Harry's Games

by John Crace

  Better still for Redknapp was that the May edition – which came out in mid-April – of the influential football magazine Four Four Two featured Redknapp wearing a crown on the front cover under the strapline ‘All Hail King ’Arry’, along with an inside feature in which former players such as Paolo Di Canio, Paul Merson and Shaka Hislop paid tribute to his managerial skills. No one lost any sleep working out the subtext of that article.

  The final piece of the coronation jigsaw appeared to be complete when the Bolton Wanderers chairman and FA board member, Phil Gartside, declared in an interview with BBC World’s Extra Time programme that Redknapp would be ‘an outstanding England manager’ and described him as ‘a good motivator with a winning mentality’. Although Gartside wasn’t one of the four FA members on the selection panel he was considered to be one of the most influential of the FA’s committee members. This was the first time that anyone from the FA had spoken in public about the England job since Fabio Capello’s resignation, so Gartside’s remarks were reported by every newspaper as a rubber-stamp of approval – a way of calming speculation – ahead of the formal announcement.

  For his part, Redknapp continued to insist he was hardly even aware there was a job vacancy. ‘I never think about it . . . honestly,’ he said. ‘I swear. I never think about anything other than Tottenham, trying to finish this season so that we get where we have been all year – in that top four. Other than that there is nothing to occupy my mind at all.’ If true, he had a funny way of showing it. Not normally a man to turn down easy money, Redknapp had rejected an offer from a confectionery company to appear in a TV commercial to coincide with the Euro 2012 finals – possibly because it wasn’t the sort of deal the FA would take kindly to an England manager making.

  He also hadn’t endeared himself to Spurs by saying that he hoped Chelsea beat Barcelona in the second leg of their semi-final Champions League tie, even though he had gone on to qualify this by adding that he couldn’t see Chelsea winning the final against Bayern Munich. Chelsea were not just rivals for a top-four place in the Premiership; if the club won the Champions League, then it would guarantee itself a place in the competition at the expense of whoever finished fourth. As there was a good chance it would be Tottenham in that fourth spot, everyone at the club was praying for Chelsea to get knocked out of the competition as soon as possible, so that avenue of anxiety and uncertainty would be eliminated. Well, everyone except Redknapp. It was impossible to imagine Alex Ferguson or Arsène Wenger saying anything like that in a similar position. They might not have gone public with an ‘I hope Chelsea lose’ statement, but they would certainly have kept a diplomatic silence. There was no need for Redknapp to say anything. Even a man prone to speak first and think later would have worked that one out. So saying what he did, when he did, was just another way of saying, ‘I’m already half out the door at White Hart Lane and I’m trying to talk like an international manager.’

  If Gartside’s backing had been intended to reassure Redknapp that the job was his and allow him to refocus his concentration on Spurs’ remaining five games, then it had no immediate effect as the team slumped to an away defeat at relegation-threatened Queens Park Rangers and down to sixth place in the league. After the game, Redknapp said that Spurs had dominated the game and had just been a bit unlucky in not scoring. That wasn’t the way it had looked to anyone at the ground. For the most part, Spurs had looked hapless and aimless, barely managing one shot on target. Redknapp himself had looked much the same. In most games, he could be found pacing the technical area and shouting the odds; at QPR, he remained mostly rooted to the dugout, sucking in his cheeks and shaking his head. This was a pale imitation of the jocular, cajoling, dynamic Harry Redknapp the fans knew and loved.

  There was some relief on the last weekend of the month as Spurs managed their first win in five games, a 2-0 victory against Blackburn, yet another side battling relegation. When Kyle Walker scored the second midway through the second half, from a thirty-five-yard free kick, no one assumed it was a victory planned out on the training ground. Least of all Redknapp, who after the game admitted he had said to Kevin Bond that he hoped Walker wasn’t going to take the kick as it would end up in Row Z. If it had done, it would have been no more than anyone else at White Hart Lane expected, as that’s precisely where every other free kick Spurs had taken throughout the season had gone. Whatever else Redknapp was doing with the first team on the training ground, it wasn’t practising dead ball situations.

  Had Spurs turned the corner? And had Redknapp finally learned to deal with the pressure of being the England manager-elect? That last question proved to be academic within hours of the final whistle of the Blackburn game, when the FA announced they had been given permission by West Bromwich Albion to talk to their manager, Roy Hodgson, and that they had no plans to talk to anyone else. After all that, the job of England manager had been offered, seemingly out of the blue, to Hodgson.

  9

  Winning His Spurs

  October 2008

  By late October in the 2008/09 season, Spurs – managed at the time by Juande Ramos – were four points adrift at the bottom of the Premier League, having managed just two draws in eight games, and had been well beaten by unfancied Italian side Udinese in the UEFA Cup. After that kind of start, any football manager would have been looking nervously over his shoulder but, even so, the sacking of Ramos was brutal. Most sackings are preceded by a series of leaks, private briefings and counter-briefings in which possible replacements are sounded out and excuses made. If Ramos had any idea the axe was about to fall he didn’t let on, and the club’s announcement that Redknapp was to take over as manager with immediate effect caught both the media and fans on the hop.

  Spurs had approached Portsmouth on the Friday night and, within twenty-four hours, had made the club and Redknapp an offer neither could refuse. Portsmouth got £5 million and Redknapp got a basic salary of £3 million along with the chance to prove himself at one of the country’s biggest clubs; given that Redknapp had been earning nearly that much at Portsmouth, the opportunity was probably a bigger attraction than the money. If he’d ever truly had the ambition to climb the management ladder, at nearly sixty-two years old he must have imagined his moment had passed.

  ‘It’s a big opportunity to manage a big club before I retire,’ he said. ‘The chairman knows the team needs strengthening in two or three positions still . . . we are short in one or two areas and that is something I will be looking at. However, first and foremost it will be about getting the best out of the players who are here. There are some good ones who have not done as well as they should have done. We have got to get them playing to their maximum and, if we do that, then we will be OK.’

  Redknapp’s arrival at Spurs was greeted with pragmatism rather than joy. The club was in a mess and Redknapp was the kind of manager who could sort it out. ‘I wasn’t a fan of Redknapp,’ says Adam Powley, a football writer and author of several books about Spurs. ‘He came with a lot of baggage (deserved or otherwise) and his record of one devalued FA Cup in thirty years of management seemed to tell its own story. It was more a case of grudgingly accepting that a problem of the club’s own making required a pretty drastic remedy. Spurs seemed to be paying for the “bad karma” of the way Ramos had been appointed, and Redknapp was the appropriate antidote – a short-term fixer who knew his way round the Premier League and could rescue what was a pretty risible situation.

  ‘That’s not to say that I thought Redknapp was a wholly negative appointment. I liked the way his teams played. I’d reported on quite a few Portsmouth games in the past and he set his teams up to attack and play passing football. It was simply that the appointment of a sixty-one-year-old none of the “big clubs” appeared to want seemed a retrograde, reactive and short-term step.’

  Reactive and short-term would almost certainly sum up Levy’s own assessment of his approach to Redknapp. Levy had lost a great deal of the Spurs fans’ goodwill the previous season by sacking
Martin Jol – one of the most successful and popular club managers since Keith Burkinshaw – for no very good reason and appointing Juande Ramos, the Spanish manager of Sevilla, in his place on a reported £6 million per year. Despite engineering a Carling Cup victory over Chelsea, Spurs had suffered a dismal end to the 2007/08 Premier League season and an even worse start to the current season. Levy needed a quick fix, a manager who was going to be able to shore things up, ward off the threat of relegation and who was, above all, available. Redknapp ticked all those boxes. A long-term solution could be sought once the immediate danger had passed.

  The terms of Redknapp’s contract appeared to bear out Levy’s thinking. In the four-year deal he agreed with Redknapp, there were no conditions included by which Redknapp would be able to renegotiate an improved deal for himself. This might suggest that both men thought there was little chance of Redknapp lasting much longer than a year – eighteen months at most – at Spurs. The longer Redknapp stayed at the club, the more resentful he became at not being able to negotiate a better deal; and thereby ultimately hastening his exit from it.

  The surprise wasn’t that Redknapp saved the club from relegation – the squad had always looked too strong for that – but that he got it to play, at times, the best football of any Spurs team since the 1960s, and it wasn’t long before Redknapp began to win over those who had doubted his ability to do more than a rescue job.

  ‘I was a little uneasy when he was appointed, if I’m honest, although as there really wasn’t much choice, I just had to face the facts,’ says Martin Cloake, another football writer and author of many books on Spurs. ‘The unease was because of the feeling that Harry is always more interested in Harry than any team he manages, and because I wasn’t sure just how good he was. That probably makes me sound like one of those fans who always goes on about “a name big enough for Spurs”, but I’ve always rejected that attitude. A “big name” isn’t always the right name; managers should make their reputations, not simply transfer them.

  ‘Harry, like Terry Venables before him, gets a great press because he gives plenty of quotes. But Venables was a great coach as well as a motivator. I think Harry’s skills are more motivational – although I don’t think he is as tactically naïve as some of his more vociferous critics say. Or as he would sometimes like us to believe. What we needed when he came was a motivator and he motivated the players pretty quickly. He had pretty much the same squad as Martin Jol; the difference was that Redknapp got rather more backing. His self-interest worked well for us. So my unease was outweighed by the fact that we had a strong coach who insisted on his own space, dealt well with the players and had good ideas about playing attractive football . . . and the fact that he turned things around fairly quickly.’

  Redknapp got off to the perfect start with a 2-0 victory against Bolton after which he made suitably purring noises about the team, saying, ‘There is real quality in this group of players here. You look at the quality and they shouldn’t be where they are, but two points in eight games is an amazingly bad start. We have to start working as hard as we did today for each other, picking up points, playing as we did – they passed the ball with real quality which I was really impressed with.’

  But it was the next game – a 4-4 away draw against Arsenal, secured through two injury-time goals – that really got people’s attention. Spurs just didn’t carve out those kinds of results when they were all but buried against their arch-rivals. Who cared if Redknapp was mainly out for Redknapp? If he could carry on upsetting the odds, then everyone was going to get along just fine.

  Redknapp and Levy are often characterized as the odd couple, the manager and chairman who rubbed each other up the wrong way and barely agreed on anything. But their relationship wasn’t always like that, especially at the beginning, when they had a respect for one another that went beyond the grudging. They had their own separate spheres of influence and were happy to let each other concentrate on what they did best. Levy had recognized that Damien Comolli’s appointment as director of football in control of identifying and buying players had not been a success. Two of his acquisitions, though, Luka Modric and Gareth Bale, would prove pivotal to Redknapp’s Spurs, so Redknapp was left to work in the way he liked, free from excessive interference. For the man who had left Portsmouth when threatened by Zajec and had bristled at Woodward at Southampton, the news that Comolli would be leaving White Hart Lane at the same time as Ramos was welcome indeed.

  And there certainly weren’t any obvious sounds of discord over Redknapp’s first signings in the January window, as Redknapp played it safe by re-signing three experienced former Spurs players; true to form, he raided his own former club, Portsmouth, to bring Jermain Defoe back to White Hart Lane and completed the trio by buying Robbie Keane from Liverpool and Pascal Chimbonda from Sunderland.

  Defoe was an instant success on his return, adding some much-needed sharpness to the attack, but neither Keane nor Chimbonda could recapture the form that had previously made them local heroes at Tottenham.

  That Redknapp’s first sortie in the transfer market had been rather hit and miss was long forgotten by the end of the season. By steering Spurs to the Carling Cup final, which was lost to Manchester United on penalties, and finishing eighth in the Premier League, Redknapp had done everything that had been asked of him and more. He had shown himself to be a more astute tactician than he had been billed – his decision to play Modric in a more forward role had made the Croatian and the team far more effective – and he had given back the players their self-belief.

  Well, most of them. At home to Portsmouth towards the end of the season, the scores were level at 1-1 with about ten minutes to go when Darren Bent headed wide with the goal open. It was a truly horrible miss, but Redknapp’s reaction was worse. ‘It was a great chance,’ he said at a post-match press conference. ‘You are not going to get a better one than that to win a game. It was game over and we were going home with three points, as simple as that. My missus could have scored that. David James had given up on it. He had turned his back and was getting ready to pick the ball out of the net. He did not just have a bit to aim at, he had the whole goal to aim at. What can you do?’

  Not rubbishing one of your main strikers in public would have been a start. Telling the media Sandra would have scored got plenty of laughs, but it also got plenty of headlines, and Bent’s confidence, fragile at the best of times, was destroyed. He barely scored another goal for Spurs and moved to Sunderland in the summer. Redknapp later defended his remarks by saying, ‘It was only the truth, wasn’t it?’ but that rather missed the point. You wouldn’t have caught any other Premiership manager humiliating a player in this way, whatever he may have thought in private. A manager’s role is to build up a player, to make sure the next time he has an open goal he doesn’t miss. It’s called looking after your assets; a £16.5 million asset in Bent’s case.

  Part of Redknapp’s charm had always lain in the fact that he was unlike other managers. He saw the game as a fan and sometimes called it as one; he wasn’t one of the drones who could find ten different ways of saying nothing very interesting. When his teams were playing well and winning, he was let off the hook because he was ‘a bit of a character’; and when they weren’t, he just looked a bit unprofessional. But he had largely got away with it, because up until now he had managed smaller clubs where every indiscretion didn’t automatically make a headline in the national press and feelings weren’t so badly hurt. At a club like Spurs, the prospects of causing more serious damage through unguarded comments was infinitely greater.

  Redknapp may sometimes exaggerate his ‘cheeky chappy’ persona – if he sees a reporter with a microphone, it’s rare for him not to wind down his car window and give good quote – but it’s not an act. It is the way he is; even the exaggeration is part of the way he is. Under his tough-ish façade, Redknapp wants to be loved; he wants to be understood. Comedians don’t tell jokes because they want to make people laugh; they tell them becau
se they crave the feeling other people’s laughter gives them. It makes them feel included, desired and good about themselves; it fulfils a need they can’t meet themselves. Harry Redknapp is no different; keeping everyone laughing is one of the ways by which he can make himself feel valued.

  This gets to the heart of understanding Redknapp. Fans and critics often suggest that ‘Harry is only out for Harry’ as if this is some kind of business strategy, like a banker manipulating the LIBOR rate for his own personal gain. It isn’t; it’s far less calculating and deliberate than that. If Redknapp does always look to gain an advantage in any situation, it’s an unconscious, reflex response driven by his own personality. This doesn’t excuse his behaviour, it merely explains it.

  Redknapp – like many other extremely successful people – is self-absorbed; he sees other people largely as adjuncts to himself. If he weren’t to exist, neither would they. This isn’t to say that he isn’t capable of empathizing with other people or is incapable of kindness or generosity. He clearly is, which is yet another of his attractions. Rather, it’s that he can switch it on and off according to how he feels. If he feels generous and giving, he is; far more so than many. But when he doesn’t, he’s incapable of acting otherwise. So when people are caught in his warmth, he makes them feel like world-beaters; but when the light goes out, they feel hurt and a bit lost.

  Seen like this, the highs and lows of Redknapp’s career begin to fall into place. The great successes and the seemingly mindless acts of self-destruction are just two sides of the same coin, albeit a coin that had never been examined that closely as most of his career had taken place away somewhat from the main stage. There, his triumphs could be lauded as the work of the ordinary man taking on the football establishment and his failures could be brushed aside with a ‘What else can you expect from a club with limited resources?’ Even though Spurs had had little to show by way of trophies or league titles for many years, it saw itself with a big history and a great tradition. Success was expected and the lapses that Redknapp had got away with at his previous clubs would not so easily be forgiven at White Hart Lane.