by John Crace
It’s hard to avoid the image, then, of Redknapp as a gifted player who rather took his talent for granted and let it slip slowly, like grains of sand, through his fingertips. There was no spectacular George Best-style self-destruction – he wasn’t an alcoholic. Rather, he was an ordinary young bloke who never thought too much about the future at the time. He’d shown talent as a kid, and those who knew him had always said he’d play professional football and he’d gone on to do just that. The achievement had almost been preordained. Redknapp had never had to think about a career; the career had come to him. And like many young men in that situation he had thought himself immortal – that life would somehow stand still and the good times would roll for ever. But eventually the lifestyle found him out; the bottom line was that he didn’t quite have the innate talent – or possibly the desire – of a Bobby Moore who could perform flawlessly week after week, no matter how hard he had been partying. Redknapp was good, but not that good. His sharpness was blunted and the cracks began to show.
The other phrase that stands out in Redknapp’s self-assessment is ‘Suddenly, whenever you got the ball you were clattered within a split second.’ The key word here is ‘clattered’. In the 1960s and 1970s, by the time the season had reached the winter months many pitches were mud-baths and the balls were heavy and waterlogged; as a result, skinny, nippy wingers like Redknapp did not have the advantage their counterparts do today. Both the ball and the winger got stuck in the pitch, making it easier for opposing full-backs to neutralize their threat – as often as not, by crunching them as hard as possible in the tackle. If the winger didn’t bounce back up immediately, so much the better. A limp made him even less of a problem for the rest of the game.
And Redknapp was regularly injured; the knee injury that forced him out of English professional football in 1976 was just the last in a long catalogue that had gradually destroyed his pace and effectiveness. Perhaps if he had been playing these days with better pitches, better physiotherapy and higher levels of fitness his career might have fulfilled its early promise, but that’s another story.
John Sissons has a lot of sympathy for Redknapp. As a fellow winger, he was often on the wrong end of the treatment himself. ‘It was a tough, tough game for a winger,’ he says, ‘especially as you didn’t get much protection from referees. If you went past some players, such as Norman Hunter, early in a game they’d make a point of catching up with you a little while later and saying, ‘If you do that again, I’ll break your legs.’ You tried to ignore them and just get on with the game, but it did make you think twice, because you knew they were being serious.’
The impact of the ‘clattering’ wasn’t just physical. Intimidation is just as much in the mind; a full-back who knows that a forward is going to pull out of any 50-50 ball has a significant advantage. And a few early, heavy tackles – with possibly a yellow card as collateral – can shift the balance even more, with opponents not going for the balls that are 60-40 in their favour. Then the game really is up for the forward, and this is the reason that one old-time West Ham fan gave for the Upton Park crowd turning against Redknapp. ‘We never doubted his ability,’ he said, ‘and no one had a problem with him being a bit of a joker. What annoyed us was the sense we began to get that he just didn’t really fancy it that much. When the chips were down and the studs were flying, he would go AWOL.’
Football fans can be an unforgiving bunch; they expect things of their players that they wouldn’t dream of doing themselves and offer little thanks for it in return. They demand their players make that potentially career-ending tackle, and when the bone does break or the ligaments do snap, they say, ‘That’s a shocker’, before wondering whom the manager is going to bring on as a substitute and whether the formation will have to be switched. Even before the mega salaries of the Premiership, footballers were just a commodity in an ongoing entertainment, and a relatively cheap commodity at that. But supporters can read the game, and if they can sense the fear from the terraces, then it must be obvious to the players and the manager.
Fear isn’t something often admitted in football. In a tough game, with big egos, any sign of vulnerability is almost always vilified. ‘Call me a bad footballer if you like, just don’t call me a pussy’ is the mantra of just about every professional. But it’s equally hard to imagine that some players weren’t – and still aren’t – physically intimidated. When you’ve been badly injured once, why would you necessarily be fully committed in every subsequent tackle? Look at it from a forward’s perspective. It’s not as if pulling out of a tackle is likely to cost your side that much, unless you are clean through; so the worst that can happen is that your side loses possession. And as you can probably make it look as if you were really going for it, there’s no harm done. Balance that against the possibility of being crocked for several months, and it’s a no brainer.
It’s no great surprise that neither Redknapp nor any of his teammates have ever so much as hinted he may have lost his nerve a touch – that topic is strictly off limits – so only he can know for sure whether he did or not. But it does make rather more sense of Redknapp’s transfer from West Ham to Bournemouth in the summer of 1972. In his autobiography, Redknapp explained the deal like this: ‘Bondy [John Bond, the Bournemouth manager] had made an early attempt to lure me from West Ham but at that stage I didn’t fancy going from the top flight down into the lower divisions . . . But as it became clearer I was out of the picture at West Ham, I decided a move would be in my best interest . . . Bournemouth were going places at the time. The chairman was a man called Harold Walker, who was pumping a fortune into the club and Bondy was spending it. He had top players like Ted MacDougall and Phil Boyer at the club, and signed me and ex-Everton star Jimmy Gabriel on the same day.’
Or to put it another way, moving to Bournemouth was a deliberate act of career advancement. Somehow, that doesn’t ring quite true. Redknapp says he resisted an earlier offer to go to Bournemouth because he didn’t fancy moving down two divisions. Who could blame him? What player would? When he did agree to the transfer, he was still only twenty-five; at that age, he should have had at least three or four years left in him in the First Division. More, maybe, given Redknapp’s natural talent. Bobby Howe had described Redknapp as one of the best crossers of the ball in the game while at West Ham, and Jimmy Gabriel said much the same about him at Bournemouth. So if he was that good, why were no other clubs interested in signing him?
Injury-prone or not, you might have thought that another first- – or even second- – division team might have been willing to take a punt on Redknapp. Just give him enough time to recover from his niggles, get him strong, fit and motivated, then let him loose against the full-backs. Except there were no other offers from anyone else. So either Redknapp was a great deal more physically knackered than West Ham chose to let on – in which case Bond took a £31,000 gamble signing him to Bournemouth at all – or there was a general feeling that he no longer had what it took mentally to succeed at the highest level.
Redknapp went on to dismiss his four-year playing career at Bournemouth in less than a paragraph. And most of that paragraph was about how Bond had gone on to manage the first-division club, Norwich, and how a proposed transfer – then loan deal – for Redknapp to join him had collapsed along with his knee. If Bournemouth left little impression on Redknapp as a player, the fans reciprocated by feeling he had left little impression on them. ‘I think the basic problem was that every full-back in the Third Division targeted Harry,’ says a Bournemouth old-timer. ‘They wanted to make it clear right from the start they weren’t going to be shown up by some fancy Dan who had just moved down a couple of divisions, so they all got their retaliation in early.’ Perhaps, even, some of them had been tipped off about the best way of dealing with Redknapp by friends playing in the higher divisions. Either way, it was the same old, same old.
* * *
With his knee and playing career in England grinding to a halt, Redknapp was granted an unexpec
ted three-year lifeline with the offer to play for the Seattle Sounders in the newly formed North American Soccer League. The football in the US at this time was as undemanding as the lifestyle was good, so the state of Redknapp’s knees didn’t automatically rule him out of contention. And for some great footballers coming towards the end of their careers – Pelé, Carlos Alberto and Franz Beckenbauer among them – it was a handsome and stress-free last payday. Redknapp secured an invitation through his old Bournemouth mate, Jimmy Gabriel, and quickly renewed his West Ham connections, moving into the same apartment complex as Geoff Hurst and Bobby Moore who were also playing out time Stateside.
‘We all trained quite hard and there some were very enthusiastic American youngsters as well as us ex-pros coming to the end of our careers,’ says John Sissons, who joined the Tampa Bay Rowdies the year before Redknapp joined Seattle. ‘But it was a completely different game. The North American Soccer League didn’t play offside at the start, so all the tactics we had learned over the years counted for nothing. When you had an opposition forward who seldom left your penalty area, it was impossible for your backs to push up. So we’d play these weird games where very little was happening in the middle of the park! Still, it was good fun and we all enjoyed our stay in the US.’
Redknapp’s time in the US was undoubtedly more rewarding for him than it was for his employers. Redknapp managed just twenty-four games for Seattle – a lot fewer than the number of barbecues, beach parties and horse-race meetings he managed to fit in – yet even so it wasn’t the final collapse of his knees that forced him back home. It was the collapse of Phoenix Fire, a US club that had offered Redknapp and Gabriel megabucks to player-manage the team. Within weeks, Redknapp realized the money he was being offered wasn’t silly so much as non-existent. This particular American dream really was just a dream after all; Redknapp was left with a wife and two young kids to support and with no obvious source of income.
Life always looks much simpler when it’s replayed in reverse; motives and intentions that are sometimes weak, non-existent even, while going forward, take on an air of concrete inevitability. So by 2010, when Les Roopanarine published his biography of Redknapp, there were several of his ex-colleagues who were queuing up to say how Redknapp had always been a brilliant coach.
‘We did a tremendous amount of technical stuff in training [at West Ham under Ron Greenwood],’ said Bobby Howe, ‘and I think that anybody who played in that era and went on to coach believed in that philosophy as well . . . Harry was one of the players that we took on the preliminary badge . . . I would have to say that Harry was one of the better coaches, even then – and it was a very long time ago.’
Frank Lampard Senior, Harry’s brother-in-law and father of Chelsea’s Frank Lampard, also described how he and Redknapp ‘nurtured young talent, encouraged it and then gave players a platform on which to develop’. ‘Like all good managers,’ said Jimmy Gabriel, who had asked Redknapp to be his assistant coach in the US, ‘Harry can get the most from his players – and he did that right from the start, right from when he was coaching young kids in Seattle.’
It’s a heart-warming and compelling image: the young pro anxious to learn his trade and to pass on his knowledge and skills to the next generation. But just how accurate is it? In his own autobiography, written some twelve years earlier in 1998 while he was in charge at West Ham and there was much less of a cottage industry in the Redknapp legacy, Redknapp didn’t make a single mention of having enjoyed coaching kids or wanting to build a career in the management side of the game during his years as a player. Not one.
And when Roopanarine interviewed him over a decade later, he didn’t sound a great deal more enthusiastic. ‘When we had finished training,’ he said, ‘me and Frank Lampard used to go to a place in Canning Town called Pretoria School and they had a lovely sports master called Dave Jones. We used to teach the kids and play a game of football in the gym. We loved it and as we were only on £6 a week, £2.50 for the afternoon didn’t half come in handy.’
The kids probably learned a great deal, and even if they didn’t they would definitely have had a great afternoon laughing, joking and running around. An hour or so with Redknapp could hardly fail to be anything else. You’d guess that Redknapp had had an equally good time himself. But would he have done it without the inducement of an extra £2.50? That’s a much tougher call. Since he’s become a comparatively wealthy man, Redknapp has done more than his fair share for charity, so to write him off as a man who wouldn’t get out of bed unless there was money involved is plain wrong. But was he the type of twenty-year-old who would have willingly given up a few hours of his spare time because he had a burning desire to help kids improve their football skills? Probably not. It’s not the image of him that Geoff Hurst remembered in a radio interview some forty-five years later, when he said that of all the footballers he had played with, Redknapp was about the last one he would have predicted to become a manager. But then there’s no reason why Redknapp at that age should have been any different from most other twenty-year-olds of his generation. They would have been the exception, not the rule.
Redknapp was a professional. Football may have been a game he started out playing for fun but it soon became something he did for money. He had skills for which people were prepared to pay cash; not as much cash as they do now, but enough to make a living. Football was his job and if he could earn a bit extra on the side then he was happy to do it. He’d got married and had two kids while still in his twenties so there was no room for manoeuvre. With his career in America coming to a sudden end, he needed an income to keep the family afloat.
‘Was he really interested in being a football coach?’ says Pete Johnson, a veteran local news reporter who was close to Redknapp throughout his many years on the south coast. ‘Yes and no. He loved the game but I couldn’t have seen him going off to do a bit of coaching in his spare time at a local amateur club. Coaching was initially just a passport for him to earn a living doing something he enjoyed while hanging around with his mates.’
And it was his mates who came to the rescue – no surprise there. Friendships in football weren’t then the short-term marriages of convenience they so often are now. Players tended to stay with the same club for more than a few seasons so they got to know each other, they also earned pretty much the same salaries and socialized in the same pubs. They had relationships that were forged not in idle visits to the Ferrari showroom – the occasional dodgy TV being sold on the cheap outside the training ground was about as good as it got – but out of a genuine sense they were in it together. And the friendships frequently lasted. Football may have looked like a closed shop to outsiders but, for those in the game, it was good mates looking out for one another; not so much an old boy’s network as an act of charity.
Bobby Moore was the first to offer Redknapp a helping hand by taking him on as his assistant at non-league Oxford City where the former England captain had been appointed manager. It was in the main a fairly miserable year for Redknapp, commuting between Oxford and Bournemouth for just £120 per week to help coach a team he didn’t really know or care that much about. But it was a job, it was football and he was working with an old mate.
Redknapp has never made any secret of how much he admired Moore. ‘Mooro was a God, there are no two ways about it,’ said Redknapp. ‘When I first broke into the team in the early sixties after a golden youth career, Bobby was top man at Upton Park. Everybody looked up to him. You’d have thought given his stature that he would be aloof with kids coming into the side, but from day one he looked after me. He took me under his wing and really made sure I was OK. We got on great but he treated everyone the same way.’ Moore was everything Redknapp aspired to be: better looking, better mannered, better leader, better player, better drinker. And a better better as well, probably.
The two remained close right up until Moore’s death from bowel cancer in 1993. ‘He spent a few days in Bournemouth with me towards the end of his life,’ Redk
napp said, ‘and we went to watch the horses working at racehorse trainer David Elsworth’s yard. Not once did Bobby complain that things were getting too much for him. He’d go for his treatment to a clinic in Scotland and not say a word to anyone. I remember I went to see him after he’d had his operation. I could have cried. Bobby was always a big lad, a powerful build, but suddenly his trousers were hanging off him at the back because he had lost so much weight. It slaughtered me to see him like that. He’d say to me he was going OK but he knew all along he wasn’t. He knew what was coming but faced it with incredible bravery. That was how he was – unflappable. You couldn’t help but love him.’
As a role model both on and off the pitch, Moore was one of the most – if not the most – influential figures in Redknapp’s life. He was the man who taught the young Harry how a footballer should live, the man who gave him his first chance when his playing days were over, the man who showed him how to die. Significant as all these things are, though, Pete Johnson believes that if you want to understand Redknapp’s managerial career, Moore’s greatest legacy to Redknapp is probably to be found elsewhere in a gift he almost certainly had no idea he was giving.
‘Harry had Bobby on a pedestal,’ he says. ‘And though he was thrilled to be offered the job at Oxford, he told me he was shocked at how far Bobby had fallen. It had never occurred to him that a World Cup-winning captain and football legend could end up managing a non-league side, playing against opponents who openly disrespected his reputation in front of just a few hundred spectators.