Harry's Games

by John Crace

  It was tough on Redknapp that fourth place should have been regarded as a failure. Only two years earlier, after Spurs had beaten Manchester City to secure fourth place, the celebrations had been uncontained. But this season, fourth place was only good enough to put Spurs in limbo. The misery was complete a week later when Chelsea held off Bayern Munich to win the Champions League. It may have been bad luck for Spurs to become the first-ever English team to finish fourth and not qualify for the Champions League but, deep down, Redknapp and the players all knew they had no one to blame but themselves. Third place had been theirs for the taking and they had blown it.

  There was a light comic interlude when the betting firm Betfair confirmed it had signed Redknapp as an analyst for the duration of the Euros; given Redknapp’s luck on the horses, most punters would have been well advised to keep their money in their pockets. Just a few days later, the comedy turned to tragedy when Redknapp was sacked as manager of Spurs.

  Having originally said that he was going to leave it up to Levy to decide whether his contract was extended or not, Redknapp announced in early June that he was bringing in Paul Stretford – the man who’d previously gone eyeball to eyeball with Alex Ferguson and secured a massive pay rise for Wayne Rooney – to negotiate on his behalf, and went on the offensive in an interview with Sky Sports.

  ‘The simple situation is that I have a year left on my contract and it is up to Tottenham whether they want to extend that or not. Things couldn’t have gone better since I’ve been there. We’ve finished fourth twice, fifth once, quarter-finals of the Champions League and played fantastic football,’ he said, before going on to warn of the dangers of letting his contract reach its expiry date at the end of the following year. ‘It’s not a case of me looking for security. What it’s about, really, is that when players know they have only a year left on their contract, it doesn’t work. You don’t let players run into the last year of their contract if you think they are any good, and you don’t let managers run into the last year of their contract if you think they are any good. That is the situation, so it is up to the club.’

  It was a huge misjudgement on Redknapp’s part. He had had enough first-hand experience of doing business with Levy to know the chairman didn’t react well to being threatened, and to do so when his own hand was so weak was a peculiar act of self-destruction. He should have known that Levy had not been impressed by Spurs’ failure to qualify for the Champions League. He should also have known his suggestion that the players would be unsettled if he was not offered a longer deal, having previously claimed that the squad would not be affected by speculation linking him with the England position, was unlikely to have been well received. So why didn’t he just keep his mouth shut and do things on Levy’s terms?

  It can’t be ruled out that he might, subconsciously, have been trying to sabotage his career; he was no stranger to knee-jerk reactions, and the rejection by England must have played its part. If he couldn’t have the best job, then he wasn’t going to have any.

  Steve Claridge reckons Redknapp just got fed up. ‘He’d expected to get the England job and hadn’t got it,’ he says. ‘Then he’d asked the Spurs chairman for a new deal and more money and was being stalled. Something snapped.’

  If so, it was Redknapp’s ego that let him down. He had managed to convince himself so well that he had done a brilliant job and was worth a great deal more money, that he wasn’t able to see how his position might look to anyone else.

  Levy didn’t blink when challenged. As far as he was concerned, Redknapp had another year left on his contract and there was no need to do anything. If Spurs qualified for the Champions League the following season, then they could negotiate new terms; if not, then Redknapp had come to the end of the road at Spurs and they could part company with no hard feelings. And no hard cash. With his bluff called, Redknapp was left with nothing to negotiate but the compensation for terminating his contract a year early.

  ‘I have thoroughly enjoyed my time at Spurs and am proud of my achievements,’ Redknapp said immediately after his sacking had been confirmed. ‘I have had a fantastic four years with the club . . . at times, the football has been breathtaking. I am sad to be leaving but wish to thank the players, staff and fans for their terrific support during my time there.’

  His disappointment was more evident a day later in an interview with the Sun. ‘If the club wants to go in a different direction, that’s up to them,’ he said. ‘But even if I say so myself, I did a fantastic job there. I don’t know what more I could have done there. No one was more loyal to Spurs than me. I wanted to stay, but that’s life. I can’t do anything about it.

  ‘It’s entirely up to the owner of the club. I was an employee and if they want to go down a different road, they own the club. I won’t slit my throat over it. I want to get on with my life instead of moping about getting the sack. What have I got to have the hump about? It’s football. I just want to move on with my life. My missus Sandra is going to be fed up with me for a little while because I’ll be under her feet. But not for long. I want to manage a club again. I’ve not given any thought to where – but I will be back.’

  Steve Claridge found the whole episode massively depressing. ‘He got Spurs fourth place in the Premier League,’ he said. ‘No one could have asked for much more than that, especially as all the clubs who finished above him had far more money. He was just unlucky that Spurs didn’t qualify for the Champions League.’

  Many football writers, in particular those who had been close to Redknapp and had got good copy from him, were quick to condemn Levy for sacking him, arguing that Spurs had shown a lack of respect, tried to airbrush Redknapp out of its recent history and would inevitably pay for the blunder by going backwards the following season.

  Martin Cloake gave a rather more considered verdict that spoke for the overwhelming majority of Spurs fans. ‘I’m sad Harry Redknapp’s gone from Spurs,’ he said. ‘We’ve seen some great football during his time at the club, and the record of fourth, fifth and fourth again speaks for itself. But I’m not going to join in with the kicking of the Spurs board for sacking Harry. I think a build-up of factors led to the decision to sack him, and I think Redknapp overplayed his hand when foolishly opting to negotiate through the press.

  ‘Redknapp got a talented group of players to believe in themselves, set the team up in a straightforward manner, and encouraged it to play football the way we like to see it played. It didn’t work every week, but things steadily improved during his time in charge. Any criticism of what he achieved seems to be based on a view about what the team could have achieved but didn’t. It’s a strange way of judging any manager’s tenure, not least because it’s only the success we had that meant we could seriously contemplate further success. When was the last time we were seriously talked of as title contenders? Or Champions League regulars?

  ‘I still have a nagging doubt about whether we could have mounted a stronger title challenge in a couple of seasons when the so-called Big Four were stumbling or rebuilding and Spurs did not have the added pressure of the Champions League. One of my concerns about Redknapp never really went away, and that was that he was more focused on relative success than absolute. Harry never hesitated to point out how much Tottenham’s rivals had going for them compared to us, always portraying himself as the underdog in order to play up any achievement and minimize the risk of blame for any failure. Under Harry, we were very successful – but it’s not wrong to ask if we were as successful as we could or should have been.’

  For all that Redknapp likes to portray himself – or is happy to be portrayed – as a straightforward, what-you-see-is-what-you-get bloke, he is anything but. If he is the quintessential English football manager, then the quintessential English football manager is a complex character. That his departure from Spurs aroused such conflicted feelings was entirely in keeping.

  Under most normal circumstances, a manager who had achieved two fourth- and one fifth-place Premier League fi
nishes, two FA Cup semi-finals, a Carling Cup final and a Champions League quarter-final within three and a half seasons would go down as a club legend at White Hart Lane. But, just as before at Bournemouth, West Ham, Southampton and Portsmouth, his legacy has been tarnished; the fans remember the good times – and there were a lot of them – but they can’t somehow bring themselves to forget the bad.

  It would be easy simply to explain this away as being typical of the lack of gratitude and general fickleness of the average football fan. Indeed, that can’t be ignored, but to blame the fans for everything would be to miss a trick. Other managers have remained the fans’ sweetheart for delivering far less, long after they’ve moved on. So there has to be something in Redknapp that contributes to the souring of the relationship.

  In an interview with The Times, given before he was told he hadn’t got the England job, he said, ‘I get stressed out like I couldn’t tell you. It’s difficult to deal with on a Saturday night after a bad result. I often wonder what it must do to my health; I’d be lying if I said I didn’t. It affects me so badly it stops me sleeping.’

  Despite his public image as a man who wore his heart on his sleeve, he seldom showed it. Apart from the odd occasion when he lost it completely – such as when he was accused of being a wheeler-dealer by a TV reporter – he always came across as a genial bloke who didn’t care as much about a defeat as the fans. There was no reason why he should, other than that it would have done him a favour. For a man who appeared so much to want to be loved and appreciated, Redknapp had a funny way of going about things. Then was Redknapp ever quite the man he seemed? Apart from with his family, was he really ever close to anyone? For many, it often seemed like the more they felt they were getting to know him, the more elusive he became.

  Later in the same interview, Redknapp went on to say, ‘If someone asks me to do something, I’ll do it. If you stop me in the street, I’ll talk to you, because if people have time for you then you should have time for them. Besides, I enjoy talking to people. It’s in my nature.’ That was true, most of the time. But, equally, it’s hard not to forget the people he did know, with whom he didn’t bother speaking as much as he should have done; the players to whom he gave the cold shoulder and whose respect he lost. Maybe if he’d spent more time developing better relationships with those to whom he was professionally close, rather than chatting so freely to strangers, he would have received the long-term affection he deserved.

  Like Icarus, Redknapp got within a heartbeat of football immortality before his wings melted in the sun. And the fans got within a heartbeat of giving him their devotion, before that same sun exposed their love as something more transient, more ephemeral than they had ever expected. Under the glare of the light, the relationship was not quite as rose-tinted as either had imagined it.

  After getting the sack from Spurs, Redknapp stood down as a pundit for the BBC at Euro 2012, so, for now at least, his feelings about the performance of the England team remain private. But while watching that tournament, he must have felt the slightest tinge of regret as Hodgson’s side went out in the quarter-final after an uninspired, pragmatic, defensive display. Redknapp’s team might have lost at the same stage, but it would probably have been a great deal more fun to watch.

  Steve Claridge reckoned Redknapp might think enough was enough. ‘There aren’t any vacancies going at one of the top Premiership clubs,’ he said, ‘and even if there were, Harry probably doesn’t have the kind of profile their chairmen would be looking for. So if I were him, I’d be inclined to chuck it in. Any new club would probably feel like a step down after Spurs, and how much longer does he want to traipse up and down the motorway twice a day?’

  There again, Redknapp had always said that football was the only thing that interested him, so, even though he was now sixty-five, it felt unlikely he would be content to see out his life looking out to sea from his Sandbanks home, in between walking the dogs, playing the odd round of golf and doing the occasional stint as a TV pundit. But what managerial job could he do next?

  It wasn’t long before newspaper reports linked him with the job of managing the Qatar national side. It was a move that wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility, as he could have done the job part-time. There had also been rumours he had been close to accepting a £6 million per year offer to manage Dubai side Al Ahli in 2010 – but the United Arab Emirates was still an awfully long way away from Poole.

  Thereafter, the rumour mill went quiet for a couple of months. And yet . . . it didn’t seem right that Redknapp could just fade away. He’d been a fixture of the football landscape for the best part of fifty years and a lot of the fun had always been wondering what he would do next. Whatever he said, the opposite was always just as likely. Redknapp may have been infuriating, difficult and contradictory but he was never boring. The speed and height of his fall might have had all the hallmarks of Greek tragedy, but it had cemented his reputation as a one-off English legend.

  Football’s need to resurrect Redknapp matched his own desire for a football afterlife. Both seemed diminished without the presence of the other. Without Redknapp on the back – and front – pages, the beginning of the 2012/13 football season felt just a little bit duller, a little bit more corporate. And without football, Redknapp had lost a dimension, a sense of purpose. He was marking time. So both Redknapp and football did what they had always done so well in the past: they worked hard together to find ways to contrive to keep each other in the news.

  It is never entirely clear where any new Redknapp rumour starts – with him, his agent, a desperate football writer with space to fill or a bloke in the pub? Its genesis isn’t really the point; what matters is that it exists as a background hum of football noise to keep everyone entertained, and that everyone does their bit to keep it alive for as long as possible. And they invariably do. Redknapp has long since perfected the art of denying a rumour in such a way as to leave open the possibility that it’s true. Football writers never miss a chance to quote Redknapp denying a rumour that he could have started himself, and fans are happy to repeat any old nonsense they read in the papers or on Twitter. It’s just another of Harry’s games.

  The first rumour to surface after Euro 2012 was that Redknapp had been included on the shortlist of candidates to take over as manager of the Russian national team from Dick Advocaat – an unlikely possibility given the commuting distance, even before Redknapp accumulated dozens of column inches with a denial. Thereafter, it was as if the floodgates had been opened as Redknapp was linked with virtually every managerial vacancy, real or imagined. Possible moves to Leicester City, Ipswich Town and Nottingham Forest came and went quite quickly; a move to Blackburn Rovers lingered rather longer, as the club dithered over announcing a replacement for Steve Kean, and Redknapp’s responses to suggestions he might take the job were equivocal and enigmatic even by his own standards. A quick check of the distance between Blackburn and Bournemouth should have been all the information anyone really needed to work out the real probabilities. Still, it all kept Redknapp’s profile high and everyone else amused until Blackburn appointed the Norwegian, Henning Berg, as manager at the end of October.

  When not putting himself in the frame for another job, Redknapp found plenty of other ways to keep himself in the limelight. Initially, this was by giving his first in-depth newspaper interview since his trial, most of which was the standard fare of ‘It’s been very stressful . . . I wish Roy well . . . That’s football.’ But there was one revealing nugget and that came with a barely veiled attack on the management style of his replacement at Tottenham, André Villas-Boas.

  ‘There are people out there who try to make the game sound too complicated for their own good,’ he said. ‘They are such geniuses, some of these boys. It’s a simple game and it’s about getting the best out of people. About managing them.

  ‘If you’ve got a right-back who can’t defend, you work with him. Make sure he’s putting himself in the right positions. That’s coaching. If G
len Johnson is getting caught with the ball behind him, you work with him on that.

  ‘It’s about moving Modric from left wing to central midfield. People said he was too small but I moved him into the middle. You don’t need PowerPoint. You take him out on the pitch. It’s simple and, if you can’t see it, you shouldn’t be in bloody football. Now you’re getting seventy-page dossiers on this and that. Bullshit can baffle brains at times.’

  On one level, this could be read as Redknapp being Redknapp, a simple reiteration of his management philosophy. But as ever, there was a subtext. Villas-Boas hadn’t had the easiest of starts at Tottenham; the team had struggled to find fluency and form. So this was Redknapp laying down a marker, a reminder of the dangers of getting rid of him. But it wasn’t necessarily a very well advised one, as it left Redknapp a hostage to fortune if Villas-Boas managed to reverse the early season decline. More seriously, it invited everyone to reconsider his own legacy.

  For a while, it was true that some of the Spurs players had looked hesitant and inconsistent on the pitch, but the unarguable message coming from the training ground was that the players liked and respected the new manager. During Redknapp’s regime at Tottenham, certain fringe players leaked sideways moans about Redknapp and his methods to the media; under Villas-Boas, every player went out of his way to back him. The jury may have been out on Villas-Boas’s tactics, but the Portuguese was winning hands down on touchy-feely man-management.

  Redknapp’s next public outing was to reveal that he was now acting in an unpaid advisory capacity to his old club, Bournemouth. ‘Just because it’s League One doesn’t mean you can’t get it off the back four like Andrea Pirlo,’ he said. ‘They play proper football. I had a great day watching them against Yeovil last week. I was desperate for them to win. I just love the game. It’s like Fergie. Get me and him together and we’ll be talking about the good job Micky Mellon’s doing at Fleetwood Town.’