Harry's Games

by John Crace

  And he frequently got his own way as the West Ham team of the mid- and late-1990s often gave the appearance of operating on a revolving door policy: one player in, another out. If a player wasn’t performing as well as Redknapp expected, he wouldn’t waste too much time trying to understand why or tinker with the formation to help him improve. He’d get rid of him and bring in another player he thought could do a better job.

  It was a policy that misfired as often as it worked and occasionally exasperated the West Ham fans. ‘We’d get some brilliant players in – John Hartson and Paolo Di Canio did fabulously for us,’ says Sam Delaney. ‘But Harry also brought in some real shockers, most of them from the European mainland. For a while, it was quite exciting. There weren’t so many foreign players in the Premiership back then, and those there were didn’t want to come to West Ham. But under Harry they did and it made us all feel good to bask in the kudos as he would big them all up on their arrival as World Cup stars. And then we’d see them play . . . Some barely lasted a season, they were that bad, and it made us into a bit of a laughing stock.’

  Even Redknapp couldn’t gloss over just how disastrous some of his acquisitions had been. Marco Boogers had been bought from Sparta Rotterdam for £1 million before the 1995 season, with West Ham proudly announcing they had acquired the player who had been voted third best in the whole of the Dutch league the previous season. As Steve Blowers pointed out, this wasn’t quite true. ‘It now transpired he had only been voted into third place in the Sparta Rotterdam player of the season poll,’ he wrote.

  With Boogers having been sent off after just eighteen minutes of his first game, Redknapp came under scrutiny. ‘Of course he’s the kind of player I expected,’ he said, back-pedalling in response to criticism. ‘I knew exactly what I was getting. People are saying that I bought him off a video. I don’t know who dreamt that one up!’

  No one, as it happened, for it wasn’t a dream. A while later – with Boogers having apparently gone AWOL in a caravan in between fitting in ninety-eight minutes’ playing time in his four appearances, before being shifted on to Groningen along with a mental-health sick note – Redknapp came clean. ‘I could tell after three or four weeks that I had dropped a “rick” with him,’ he said. ‘His attitude stank. Someone sent me a tape of Boogers in action and urged me to watch it. I was very impressed and, for the first time in my life, I signed a player purely on what I’d seen on video. The season was upon us and we didn’t have time to check him out any further.’

  The least that could be said was that it was a cavalier way of spending the club’s money and one that cost the club £800,000 in transfer costs along with Boogers’ wages.

  The signings of the two Romanians – Ilie Dumitrescu and Florin Raducioiu – weren’t quite as catastrophic as that of Boogers, but not far off. Dumitrescu had been bought from Spurs in 1995 for £1.5 million, but, as he had played fewer than a quarter of the games for the north London club for which he had been eligible, the British government was reluctant to issue him a work permit. So he also sat out a fair few games for West Ham and, when he did become available, was either injured or disappointing and was transferred for £1 million to the Mexican club, FC de America, at the end of the following season.

  Raducioiu lasted even less time. Bought for £2.4 million from the Spanish club Espanyol at the beginning of the 1996 season, he was sold back to the same club for £1.5 million long before the end of it. ‘It was a toss-up between Raducioiu and Marco Boogers for my worst ever signing,’ was Redknapp’s philosophical take on West Ham’s £900,000 loss.

  Redknapp didn’t lose on the signing of another foreigner as Paulo Futre was acquired on a free transfer from AC Milan, but neither did he gain. The forward decided to retire in the same season as his arrival, leaving Redknapp to observe ruefully after an away game at Roker Park, ‘There was a howling wind and Sunderland were swarming in on our goal and Futre, Dumitrescu and Raducioiu were standing there on the halfway line looking on. I knew then it wasn’t going to work . . .’

  It was the overseas signings that attracted the most interest – and criticism – but Redknapp was as busy as ever in the home transfer market, equally as happy trading in low-value players from his old club Bournemouth as in high-value ones, such as John Hartson, Trevor Sinclair and Paul Kitson. But then as long as he was trading, Redknapp was usually happy. And for the most part, his signings all did a decent job for a season or two; Redknapp may have made the odd howler during his career, but he has a nose for a good footballer.

  What he doesn’t have a nose for is stability. When Redknapp invites his critics to judge him on his transfer track record, the only subject up for discussion is the profit and loss account – the amount each player cost set against the fee the club recouped on his eventual sale. This way he more often than not emerges in credit. The element that gets lost here is the hidden, invisible costs. Treating players as mere commodities – functioning objects who either do their job well or badly – is an inefficient and expensive way of doing business. Most players – people – want to feel loved and valued; they want a sense of belonging. They don’t want to feel as if they are being judged on a game-by-game basis and, if found wanting, are going to be shipped out to the highest bidder at the first available opportunity.

  But that’s precisely the atmosphere that Redknapp tended to create in his West Ham teams as the players knew they could be in favour one week and on their bike the next. And that type of atmosphere can be extremely demotivating – not just for those who are insecure about their status within the team but also for the players who have good reason to believe they are semipermanent fixtures. The most successful teams may now be the ones crammed with the best and most expensive players, but they weren’t always in the 1990s. Back then, mutual understanding and cohesion were just as important and Redknapp seldom allowed his teams the time to develop those qualities. This, in turn, often made his teams less than the sum of their parts and goes some way to explaining why they stumbled along near the bottom of the Premiership in the first few years of his tenure at West Ham.

  Giving Redknapp’s managerial style a more positive spin, you can argue that he treated his players like adults. He told them what he expected and left them to get on with it, without any excessive interference or micro-management. That approach might have worked better if his players had also behaved like adults. In his autobiography, Redknapp wrote of his exasperation about a Christmas party that got out of hand in 1994. ‘There was a little group of players who couldn’t behave themselves,’ he said. ‘They were forever having booze-ups and causing aggravation. Dale Gordon was head of the club’s entertainment committee and for Christmas he wanted to hire an open-top bus to trawl through London’s West End. “Are you out of your mind?” I said to him. “We’re struggling in the league and you want to go around looking like you’ve won the FA Cup!” Instead, they hired a minibus to take them to the Phoenix Apollo in Stratford. One or two of them had too much to drink and set alight to the seats on the bus at the end of the night.’ Steve Blowers suggested the seats were also both slashed and slashed upon.

  Redknapp might have given the team a bollocking afterwards, but what really matters is that the players got trashed in public anyway, even though he had given them a prior warning. Why? Because they thought they could get away with it. The bottom line was that they just didn’t respect Redknapp enough. He was too much one of the lads – ‘H’ rather than ‘Gaffer’ – and he wasn’t someone they necessarily trusted.

  ‘There were times we felt we were being spied on,’ said one former player, ‘that Harry was trying to listen in to dressing-room conversations rather than asking us for our opinions outright.’

  It didn’t help that his ‘win or lose – on the booze’ mantra still followed Redknapp around. And Redknapp often didn’t seem in much hurry to lose it. Several years later, when asked why his team wasn’t playing particularly well, he suggested the problem lay with the foreign players who preferred
to stay at home rather than go out drinking with the rest of the squad. At best this was inconsistent, at worst crass. It gave the drinkers licence to go on boozing and the overseas players a reason to think they were better off packing their bags and returning home.

  ‘If I’m honest,’ says Trevor Morley, ‘there were a number of us that were the last of football’s drinking culture. These days, players wouldn’t dream of going out on a Thursday night but, back then, the only day we all stayed in was the night before the game. Looking back, that wasn’t particularly professional of us, though we were by no means the only club behaving like this. Harry knew exactly what was going on but never interfered as long as our performances on the pitch weren’t affected. Occasionally, though, he did get the strop. Every year he’d take us on a mid-week break down to Bournemouth. After one party got out of control, we found ourselves downgraded from a five-star to a two-star one the following year.’

  ‘Some of the fans used to quite like all these kinds of Harry shenanigans,’ says Sam Delaney. ‘They thought it was funny and made us different from other clubs who took themselves far too seriously. And there was that feeling that Harry was a real person in comparison to the uptightness of a Sir Alex Ferguson. But it also began to wear me down, because there was often a feeling of chaos about the club, as if no one was really in charge or knew what was going on.

  ‘There was the time when our team were at the airport at the same time as Arsenal. The Arsenal team were all kitted out in matching club suits and were waiting in the business class lounge to board; we were all dressed in jeans and jostling with the public to board an easyJet flight. There was the time the team was supposed to be boarding the coach to play Stockport County away in the League Cup and Raducioiu was out shopping in Harvey Nichols. And then there was the time we fielded a cup-tied player [Emmanuel Omoyinmi] in a match against Aston Villa and were ordered to replay the tie. How could anyone at the club make such an idiotic mistake? You just couldn’t imagine it happening to anyone but West Ham.

  ‘Individually, all these things probably seem quite amusing, but taken together they were just embarrassing. They made us look unprofessional. There were often occasions during this period when supporting West Ham felt more like watching a circus act rather than a football club, with Harry being only one step away from being the Barry Fry-like, novelty-act ringmaster.’

  These comic, quasi-slapstick tales have become part of both West Ham’s and Redknapp’s legend. There isn’t a Hammers fan from the 1990s who doesn’t have instant recall of them – usually accompanied by a curious, hybrid grin-cum-cringe. Seldom does anyone ask why they happened but, if they do, the answers tend to go no deeper than ‘that’s Harry and West Ham for you’. But why should it have been that way? Redknapp may not be a well-educated man, but he is extremely quick-witted and nobody’s fool. Neither is he the slightest bit lazy; he puts in more hours than most managers. So why did he and the club so often end up looking a bit stupid?

  The easiest answer is that he was looking in the wrong direction at crucial times. Everyone who has worked with Redknapp says he is something of a control freak, a man who likes to have a finger in every available pie. And with so many different things going on at a football club at the same time – and with Redknapp invariably giving priority to which players he was planning to buy and sell – it was inevitable that something was going to give from time to time.

  But this analysis only gets you so far. Redknapp was nearly 50 by this time and the strengths and weaknesses of his personality couldn’t have been any surprise to him. You therefore have to question his choice of management team. Most of the off-field disasters were ones that shouldn’t have got anywhere near the manager. The Christmas party, Raducioiu’s shopping expedition and Emmanuel Omoyinmi’s ineligibility; they were all complications that should have been dealt with by the back-room staff. So why weren’t they?

  There are two possibilities: either Redknapp had hand-picked a management team whose most important quality was loyalty to him rather than administrative competence; or the level of his constant interference in the way his staff went about their daily jobs resulted in them feeling disengaged. It’s easy to imagine someone thinking, ‘I can’t be bothered with this as Harry will only come along and change it all.’

  You also have to question what the club thought it was doing. Even if Redknapp wasn’t self-aware enough to assemble a management team who could compensate for his weaknesses and were good at the details which didn’t interest him, then the West Ham board ought to have been. Fifteen years ago, football clubs may not have been the slick corporate machines they are now, but there was enough money and expertise around to have kept some sort of eye on what was going on. A single phone call to the Bournemouth board of directors would have told them all they needed to know about where Redknapp was likely to need help. If Redknapp wasn’t going to make the right appointments, then the board could have stepped in and insisted on making them for him. But they didn’t. Exactly why they didn’t is something to return to later.

  For now, what matters is that Redknapp was left exposed. Unlike in government where ministers can use their special advisers as fall guys, in football the manager always gets the blame. So when things went wrong, Redknapp was in the firing line and, as someone who does not always engage his brain before opening his mouth when under pressure, he was left to make contradictory statements – ‘we’re not a drinking club’ . . . ‘the players don’t drink enough together’ – that only ever made a bad situation look worse.

  Even at the best of times, though, when he wasn’t being asked awkward questions, Redknapp was prone to lapses of tact and judgement, especially when the opportunity for a one-liner presented itself in a room full of appreciative reporters. It’s a hard temptation to resist sometimes.

  For Redknapp, the consequences were sometimes rather more serious. Asked why Stan Lazaridis had yet to join the club from Australia, Redknapp said he was probably still shagging sheep. Talking about Ian Dowie’s aerial threat, he said, ‘Judging by the look of Dowie’s face, I’d reckon he’s headed a lot of balls.’ After signing Dani, a Portuguese striker with boy-band good looks, Redknapp joked, ‘Dani walked into the dressing-room and all the lads said they’re not bringing their wives to the games any more. He looks like a film star. The other teams won’t know whether to mark him or fuck him!’ And so it went on . . .

  Taken individually, none of these gags was totally out of order; the damage came in the cumulative effect, which was to make Redknapp appear abusive. Unless he is a big star, a player has little comeback against a manager who takes the piss out of him in public. Make a fuss and he looks thin-skinned, someone who can’t take a joke. Worse still, he could find himself in the reserves for a spell. It’s largely a one-way power relationship, with the player having little choice but to roll with the punches. But the crime does not go unforgotten and, on a cold February afternoon, the team finds itself with a player disinclined to put his body on the line in the last twenty minutes when only absolute commitment is enough to hang on for a draw.

  It’s not only those players who find themselves on the wrong end of Redknapp’s humour who are affected. The whole team knows that if it can happen to one of their number, then it can happen to any of them. No one knows who is going to be next, and the insecurity spreads – possibly as far as a player trying to goad Redknapp into having a laugh at another’s expense, merely to deflect attention away from himself. Much as Redknapp might try to pass off his gags as ‘spur-of the-moment, harmless fun’ – a way of relaxing the team and bringing it together – in many cases his humour will have the opposite effect. It will make the players treat him less seriously and, more crucially, trust him less. There’s a time and a place for a manager to give a player an earful, and if you’re hoping to provoke a positive response, that time and place is not in front of a room full of journos.

  Trevor Morley never got on the wrong end of one of Redknapp’s gags but he did know what it was
like to be both in and out of favour. ‘Harry has the gift of making you feel really special,’ he says. ‘After he’d been at the club for six months or so, he took me aside to say that he’s been told that I might be trouble but that he’d been really impressed with my attitude. That kind of thing made a difference. He also noticed things. In those days, many players used to report back for pre-season training overweight and unfit, but I used to go and play for the Norwegian side Brann over the summer and he used to comment on how sharp I was looking and that I was guaranteed a place in the starting line-up.

  ‘The downside of this is that it’s much harder when things aren’t going well. In my last season at the club, I got badly injured, tried to come back too soon, got injured again and knew my days were numbered. I was never a big one for going to bang on the manager’s door, so I just felt I was left in limbo a bit. It’s the same with most managers, I suppose. When you’re in, you’re in – when you’re not, you’re not. The manager just hasn’t got the time to reassure players who aren’t in line for a game at the weekend. But because Harry had once made me feel so good about myself, being ignored by him was hard to take psychologically.’

  There were also knock-on effects to the image of West Ham as a club on the edge of chaos with a joker for a manager, as outsiders came to look for the worst in any possible situation. One case in point was the final game of the 1996/97 season at Old Trafford when the ball was passed to Paul Kitson at the kick-off, whereupon the striker launched an optimistic kick down-field that went straight into touch. The crowd laughed, but the bookies blanched as some punters reportedly made a killing on a spread bet for the time of the first throw-in.