Harry's Games

by John Crace

  In a post-match television interview after Spurs had lost to Wigan, Sky’s Rob Palmer jokingly referred to Redknapp as a ‘wheeler-dealer’.

  ‘I’m not a wheeler-dealer. Fuck off!’ Redknapp snapped before storming out. The conversation continued off camera. ‘Don’t say I’m a fucking wheeler-dealer. I’m a fucking football manager.’

  Redknapp’s hypersensitivity to the word ‘wheeler-dealer’ was no doubt explained by his having recently been charged with tax evasion. Taken in a certain context, wheeler-dealer can be shorthand for a wide-boy. But in its other sense of a person who loves the thrill of buying and selling, who can’t resist a deal, Redknapp is most definitely a wheeler-dealer, and a very capable one at that.

  Back in 2003, Michael Lewis wrote the bestselling Moneyball, a gripping account of how the 2002 Oakland Athletics baseball team (known in the US as the A’s) – with a payroll of about $41 million – took on and beat much higher-rated teams, such as the New York Yankees, that could afford to pay their players three times as much, by ignoring the conventional methods of assessing the value of a player to a team. Instead of using the same statistics as every other team – batting averages and stolen bases – to judge a player’s ability, the A’s’ analysis, known as ‘sabermetrics’, led them to believe that other criteria, such as on-base percentage and slugging percentage, which were undervalued by everyone else, were a far better guide to potential. As a result, the A’s were able to recruit a number of players in whom the bigger teams had no interest at a salary level the club could afford. They became competitive as a result by setting an American league record of twenty consecutive victories and winning the American League West in the process.

  Following the success of the A’s and the publication of Moneyball, some baseball traditionalists dismissed sabermetrics as a fluky piece of back-room bullshit. But just as many, including, significantly, the big spenders such as the Yankees and the Red Sox, who had lost out when the A’s out-smarted them in the draft and transfer market, thought there was something in it and employed their own sabermetricians. The geeks had finally found a place at the high table of the all-American game.

  The potential for Moneyball analysis wasn’t lost on other sports, either, although football has yet to come up with a definitive measure for ranking the effectiveness of player stats. If it had, you can’t imagine Liverpool paying £35 million for Andy ‘He’s big . . . he’s English’ Carroll or Chelsea forking out £50 million for Fernando ‘He’s quick . . . he’s Spanish’ Torres. But many clubs now employ people to spend days in front of a screen replaying old matches, searching for the holy grail of those features of players’ performance that have previously been disregarded and mark them out as something special. Used properly, Moneyball cuts both ways; not only does it help you to pick up potential match-winners on the cheap, it helps to prevent you from paying over the odds for duds.

  Redknapp is a long way off being a football geek, or any type of geek for that matter – he likes to give the impression he can barely operate a DVD player. But there is a sense in which he instinctively grasped the principles of Moneyball long before the boffins turned it into a science. He had a feel for the kind of player he was after and scoured the country to find them on the cheap. You could argue that he had little choice, as Bournemouth didn’t have the resources to pay a few million for the big stars; but then neither did any other manager in the lower divisions and Redknapp consistently outplayed them in the transfer game.

  ‘Some of it wasn’t rocket science,’ says Pete Johnson. ‘There’s a fairly standard formula for getting promotion from the lower divisions. Get two big centre-backs, a playmaker in midfield, a big strong centre-forward to knock in the goals and build the rest of the team around them. And Harry knew that better than anyone as he’d had lumps kicked out of him at Bournemouth as a player, which is why he often made a point of signing precisely the type of players who used to terrify him.

  ‘But other managers in the division worked the same system and were looking for similar players and Harry was a bit of a genius at getting the players others had missed. If he fancied a player, he would go all out to get him. He would chat to him, charm him, do whatever was necessary to get the signature. One tactic that always worked well was to pounce early at the end of May when the rest of the football world was only thinking about going on holiday. He picked up both Efan Ekoku from Sutton and Ian Bishop from Carlisle ahead of the opposition in that way.’

  One of Redknapp’s first acquisitions, the striker Colin Clarke, who was signed from Tranmere for £20,000, was a typical example of Redknapp’s financial nous, and one he has always been happy to shout about from the rooftops. Curiously, perhaps, he remembers that deal as much for the money he personally lost as for the value he bought to the club. When he’d originally approached the chairman for Clarke’s £20,000 fee, he’d been told there was no money available. Whereupon, Redknapp suggested putting together a syndicate in which he and three others would personally put up £5,000 each and – in a forerunner to the Peter Crouch arrangement that would later be the subject of his court case – split any profits on Clarke’s subsequent sale. The chairman turned this suggestion down and finally came up with the money himself.

  ‘So Clarkie played for a season,’ Redknapp said, ‘got 36 goals and then we sold him to Southampton for £500,000. My syndicate was gutted – that would have been a profit of almost half a million pounds – but at least it confirmed to me that I could spot a player and had a big future in the management game.’

  The Clarke deal is yet another of the great ‘loveable Harry’ stories, pitched artfully somewhere between bigging himself up for having been so clever and taking the piss out of himself for having missed out on a bumper payday. It diverts us from thinking about what was really going on in any depth. We’re meant to think, ‘That Harry . . . what a geezer. Gets a player the chairman doesn’t even really want for next to nothing and then flogs him for a fortune in next to no time.’

  This is really only half the story, though, because what gets left out is that, in the summer of 1986, Clarke was picked for the Northern Ireland World Cup squad in Mexico and was one of its few stars, scoring a consolation goal in the defeat to Spain during the group stages. Most pundits reckoned that showcase goal more than doubled his eventual transfer fee. So while Redknapp deserved credit for spotting and developing talent, the size of the profit owed a great deal to post-World Cup hysteria. Good as Clarke was, Redknapp can never have imagined he was a half-million-pound player.

  More significantly, though, the deal glosses over Redknapp’s failure sometimes to distinguish between the private and the public good. It’s as if his default position is that anything that benefits him automatically benefits those around him and, yet again, it raises questions about where his loyalties ultimately lie – to himself or the club? This is a recurring theme with Redknapp. The Clarke transfer might suggest that, on that occasion, Redknapp was rather more concerned about his own lost opportunity, as what he seems to remember most clearly is that he missed out on the chance of making a quick and easy £120,000. There is no record of him ever having said, ‘Thank God the club did so well as it was struggling a bit at the time.’

  The aftershock ripples of the Clarke transfer didn’t end there. Had the money stayed with Redknapp, it would probably have been put towards buying a bigger home or invested in a local business; he would later buy an Italian restaurant in Bournemouth. And the club might have stayed in the Third Division. As it was, the half million proved to be the financial launchpad for Redknapp to acquire the team that was to win Bournemouth promotion to the Second Division in the following season. It bought John Williams, a centre-back from Port Vale whom Redknapp has often described as his best-ever signing; defender Tony Pulis from Newport; strikers Dave Puckett from Southampton, Trevor Aylott from Crystal Palace and Carl Richards from Enfield; and goalkeeper Gerry Peyton from Fulham. All of them turned out to be shrewd acquisitions by Redknapp, and they w
ould never have been possible without the Clarke windfall.

  The John Williams deal shows just how cannily Redknapp operated. ‘I didn’t really want to leave Port Vale,’ says Williams. ‘I had just bought my first house in Holmes Chapel and I was feeling settled. But Clarkie [Colin Clarke] had tipped Harry off about me and he wouldn’t take no for an answer. Eventually, I agreed to go down to Bournemouth and Harry took me straight out on to the beach. After Port Vale, I thought I was in Magaluf. He then chatted to me and my wife about the best private schools in the area . . . he later told me his trick was to sign the wife, not the player.

  ‘Anyway, it worked on me. I think I agreed to the move on the spot. I got a small signing-on fee, but it wasn’t about the money. My weekly wage only went up from £250 to £300. I signed because I liked Harry.’

  Redknapp began his career as full-time manager at Bournemouth on a tide of goodwill from the supporters; he wasn’t Megson and he was a former Bournemouth player, someone who understood the club and had demonstrated his loyalty by buying a house and settling in the town. Within a month, he had become a local hero when his team beat Manchester United 2-0 in the third round of the FA Cup. ‘That was the thing about Harry,’ said Glenn Rodgers, a Bournemouth season ticket holder. ‘He could deliver these fantastic days, when the impossible seemed to become possible, that you knew you would remember for the rest of your life. It was a bit like having the most fantastic sex with your girlfriend; you instantly forgot all the times she had played hard to get or ignored you. Memories of defeats that shouldn’t have happened quickly melted at the prospect of another good time just round the corner.’

  And the good times did continue, at least for a while; Bournemouth avoided relegation and won the Associate Members Cup (now the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy) in Redknapp’s first season. Two years later, Bournemouth won the Third Division Championship and were promoted to the Second Division. Within three years, they were relegated and no one was exactly sure why. Redknapp was still talking a good game to the local press, he was still active in the transfer market, bringing in high-profile and high-value players, such as Gavin Peacock from Gillingham for £250,000, George Lawrence from Millwall for £100,000, Bobby Barnes from Swindon for £110,000 and Luther Blissett from Watford for £50,000, but the team just didn’t gel on the pitch.

  ‘There was a lot of head scratching,’ says Pete Johnson, ‘because on paper the team looked easily strong enough to stay up, despite a long late-season injury list. So had Harry just found his level? Was he a good manager for the lower divisions but didn’t have the tactical nous for the higher ones? Had he become so focused on buying and selling players that he had taken his eye off the day-to-day running of the club? Did the players think they were on to a cushy number at Bournemouth and were not as committed as they should have been? Was he just too matey with the team, too quick to join in with the daily trip to the bookie’s after training? No one could work it out.’

  For John Williams, the immediate blame for relegation rested with an injury list that took out the entire back four. But he also wonders if the team wasn’t as professional as it might have been. ‘There was a big drinking culture at the club,’ he says, ‘and we could be a bit of a handful at times. Harry tried to keep one step ahead of us, but he didn’t always manage it. It was the same at a lot of clubs, mind. I also think it must have been awkward for Harry, as a few of us were good friends with his son Mark. He probably didn’t always know whether to talk to us as the boss or a family friend.’

  Within months, no one at Bournemouth was thinking much about football. During a holiday in Italy with Brian Tiler to watch the 1990 World Cup, the minibus in which they were both travelling was hit by a car travelling at 90 mph on the wrong side of the road. The three Italians in the oncoming car and Tiler were killed instantly. Redknapp, who had been sitting next to Tiler, suffered a fractured skull and was in a coma for two days. Initially, the doctors didn’t expect him to live, but after three weeks in an Italian hospital he was well enough to be flown home to convalesce. Or rather, that was the idea. He had been warned not to go to any matches, but in a matter of weeks he was back at Dean Court, disguised in sunglasses and a baseball cap, watching Bournemouth play Aldershot in a pre-season friendly.

  ‘When I look back on the accident now,’ he later wrote, ‘it hasn’t altered my outlook on life although I suppose for a while it put things into perspective. I thought at the time that there was no way I’d allow football to be the be-all and end-all of life for me, that I would be able to switch off. But within a few months I was just like I’d always been – still getting the hump when we get beat, and taking everything too personally. I’d be lying if I said it radically changed my life. For a while, I completely lost my sense of taste and smell; I wouldn’t have a clue what I was eating. The taste came back, though not fully, after about six months but even today I can’t smell anything.’

  Spoken like a man. More than that, spoken like an English professional footballer brought up in the school of hard knocks. But should we believe that he hadn’t really been affected by the accident? ‘Those of us who did observe Harry close up reckoned the accident did change him,’ says Johnson. ‘He had always had his favourites and he wasn’t afraid of showing it; if a player wasn’t one of those he really valued, he wouldn’t go out of his way to put an arm round him and make him feel good about himself. If he was angry about something, he would let him know it. The onus was always on the player to get back in Harry’s good books.

  ‘But after the accident, his mood swings did get more extreme and he could suddenly lose his temper over next to nothing. It definitely affected the players. There was one lad, Wayne Fereday, a winger whom Harry had signed from Newcastle, who turned out to be absolutely hopeless. Harry regularly humiliated him in public by getting him to come in and do extra training, running round the pitch, on a Sunday. It wasn’t Harry’s judgement that was off – Fereday regularly features in the top two or three of any poll for the worst footballer to have played for Bournemouth – it was his handling that was off. Fereday’s confidence was clearly shattered; what he needed was some TLC, not humiliation.

  ‘He also had a go at me for no reason whatsoever. All I’d done was write in the local paper that Jamie’s [Harry’s son] transfer to Liverpool from Bournemouth for £350,000 was a big move for a seventeen-year-old . . . which it self-evidently was. There was nothing controversial about it whatsoever, but Harry rang me to shout at me for about half an hour and, for a while, I was persona non grata.’

  John Williams also thought the accident took its toll. ‘Harry would almost never talk about it,’ he says. ‘It was as though he kept that bit of him to himself, and would only let us see the same fun and jokey side of him. But I think it did make him a bit harder, a bit more determined. As if he realized he had come so close to losing everything and that he now owed it to everyone to make the absolute best of every opportunity that came his way.’

  Clearly, such a serious accident must have had some effect on Redknapp. He’d experienced a severely traumatic event, his skull had been fractured, and who knows what peripheral damage may have been caused to his neural pathways? Indeed, he may even have suffered post-traumatic stress disorder; mood swings are a classic symptom. And then there was survivor’s guilt. Tiler had been one of his best friends and the two of them had been sitting next to each other. If Redknapp had got into the minibus first he might have been the one killed. As it was, his friend was dead and he was alive. Left untreated or unacknowledged, that kind of guilt, however irrational, can gnaw away at a person indefinitely. All things considered, it would have been more remarkable if Redknapp hadn’t been changed somehow by the accident.

  Tiler’s death certainly had one very concrete knock-on effect. Together, Tiler and Redknapp had been a powerful, virtually unassailable, double act at Bournemouth. They looked after one another, affording each other protection. If someone wanted to knock one of them, they had to be prepared to take on the ot
her. But with Tiler’s death, Redknapp was that bit more vulnerable. And he was even more so as Bournemouth showed no signs of making a return to the Second Division.

  Having had a set-to with the Bournemouth chairman, Ken Gardiner, for being disrespectful about Tiler’s death, Redknapp then fell out with Norman Hayward, a local businessman, who had joined the club board and wanted a more hands-on role. At the end of the 1991/92 season, Redknapp handed in his resignation. Did he jump or was he pushed? Both, probably. Hayward must have been aware that treading on Redknapp’s toes would eventually provoke the inevitable resignation letter and, when it duly arrived, no one at the club tried to persuade him to stay.

  By the time Redknapp left, Bournemouth found themselves in a financial crisis with debts of £2.6 million; at one point that summer, the club was within fifteen minutes of going into administration and, with the team not making much headway on the pitch, Redknapp was an expensive overhead. And not just because of the salary and bonuses written into his own contract. As with all managers, Redknapp was quick to point out his transfer successes, such as Shaun Teale, who had been bought from Weymouth for £50,000 and sold two years later for £500,000; and Ian Bishop had been bought from Carlisle for £20,000 and sold to Manchester City a year later for £465,000. If the club’s finances were rocky, then it was nothing to do with him, surely.