, though; to have done otherwise would not just have appeared ungrateful – disrespectful, even – it would have revealed a side to his personality that was not for public consumption in football circles.

  It’s also tempting to imagine that Jamie was keener on his dad taking the top job than Harry was himself. Jamie was still a youngish man, making his name in a second career as a TV pundit; he was also close to his dad and loved him a great deal. Under those circumstances, ambition is easily displaced. ‘Go on, Dad, you’ve got to take it,’ he might well have said. ‘It’s the chance of a lifetime. You’ll be brilliant.’ It’s the kind of conversation many sons would dearly love to have if their fathers were in line for a big promotion.

  It would have been hard for Harry to resist that kind of influence. He had always enjoyed being Jamie’s hero and role model, and the family dynamic would probably have demanded that he was suitably enthusiastic. And who knows? After telling everyone he really wanted the job, maybe he even came to believe it. Sometimes, you are only aware of how much you want something when it is placed directly under your nose. But if Redknapp was really keen on taking the England job after all, everything about his previous career and his immediate responses in the aftermath of the post becoming available indicated that the ambition was very recently acquired.

  No one had also given much thought to whether Redknapp would be psychologically suited to the England job. As with the question of ambition, it was just generally assumed that if someone was offered the job then he must be able to do it; all that was required was to replicate what he had brought to club management at international level. ‘It’s not just the psychological stresses of meeting a whole nation’s unrealistic expectations that make managing the England side a radically different proposition,’ said the psychologist Martin Perry. ‘It’s also the very structure of the job that requires a change of mindset. Being England manager is essentially a part-time job in which you get together with your squad for about two days a month; it can be tough getting used to that.

  ‘I know Capello’s time in charge wasn’t widely well regarded, but he did cope well with the down time. By contrast, Sven-Göran Eriksson wasn’t well suited to having time on his hands which is partly why, I’m sure, he got side-tracked into various sexual dalliances. So what needs to be asked is: How well would Harry cope with the boredom of being England manager?’

  Put that way, the only adequate response is: Not very. Redknapp likes to be busy, he likes tinkering. The idea of him spending days on end attending meetings with FA apparatchiks before sitting in the stands with a deadpan expression on his face, checking out the form of a possible fourth-choice England centre-back playing in a match in which he has no interest, feels laughable. There was a joke doing the rounds at White Hart Lane following the Newcastle game. ‘What’s the first thing Harry is going to do when he becomes England manager? Answer: Buy a couple of Croatians to play in midfield.’

  It wasn’t that funny, but it raised a few smiles because it recognized a central truth: one of Redknapp’s favourite managerial responsibilities is buying and selling players. He loves the chase, the deal, the bargain. Yet trading players was going to be the one thing he couldn’t do as England manager; he would have to make do with what he had got and shuffle the available resources into a team. If there was an obvious gap in a certain position, then it was just tough. Even worse, his selections would always be subject to the prior demands of a player’s club. He couldn’t ask for a key player to be rested ahead of an important game. Or rather, he could, but he’d most likely be ignored. Was this a situation that Redknapp would enjoy, in which his managerial talents would thrive? Hardly. Yet still there wasn’t a single voice even seriously questioning his credentials. Why challenge a done deal? It was a foregone conclusion that Redknapp co
uld do the job. He was Harry Redknapp, wasn’t he? He could do anything.

  Back on the field, a 0-0 away draw to Stevenage in the fifth round of the FA Cup that Spurs had been fortunate not to lose was quickly written off as one of those things; an off day, a poor pitch and a highly motivated, well-disciplined underdog up for a fight in front of their own fans. A replay wasn’t an ideal addition to the fixture list, but no real harm had been done. The team was still in the competition and the slick Spurs machine would surely roll over the Second Division side in the return at White Hart Lane.

  It was less easy to write off the 5-2 away defeat to Arsenal the following week, especially as Spurs had been 2-0 up within half an hour, but that was also effectively what happened in the post-match press conference. ‘We’ve got to come back like we did earlier in the season,’ Redknapp said. ‘We need to bounce back and recover. We came in at the break feeling sorry for ourselves having been 2-0 up and pegged back. We seemed to buckle after they scored, which isn’t like us. We don’t do that often. It’s going to be tight, but we’re in a great position. If we can finish third, that’s a great season for us.’

  Redknapp’s match analysis was less readily accepted by the Spurs Harry-watchers than it was by the professional football media. ‘No Spurs fan likes losing to Arsenal at the best of times,’ said Trevor Jones, a long-time Spurs season ticket holder, ‘but this defeat felt catastrophic because we’d thrown the game away. At 2-0, Arsenal were there for the taking as the home crowd had even started booing their own players. Harry didn’t seem to accept any responsibility for the fact that we had blown the game; he just looked on powerlessly as our midfield was overrun and our defence torn to shreds. He couldn’t motivate the players to lift their game, neither did he try to alter the formation to cope with the threats.’

  There again, Spurs fans do like a good moan and every manager has days when he looks like a rabbit caught in headlights. By the following Wednesday, Redknapp’s claim on the England job was stronger than ever without him needing to go anywhere near a touchline, as England, under the guidance of caretaker-manager Stuart Pearce, were beaten 3-2 by Holland at Wembley in a friendly. The scoreline made it sound close, but it wasn’t. The Dutch had cruised to a 2-0 lead and then dropped their intensity to little above walking pace; England scurried diligently to equalize before Holland bothered to up their game again. Afterwards, even Pearce wasn’t bothering to put himself seriously in the frame to stay on in the job full-time. ‘I’m pretty lightly raced,’ was how he described his management career to date.

  Once again, Redknapp was the only story in town and, as attention now turned to what kind of England team Redknapp might pick, there were, as so often with him, as many variations of the story as there were writers. Typical of this was Gary Neville, who had surprisingly proved himself to be one of the best analysts on television in his first season as a Sky pundit. Writing in the Mail on Sunday, he had argued that Redknapp was the best candidate for the job and that the way forward was for England to be prepared to write off Euro 2012 and blood new, young players as the first step to building a strong squad for the next World Cup in 2014.

  This sounded great until you gave it a moment’s thought. Even a cursory look at Redknapp’s team selections over the previous ten years would have told Neville that he almost always chose experience over youth. If Redknapp was in charge at Euro 2012, he would be far more likely to try to persuade Neville himself to come out of retirement than he would to pick a youngster, such as Jordan Henderson. So Redknapp being the best man for the job and England following a youth policy were much more likely to be mutually exclusive propositions. Even Neville, a man whose judgement was normally so sound, was behaving as if he had been bewitched by Redknapp. Normal thought processes had been suspended; the aura around King Harry was all-pervasive.

  The interregnum between England managers is usually open season for everyone with an opinion to rubbish the credentials of every possible candidate, to riff on why they are almost certainly going to be useless, why they are bound to fail and why whoever lands the job will be a compromise candidate – the best of a bad lot. With Redknapp there was just one long wave of optimism. Where were the doubts? And what would it take for them to surface?

  5

  Hammering Out a Deal

  1992–2001

  ‘You know what the most revealing section of Harry’s autobiography is, don’t you?’ Pete Johnson said to me over lunch. ‘It’s the chapter where he talks about replacing Billy Bonds as West Ham manager. It’s not what he says, so much as where he says it, because the Bonds saga comes right at the very start and he goes on and on at such length about how he didn’t stitch Billy up – “I could never have done that . . . Billy was my best friend” – that you end up feeling he must have a guilty conscience. If he didn’t, he’d surely have gone into the whole affair in much less detail later on in the book.’

  Not for the first time – and certainly not for the last – there were questions to be answered about Redknapp’s ambition and sense of loyalty.

  Harry Redknapp had first been approached to return to West Ham in 1989 when John Lyall had left after fifteen years in charge of the club. How far the negotiations got is characteristically vague, with Redknapp saying he didn’t really fancy leaving Bournemouth at the time and the West Ham board letting their actions speak for them by appointing Lou Macari instead.

  Macari’s tenure was a one-year disaster. The fans hated him – ‘He wasn’t a Londoner and he made us play a long ball game’ – and so did the directors, although when Macari resigned after just seven months, Redknapp was not considered as his replacement. Instead, the job went to Billy Bonds, a die-hard Hammer who had played for the club from 1967 until his retirement in 1988, after which he had become the youth-team coach.

  Bonds and Redknapp went way back; they had become good friends during their playing days at West Ham – Bonds had even been best man at Redknapp’s wedding – and had remained close ever since. And after Bonds had followed up securing West Ham promotion to the old First Division in his first season in charge, only to see them relegated the next, and Redknapp had been given the elbow by Bournemouth, they were both in need of a little help and were perfectly placed to do one another a favour. It was an alliance made in the boozers of Bethnal Green. Helping out a mate was something you just did.

  Who was doing whom the favour depended on who was doing the talking. In an interview with the West Ham retro fanzine, EX, Bonds remembered, ‘I’d had a few phone calls from Harry Redknapp telling me that he was fed up at Bournemouth, fed up with management itself and that he would be happy to come and work with me on my own terms. Harry wasn’t a top-drawer coach but he was good out on the training ground and good with players.’

  Redknapp recalled it rather differently. ‘When they were relegated, Bill gave me a call,’ he said. ‘I thought something must be up because he never phoned anyone. He told me he could do with a bit of help. I’d had enough of managing. I’d had nine years at Bournemouth and that was plenty. When Bill rang me that summer and started talking about someone assisting him at West Ham, I thought I wouldn’t mind some of that.’

  At the time when Redknapp became Bonds’ assistant in 1992, such differences of interpretation were largely immaterial and could easily be overlooked. Two old muckers having a laugh and working together for a club they both loved . . . what could be better? The pair got off to a great start with West Ham continuing to act like a yo-yo by gaining promotion back to what was now the Premier League in their first season in tandem – and it was very much ‘in tandem’.

  The players certainly weren’t put out by Redknapp’s arrival. ‘We all loved Billy Bonds,’ says Trevor Morley, the striker who had been with the club for three years and was player of the year in 1994, ‘but he did have his limitations. If anything, he was too nice a bloke. We needed someone a bit more street-wise and, since Billy and Harry got on so well together, Harry was the perfect fit in many ways. Harry is a very
shrewd man . . . he didn’t say much when he first arrived. He just eased his way in and gradually made his presence felt.’

  Redknapp’s arrival looked a little different from the outside. ‘Harry was always brilliant at getting himself noticed,’ says Sam Delaney. ‘Right from the time he arrived, he gave the impression he was on an equal footing with Bonds because he had a much higher profile. West Ham had always been one of those clubs about which people were respectful but which were usually largely forgotten. Under Ron Greenwood and John Lyall, the mantra had always been to say as little as possible . . . no publicity was good publicity. Bonds was very much in the same mould, but Harry was completely the opposite. He loved talking to the media, so naturally the media quickly started coming to him first, which made him look as if he was running the show more than he really was.’

  That could be an understatement, because if you were only to listen to Redknapp, you might be forgiven for thinking that Bonds had made hardly any contribution at all. ‘I knew right away serious changes had to be made for the good of the club,’ Redknapp wrote. ‘Dead wood had to be shifted. I think if Bill was honest, he would say he didn’t have a lot of time for the players. He’d been such a good player himself, a whole-hearted servant of the club, and I think deep down the thought of some of them earning high-grade salaries for low-grade performances disgusted him. That attitude was understandable, but it didn’t help when you had to get players to turn it on for you. I saw it as one of my first tasks to lift the players, to instil confidence, to tell them constantly how good they were. At the same time, stricter discipline was essential. There’s no doubt that one or two of them had been on the booze and let themselves go. I decided we had to train them harder, and get them to lose a bit of weight.’