Harry's Games

by John Crace

  Yet there was a growing feeling among some keen-eyed Harry-watchers that there was more to the club’s decline than just the ongoing England drama. The feeling was one of déjà vu; that they were watching a repeat of familiar failings, that the very qualities that Redknapp brought to the team and could help make it perform like possible champions were also those that could all too easily expose its limitations and cause it to implode. It was the fear that within Redknapp’s unquestionable touches of football genius lay the seeds of his own and his team’s self-destruction and that, with Redknapp, the line between triumph and tragedy was finer than most. It was just that in previous seasons the stakes hadn’t been quite so high, nor his limitations quite so exposed. The speculation over the England job had merely created the perfect storm from which Redknapp had no hiding place.

  The warning signs had been in place for a while, with Redknapp having given a press conference before the Bolton FA Cup tie in which he said, ‘If we finish in the top four I think we over-punched our weight really, to be perfectly truthful with you.’ This was a classic Redknapp diversionary tactic of getting his excuses in early, and one that had worked quite well for him in the past; tell everyone the team has exceeded all expectations and protect yourself from the fallout when things begin to unravel. Except this time it made him look a bit foolish and panicky. Spurs may have played better than anyone had predicted in the first half of the season but, having got themselves into a commanding position, there was no escaping the fact that the team was now crumbling. Rather than just acknowledging the situation and dealing with it, Redknapp appeared to be in denial about it. He seemed to be expecting everyone to respond with, ‘You know what, Harry, you’re absolutely right . . . We should never have let ourselves get into such a great position as it was bound to end in tears . . . We’d have been far better off if we had known our place and then we could have been happy with fourth . . .’ But that was never going to happen.

  Apart from anything else, the idea that Spurs had somehow overachieved just wasn’t true. It would have been of many previous Spurs teams, but it wasn’t of this one. The midfield of Bale, Modric, Parker and Lennon was the equal of any in the Premiership, and a combination of van der Vaart, Adebayor and Defoe up front was the envy of many. For overachievers in the division, you could point to Swansea, Norwich . . . and Manchester United. Almost everyone who claimed to be in the know had been arguing that this United side was the poorest for many seasons and yet it was still well ahead of every other team, except its local rival, Manchester City. And in so doing, that success exposed the difference in managerial styles between Sir Alex Ferguson, the United manager, and Redknapp. Whether by terrorizing his players or instilling a culture where failure was unacceptable, Ferguson had turned good – though not necessarily great – footballers into a team that could find ways to win the unwinnable games; Redknapp had assembled a team of mostly great players but was seemingly unable to make them play with any consistency.

  To understand why this was so is to get to the heart of the Redknapp paradox. Throughout his career, Redknapp has acquired the reputation for having a talent for man-management, and it’s not hard to rack up a list of players who have openly given him the credit for either reviving or prolonging their careers. What you don’t hear so often are the stories of those who have fallen out with him. Players who moan about their manager quickly acquire the ‘awkward customer’ tag, and in a head-to-head popularity contest with Redknapp in the media, there is only ever going to be one winner. But Redknapp does have favourites. If you’re in with him, he’ll put his arm round you, tell you jokes and make you feel loved; if you’re out, he can ignore you to death.

  It’s not that hard for an outsider to tell who is in favour and who is not with Redknapp’s teams. The in-crowd are in the first team; the frozen-out are not. You can’t blame a manager for preferring some players to others, it’s only human; some people are naturally much more approachable and friendly, others have strops and sulks as their default setting. But a manager has to be professional enough to work with different personality types and tease out the best qualities in a group of often quite dysfunctional players; it’s not exactly therapy, just a matter of getting everyone working well enough to put aside any differences and play as a team for ninety minutes. Part of that is making every player feel as if he has an equal chance of getting into the side and that if he is performing better in training than a first-team regular, it will not go unnoticed.

  That level of fluidity and opportunity is not generally a feature of Redknapp’s teams. Once Redknapp has decided a player is or isn’t worth a first-team place, it takes a great deal for him to change his mind. This kind of loyalty to his players paid dividends in the first half of the season; the first team responded to the way Redknapp treated them by playing with freedom and confidence. They weren’t scared that one off game or a couple of miss-hit passes would cost them their place in the starting eleven for the following match. The trouble came in the second half of the season.

  Towards the end of March, Vedran Corluka, the Spurs right-back and very obviously not one of Redknapp’s in-crowd, who had been loaned out to German club Bayer Leverkusen in January, gave an interview in which he argued that the reason the team’s performances had fallen away was because the players were all tired due to Redknapp’s reluctance to rotate the squad. His manager rejected this out of hand, implying Corluka was merely getting his own back for not being given the opportunities he thought he deserved. ‘When you lose a few, everyone suddenly has something to say,’ Redknapp observed. ‘I didn’t hear anyone complaining a month ago when we were beating everyone and flying. Most of the players have probably played thirty games. I didn’t play any of them in the UEFA Cup or FA Cup, and no player has said to me, “Gaffer, I’m tired.” Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst or Martin Peters were never rotated, playing ankle-deep in mud every week. Frank Lampard plays how many games a season? Ashley Cole, Wayne Rooney and Patrice Evra are not rotated, so it’s a load of nonsense. It’s an excuse.’

  As ever with Redknapp, there was more than a germ of truth in what he had said. Nobody had complained a month previously; though, equally, the levels of tiredness had yet to kick in. It’s true, no player had complained of being tired, but there’s no way of knowing whether that was because no one actually was tired or because the rules of the squad – you’re either in or out – were implicitly understood by everyone and to have done so would have been tantamount to career suicide. It was also true that some players have remarkable levels of fitness and quick recovery times and don’t need rotating. But some do, and one of those in the Spurs team who clearly did was Rafa van der Vaart. In the previous season, van der Vaart had played brilliantly before Christmas, creating havoc in opposition defences and seemingly scoring at will, but in February, March and April he had noticeably faded and had become far less effective. It’s something all the fans had noticed, so it can’t have escaped the eyes of Redknapp and his coaching team.

  Exactly the same thing had happened to van der Vaart in this season, and yet, if Redknapp had noticed, he did nothing about it as the Dutchman was virtually ever-present in the first team. More than that, the whole team was set up for van der Vaart to play a roving role between the midfield and the lone striker, Adebayor, and when van der Vaart was unable to fulfil that role effectively the formation came unstuck. Just as Redknapp had one Team A, so he had no Plan B. It was as if he had a single, idealized view – a platonic form – of how he wanted the team to play and was unable to react pragmatically when circumstances prevented him. Just once did he alter the team’s shape by leaving out van der Vaart and playing a standard 4-4-2 formation with Defoe and Saha up front, and that was for the home defeat against Norwich. After that game, Redknapp shrugged, seemingly implying the defeat was as much the fans’ fault as anyone else’s, because it was the fans who had been calling out for a switch to 4-4-2 to accommodate Defoe – he had merely given them what they had wanted.

  For Re
dknapp, that one game was proof enough he had been right to maintain his original formation all along. And in a sense you couldn’t argue with his logic. You could hardly expect the team to play at its best when the players knew they had been lined up in a formation that the manager thought was second best. But it was also asking a great deal of his two strikers, Defoe and Saha, to gel immediately when they had played so little together and they were so obviously not Redknapp’s first choice.

  This also rather raised the question of Saha – why had he been bought by the club in January if the manager had so little confidence in him? Saha had blown hot and cold – more often than not cold – for every other club he had played for, and no one should have been surprised when he began to look disinterested at Spurs, so it’s unlikely that Redknapp was. So either he had been hoping to squeeze just a couple of match-winning performances out of Saha and had not got lucky, or the former Everton striker had always been the choice of Spurs chairman, Daniel Levy. Whatever the truth, the repercussions would be felt later.

  There was also an old-school, wilful Englishness in Redknapp harking back to the days of Moore, Hurst and Peters ploughing through the mud. This always played well with a section of the media and fans prone to periodic bouts of nostalgia for the old days when there was less money in the game, everything seemed simpler and England won the World Cup. It may even have been a subconscious plea to the FA to hurry up and give him the England job. Sod the European softies, make me the manager and I will win you trophies with old-fashioned English virtues.

  But however attractive – or even preferable – that sense of Englishness may have been, turning back the clock to Old Albion wasn’t an option. The reason why Moore, Hurst and Peters happily ran through the mud week after week was because they had no choice. No teams rotated their squads so every side was able to slow down at the same rate. In the 2012 Premiership, the big teams with big budgets did rotate their squads and those teams that either couldn’t or chose not to almost always struggled toward the end of the season.

  Squad rotation has further knock-on benefits to resting tired bodies. It also keeps players on their toes. It had become part of the White Hart Lane experience for those who didn’t watch Spurs regularly to marvel at the brilliance of the Croatian midfielder, Luka Modric, but for those who followed the club rather more closely, it was evident that – just like van der Vaart – his late season performances, while still having flashes of genius, had little of the intensity of the early season ones. The same trend had also been apparent the season before, although in Modric’s case the reason was less likely to have been tiredness than dissatisfaction. In both seasons, he had been eyeing up a transfer to a bigger club with a guarantee of more money and regular Champions League football, and both times he frequently gave the impression he had already left. Under a manager who rotated his squad, there might have been more inducement for Modric to maintain his focus. As it was, Redknapp’s dogged adherence to his pre-ordained first team would end up costing him rather more than Modric.

  The biggest advantage to squad rotation, though, is the way it helps teams cope with injury – not just by preventing players succumbing to those caused by overuse and fatigue, but by enabling others to slot in more easily to the side when a key player was out of action. One of the foundations on which Spurs’ early season dominance had been built was the speed of their two wingers, Gareth Bale and Aaron Lennon, and their ability to terrorize defenders on each flank. In March, Lennon had been badly injured and was sidelined for about a month, forcing Redknapp to rethink his approach. Except he never came up with a workable solution. The team had grown used to playing with Lennon and struggled to adapt to his absence. Redknapp tried playing various others – including Bale – out of position to compensate, but nothing worked effectively and no one really plugged the gap.

  There were players who might have done. Two seasons previously, another Croatian midfielder, Niko Kranjcar, had been one of the first-team regulars who had helped the team reach the Champions League, but he had now fallen out of favour with Redknapp and barely made the subs’ bench. It wasn’t immediately clear to anyone just what he had done wrong, although it was also fair to say he hadn’t done himself too many favours in the interim, for when he was required he looked both unfit and bored – neither quality was the most professional of responses, but any Premiership manager should have had sufficient experience to deal with them before they became an issue. For whatever reason, Redknapp’s man-management skills fell well short of being able to re-motivate a player he had signed twice – once at Portsmouth and again at Spurs. The distance between the two men had been allowed to become too wide.

  As it happened, there was a player who could have fitted in easily as a replacement for Lennon, without Redknapp needing to have tinkered with the balance of the side by playing Bale and Modric out of position. Unfortunately, Steven Pienaar had been sent out on loan to Everton in the January transfer window, having only been bought by Spurs from Everton the previous year. On his arrival, he had started a few games, made minimal impression and then been abruptly cast aside – yet another of the players whom Redknapp had decided early on that he didn’t really rate and for whom there would be no second chances. If not as quick as Lennon, Pienaar had been a useful, competitive, right-sided midfielder at Everton before he had arrived at Spurs and had been looking even better than that since his return. David Moyes, the Everton manager, knew how to get the best out of Pienaar; Redknapp either didn’t know that trick or didn’t think it was worthwhile making the effort.

  Player loyalty was also an issue among the defensive players. For some years, the club captain Ledley King had not only been a talismanic figure but a miracle. His knees were so ropey that he couldn’t take part in midweek training sessions and he barely managed to play in half the team’s fixtures. But when he did play, his timing and his talent invariably carried him through and the Spurs defence always looked more secure when he played than when he didn’t. It was inevitable that something would eventually have to give and it had become painfully obvious since Christmas that King could no longer get by on a wing and a prayer. He had given away a silly last-minute penalty – a clumsy challenge the King of former seasons would never have made – to deny Spurs an away draw at Manchester City, been run ragged in the heavy away defeat at Arsenal and was cruelly exposed in the 5-1 FA Cup semi-final defeat against Chelsea in the middle of April.

  There was at least a certain nobility and graciousness in Redknapp’s loyalty to King. The Spurs defender had done the club proud on countless occasions in the past and he deserved the benefit of the doubt, a chance to prove that he could come good again after all. But Redknapp, a manager who can be utterly ruthless on occasions with some players, didn’t have it in him to say enough is enough to his captain and allowed him to continue for several games too many. Perhaps he couldn’t quite believe the evidence of his own eyes and accept that King was no longer the player he once was. It would have been a tough call for any manager to have made, but one can think of several cold-eyed Premiership managers who would have made it. There’s a time and a place for sentiment in football, but a tight end-of-season run-in with a jittery team isn’t it.

  Redknapp could – and did – argue that he had little choice. The team had been badly hit by injuries and, in the manager’s own words, was down to ‘the bare bones’ of the squad. ‘We are not in a position where we can pull one or two out,’ he said. ‘Everyone says “look at the strong squad we have”, but there’s every chance David Bentley could be back on the bench. He’s not had a game. I’m struggling to find seven substitutes.’ To which one answer might well have been, ‘Who’s fault is that?’

  A long second-half-of-the-season injury list had been a recurring feature of Redknapp’s four campaigns at Spurs. That could be a coincidence but, then again, it might not be. ‘If a team is consistently picking up more injuries than expected,’ says sports psychologist Martin Perry, ‘it could indicate there was something
wrong with the training methods being employed. Perhaps some of the players weren’t quite as fit as they should have been. It’s certainly something a manager should consider seriously.’

  Even if all the injuries had been unavoidable, the buck still stopped with Redknapp. Stephen Caulker and Kyle Naughton, both defenders who could have been trusted to do a decent job, had been sent out on season-long loans to Swansea and Norwich respectively and had been doing very well for their new clubs. Sebastien Bassong had been loaned out to Wolves and Redknapp appeared to have little faith in his replacement, Ryan Nelsen, the thirty-four-year-old defender who had been acquired from Blackburn in the transfer window. So much for Redknapp’s complaint that various members of his squad hadn’t yet had a game.

  Even Redknapp’s lucky touch deserted him in the FA Cup semifinal. Spurs came out for the second half a goal down, having dominated much of the first, whereupon Chelsea were immediately awarded a second for a Juan Mata shot that didn’t cross the line. Thereafter, Redknapp’s Spurs never recovered their poise and were taken apart as they chased the game. Yet even a heavy semi-final defeat couldn’t stop the ‘Harry for England’ bandwagon from continuing to roll. ‘He looks like he is going to be the new England manager and I think he fully deserves the chance to lead his country,’ said Roberto Di Matteo, the Chelsea interim first-team coach, after the game. ‘A lot of [our England contingent] know him very well and I think that the general view is that the players all like him.’