Harry's Games

by John Crace

  With Gaydamak’s money on the table in the January transfer window, Redknapp set about spending it with his usual panache. Redknapp is often described as a gambler, but his punting begins and ends at the bookies. In the transfer market he takes few chances, adopting the conservative approach of buying tried and tested talent, players who are in their prime or have been around the block and who he believes have a year or two of active service left in their legs. Only very rarely does he invest in young people with potential – that is something for managers with smaller wallets and more time on their hands. Bringing in Benjani for a club record £4.1 million, Pedro Mendes, Sean Davis and Noé Pamarot from Spurs for £7 million, along with Wayne Routledge and the Argentinian, Andres D’Alessandro, on loan deals was therefore par for the course.

  Redknapp’s approach paid off, but it was touch and go. For a long while, the new-look Portsmouth team was playing every bit as poorly as the old one had done under Perrin. At the end of February, Pompey were stranded at the bottom of the table eight points below the next club and, by the end of March, the team was still propping up the table. Only a late run of good results lifted the club to seventeenth, one place above the drop zone. If Redknapp knew why the team suddenly clicked so late in the season, he never said. Maybe it was a mixture of confidence and luck. Sometimes managers have to take whatever they can get.

  In May 2006, Redknapp was feeling so comfortable that he told Sky Sports that Portsmouth would be his last job in football. ‘I mean it this time,’ he said. ‘This is the end for me. This is my last job. I feel comfortable here – I’m in charge here. I love being here.’ Portsmouth fans with longish memories might have started panicking at this point as, two years previously, he had told the Sun, ‘I would not take another job if I left here. Too many things happen in football which do your head in. If anyone thinks I’m angling for another job, then they had better think again as this will be my last one.’ He left for Southampton seven months later.

  But most fans were in a forgiving mood, prepared to overlook the many inconsistencies and contradictions in their manager and remained open to the possibility that when he made both statements he actually meant them, because life at Portsmouth was good. And about to get a whole lot better.

  During the summer of 2006, Gaydamak bought the other fifty per cent of Mandaric’s holding in the club and, for Redknapp, it might as well have been Christmas. Finally, he appeared to have a benefactor who was prepared to put his money where Redknapp’s mouth was and, having signed his own new three-year contract, Redknapp went on to reshape the squad entirely by buying Sol Campbell, David James, Niko Kranjcar, Glen Johnson, Nwankwo Kanu, Lauren, Andrew Cole and Djimi Traore, as well as replacing his ever-trusted lieutenant, Kevin Bond, who had followed him back to Portsmouth from Southampton, with Tony Adams.

  Not all the signings immediately won over the fans, but Redknapp’s radar for getting the best out of players who had been overlooked elsewhere was spot on this time and the club finished the season comfortably in ninth place – tantalizingly out of reach of a first-ever UEFA Cup place. Away from football, the troubles that were to hound Redknapp for the next five and a half years began to close in on him. Throughout his managerial career, there had been whispers about Redknapp’s financial dealings and lifestyle, but no one had ever put their head over the parapet and accused him of wrongdoing in public. In September 2006, that changed when a BBC Panorama documentary accused him of making an illegal approach to (or ‘tapping up’) the Blackburn defender, Andy Todd.

  Redknapp denied this, saying he was the victim of an attempted sting by the BBC. ‘I was a complete innocent party,’ he told the Daily Telegraph. ‘The guy rings up, who I haven’t seen for seven years. He’s setting up a new company for £2 million for some guy and could he have five minutes with you, Harry? So the guy I haven’t spoken to for six or seven years comes down, sits opposite me and starts filming me but I don’t say nothing, not a word to him. I know what I’ve done and I’ve done nothing wrong. I sat down with this guy and he wasted his time with me, really.’

  Redknapp then went on to ridicule the allegation that Kevin Bond had taken illegal payments – ‘bungs’ – while working as his assistant at Portsmouth. ‘All this talk and all these idiots who keep on about bungs in football. It doesn’t happen, it isn’t happening, it can’t happen. You tell me that you’re going to be a manager and earning plenty of money, and you have to go to sleep at night knowing any idiot can pick up a phone and ring a newspaper and finish your career. You walk into a dressing room, every player, they’ve got agents who might say to them, “I’ve given your manager a few quid.” You’re going to get respect from those players? They can stand up and say, “I know all about you.” It’s bullshit.’

  Despite Redknapp’s protests, the BBC aired the programme. Redknapp didn’t sue for libel; Bond threatened to, but dropped his claim shortly before it came to court in 2009. If the tactic was to make no fuss so that the problem would go away more quickly, then it didn’t work. While concerns were raised about a racehorse that had been given to Redknapp by former Portsmouth player Amdy Faye’s agent Willy McKay, Redknapp was cleared of taking illegal payments in the Rio Ferdinand transfer from West Ham to Leeds by the Stevens inquiry into football corruption in June 2007. Redknapp’s house was raided at dawn by a combination of the police and a photographer from the Sun, and he, Mandaric, Peter Storrie and McKay were subsequently arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and false accounting in connection with the purchase of Faye.

  These charges were subsequently dropped, although as a result of the investigation Mandaric and Redknapp would later wind up in court over the Peter Crouch sale. The police were later ordered to pay £1,000 and legal costs for the unacceptable manner in which his arrest had been made. But some of the mud stuck as Redknapp was thereafter branded in many people’s minds as the human face of all that was dodgy in football.

  Redknapp has always been outraged by this, blaming the media and the public both for making lazy and incorrect assumptions based on class prejudice, and ignorance of how football works and the volume of transfer transactions in which he was involved. He’s probably spot on, but his innocence does raise other rather more philosophical questions: how is it possible that so many people were so insistent for so long that professional football was riven with players, agents and managers taking illegal payments from transfer deals and salary negotiations, and yet the police have been unable to acquire sufficient evidence to get a single successful prosecution?

  These matters were the last thing on anyone’s mind in Portsmouth during the 2007/08 season. Gaydamak’s cheque book had paid for three more class players – Sulley Muntari, John Utaka and David Nugent – in the pre-season and Lassana Diarra and Jermain Defoe in the January window, and the team now began to look like a solid Premiership club, rather than a bunch of chancers and hopefuls whose sole aim was to avoid relegation. Portsmouth finished tenth in the league but the heroics came in the FA Cup, where, after a nail-biting and totally unexpected away win against a full-strength Manchester United – their first victory at Old Trafford for more than fifty years – in the quarterfinals, the team lifted the trophy in May.

  For Julian Guyer and all Pompey fans, it was a dream come true. ‘Some people sniped that Gaydamak’s money had basically bought the cup and that we’d only had to beat West Brom in the semis and Cardiff in the final,’ he says. ‘But none of us cared. Every other team that was winning things had also essentially bought their silverware, so why shouldn’t we be allowed to gatecrash the party? And I felt we’d earned those victories against West Brom and Cardiff for all the years I’d been travelling up to places like Carlisle and Oldham to watch us play crap football.

  ‘I’d never thought I’d ever see my team win the FA Cup at Wembley and being there as we collected the trophy was one of the happiest and most emotional moments of my life. When I got home, I gave my grandfather a programme to put alongside his from our only previous FA
Cup win in 1939; it was quite an emotional moment for both of us. Better still, we had qualified for Europe. It’s hard to explain what that means to fans who take European football for granted. The closest any Pompey fans had previously got to Europe was the ferry port to Le Havre. Now we would be taking on top clubs, like AC Milan, on equal terms.’

  Portsmouth’s success during that season did not go unnoticed. David James and Sol Campbell were recalled to the England team and, for the first time, Redknapp’s name came up as a possible contender for the England job in late 2007 when Steve McClaren was sacked in November after England failed to qualify for the finals of Euro 2008. The job was eventually given to Fabio Capello in early December and Redknapp felt that the police raid on his home a few months earlier had been largely responsible for the FA’s decision to overlook him.

  The investigation probably did influence the FA’s thinking – no one knows for sure as the FA doesn’t publish the minutes of its selection procedures – but equally, and perhaps counter-intuitively, it did help to create the groundswell of opinion for Redknapp to become the next England manager after Capello, one that would grow ever louder over the next four years. Capello was never popular with the media and his so-so results didn’t buy him any breathing space and, within a year or so of his appointment, it seemed to have become a preordained truth that his successor would have to be English. Eriksson and Capello hadn’t performed any great miracles because they were foreigners; they didn’t understand the English game or English players. If England were ever to be successful again, then the team would need an English manager in charge.

  Few came more English than Redknapp, and the police investigation in some ways enhanced his credentials. The police hadn’t charged him and the public mood was that if Redknapp had done anything a bit dodgy it hadn’t been that dodgy. More importantly, a large cross section of football fans didn’t care if Redknapp had done anything wrong or not. He’d been picked on by the police just because he looked and behaved like the archetypal English football manager. He didn’t dress in fancy Armani suits and talk corporate management bollocks. He wore – at least in the public’s perception – a sheepskin coat and spoke the same language as the fans and the footballer, along with added gags. And if Redknapp had a wedge full of used £20 notes stuffed into his top pocket, so much the better. When he told the writer who ghosted his magazine column, ‘A grand is peanuts . . . I can do that in an afternoon at the races,’ everyone just laughed. It somehow made him even more English.

  The more you looked, the more English he became. What could be more English than an East End cockney? Especially one who had played and drunk alongside Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters; there was almost a strand of DNA linking him to the World Cup. Who needed all those poncy foreign tactics, when you had an English bloke who could do everything and more with a good half-time talk, a couple of wingers and a solid 4-4-2 formation? Why complicate things? Even Redknapp’s canteen at the Portsmouth training ground was English through and through. Sod the nutritionists, lads, just tuck into egg and chips.

  Strangely though, in all this glorification of all things English, there was little consideration of just how English was the main foundation of Redknapp’s success. If being a constant presence in the transfer and loan market was an English virtue, then it was a comparatively recent one. And Redknapp was hyperactive again at the beginning of the 2008/09 season, buying Peter Crouch – yet again – for £11 million from Liverpool in preparation for his first European examination. Redknapp had proved he could mix it in the Premier League, but did he have the tactical nous to cut it against tricky European teams?

  Before anyone had a real chance to find out, Redknapp was gone. Earlier in the year, he had turned down the Newcastle job after Sam Allardyce had been sacked – the daily commute from Sandbanks would have been a killer – but when Daniel Levy came looking for someone to halt Spurs’ worst-ever start to a Premier League campaign, Redknapp couldn’t resist. Peter Storrie tried to persuade him to stay, but Redknapp’s keenness to go and the £5 million compensation on offer sealed the deal, and this second parting from Portsmouth was a great deal more amicable than the first. The timing might have been better, though. Two days after joining Spurs, Redknapp returned to Portsmouth for the day to be awarded the freedom of the city in recognition of his achievement in winning the FA Cup, and the reception he received from the crowd wasn’t all he might have wanted.

  Once the initial disappointment had passed, most fans were philosophical about Redknapp’s departure; they hadn’t expected him to stay for ever, he’d been offered a better job and they had no reason to think the good times wouldn’t continue to roll under a different manager. Four years on, the feelings were more mixed; in another piece of Redknapp timing, the club went into administration during Redknapp’s trial at Southwark Crown Court. The ten-point automatic deduction just about guaranteed that Portsmouth would be playing in the First Division – two leagues lower than the Premiership – at the start of the 2012/13 season. That’s if the club existed at all.

  ‘I feel ambivalent,’ says Julian Guyer, ‘because I wouldn’t have missed the excitement for all the world. But in hindsight, it was like a mirror image of the banking crisis; we had had a manager who had maxed out all the credit cards at Harrods and it was only a matter of time before the bailiffs came in. Harry spent money the club just didn’t have and, though the chairman was ultimately responsible for our financial situation, he was to some extent complicit. There were always doubts about Gaydamak’s solvency and Harry should have been more careful about putting the club at risk.

  ‘A manager has long-term as well as short-term responsibilities to the club. Harry might have long gone, but the fans and the club have to live with his legacy. And it’s not just a question of being sore because we’ve gone down two divisions since he left; that sort of thing happens and you can accept it. But going into administration is not a victimless crime. There are many local firms that are reliant on the football club; some have gone out of business and others are still owed a lot of money by the club. These are the ones who have really suffered.’

  Right next to Fratton Park there is a mobile kebab stall. Match days used to offer up the best pickings of the week, but now the owner, Andy Wells, says it’s hardly worth opening on a Saturday afternoon. ‘It’s unbelievable, really,’ he says. ‘We do far better now on a midweek evening when there’s no game. The business has been hit hard. I know it’s partly the recession, but it’s also down to the way the club has been run. Do I blame Harry? Yes, I do a bit. Though I blame the board for not reining him in more.’

  That, though, is often easier said than done, as one former club chairman who worked with Redknapp in the past explained. ‘It sounds perfectly straightforward,’ he said. ‘Harry tells you he wants to buy this player and pay him so much, and you go away and work out whether you can afford it. But it doesn’t work like that. Harry has a way of talking to the media and getting them on his side. If you try to say no to him, he will go behind your back and get a story in the local paper about how the chairman has no ambition for the club.

  ‘This is the story that the fans take on board. They don’t care if you can afford it or not. To them, every football club chairman is a millionaire with bottomless pockets and if you don’t keep signing blank cheques then you don’t have the team’s best interests at heart. Before you know it, the fans are chanting, “Chairman Out!” at every match. You try to ignore it, but you can’t. It does hurt. So you give in a bit. You tell yourself you’ll let Harry get away with it just this once and stand up to him the next time. Only you don’t.

  ‘Harry understands all this perfectly and has tried to play the system to great effect at every club he’s been at. I lost millions and millions of pounds trying to keep the club afloat and it just about bankrupted me. The stupid thing is that I cared more about the club than he did, which is why I kept on handing over money I couldn’t really afford. I just sort of closed my eyes
and hoped we’d have a cup run or a promotion that would help pay for it. I’m not looking for sympathy here. Just a chance to put my point of view across. In my opinion, the judge of a good manager isn’t only the results on the pitch; it’s the state of the finances when he leaves.’

  A bankrupt club and some bitter-sweet memories aren’t Redknapp’s only legacy to the city. In 2007, through one of his companies, Redknapp bought Savoy Buildings, a row of shops and nightclubs along the seafront in Southsea, intending to redevelop the site as ninety-two luxury apartments. When the recession hit and the council insisted that more affordable housing be included in the planning, the development was put on hold indefinitely. In August 2011, the site burned down, forcing many nearby residents to be temporarily moved out of their homes. Three months later, the council had to order Redknapp to clean up the burnt-out buildings amid concerns that the site was an eyesore and potentially unsafe. The rubble has now been moved but the site is still empty. As a metaphor for the city’s football club, it could hardly be bettered.

  8

  Coming Up Short

  April 2012

  A hard-won home victory against Swansea at the beginning of the month proved to be a false dawn. There was no glorious revival, the slick machine did not slip effortlessly back into gear; rather, it continued to misfire as Spurs laboured to a goalless draw against Sunderland at the Stadium of Light the following week. The point did take Tottenham temporarily back into third place in the table ahead of Arsenal, but the ten-point cushion had been well and truly blown and it was clear the team was a shadow of the one that had taken Newcastle apart only two months earlier.

  The simplest explanation – and the one most analysts instinctively reached for – was that the delay over the appointment of the new England manager had affected Redknapp and that the uncertainty was transmitting itself to the team. There was a satisfyingly linear cause-and-effect logic to this, albeit one that Redknapp had little choice but to deny, as to have done anything else would only have made a bad situation worse. Yet the more Redknapp insisted that the England job was not distracting him, the less he was believed. It got to the point where Spurs banned any questions about his England future at Redknapp’s weekly press conferences. Or, to be more accurate, the club said the manager would not be answering any more questions on the subject. The questions still came; the ensuing silences were uncomfortable for all concerned.