by John Crace
In his autobiography, Redknapp was adamant that nothing crooked had taken place. ‘Looking at replays of his attempted pass,’ he said, ‘I’d have to admit it wasn’t Kitson’s most elegant ball. That match, or at least the poxy kick-off, would have been long forgotten had it not been for a story in the Racing Post the following week. Spread-betting firm Sporting Index apparently reported a large number of sellers at sixty-five seconds, forcing the line down to 50–65. The inference was clear. Someone had cleaned up at the bookies’ expense. And the finger of suspicion was pointing at West Ham United. Kitson’s misplaced pass looked worse and worse the more you saw it.
‘I suppose you have to admit the circumstantial evidence was pretty strong but, believe me, that’s all it was – circumstantial. But if you looked at all the characters involved in the supposed coup you’d realize it was a cock-and-bull story. There were no punters at West Ham except John Hartson who wasn’t even playing and Kitson knows about as much about betting as I do about nuclear science. I didn’t even have a spread-betting account. And who won this small fortune? Sporting Index claimed they saw a large number of sellers but they later said little damage had been done. Our kick-off that day was one we and, indeed, most clubs in the Premiership followed regularly. It just didn’t come off.’
He then added a curious coda. ‘The betting riddle made a good story, sure, but there was nothing in it. And even if there was, do you think I’d ever admit it? They’d lock me up!’ In other words, you shouldn’t rely on him to tell the truth. In which case, you might ask, why should we trust that he’d done so now? Nothing was ever proven and no charges were ever brought, so there is no reason to think that Kitson was guilty of spot match-fixing. But you can’t help thinking that the reputation of the club at the time went a long way to creating the air of suspicion that something iffy had taken place. Redknapp has to take his share of the blame for this, and not just because he was known to fancy the odd flutter himself. If Kitson’s attempted pass had gone straight into touch when Ron Greenwood or John Lyall had been in the dugout, the chances are that no one would have given it any further thought.
What’s more, the rumours have persisted. Talk to the West Ham players of that era about the incident and you are met with a knowing smile. And if Redknapp and his players weren’t involved in a petty betting sting, then, if the Guardian’s Secret Footballer (a veteran Premiership player writing anonymously for the newspaper) is to be believed, they were among the few who weren’t. In his book published in 2012, the Secret Footballer wrote, ‘When I started playing professionally, in-play betting had just come to the market; nobody really knew if it was going to take off but that didn’t stop every bookmaker from offering his own version. The service has been refined in the intervening years to maximize the bookies’ profits but there was a small window of opportunity where the punters and the players were able to take advantage.
‘An old team-mate of mine was one beneficiary. Throughout the season, a team will usually win the toss fifty per cent of the time, but away from home, even if a captain loses the toss, the home team will forfeit the kick-off so that they can kick towards their own fans in the second half. If you intentionally go after the kick-off and you don’t care which end you kick towards first, then you could easily end up with seventy-five per cent of the kick-offs over the course of a season. And if that happens, then it becomes ridiculously easy to bet on which team will win the first throw-in.
‘As a young, naïve kid, I simply thought that this player was hopeless. We’d take the kick-off, pass it back to him and every time, without exception, he’d hit the ball towards the touchline and out of play. It was so easy that nobody noticed, and it wasn’t until years later when a few of us from the team were talking about the old days that it dawned on me what had been going on. Whenever I tell that story to a player who was also plying his trade back then, his reply is usually the same: “Oh yeah, we had a lad who used to do that, too. He made a fortune.” I have heard of the same being done with corners, goal kicks, fouls and even yellow cards.’
Redknapp’s judgement had also come under scrutiny earlier that season when Michael Tabor, an East End bookie and racehorse owner, had made a hostile bid to take over West Ham with promises of a large cash injection into the club’s finances. The board rejected Tabor’s bid, with managing director Peter Storrie pointing out, ‘The offer is not as straightforward as it seems. Of the £30 million, £22 million would be in the form of loans which would, therefore, put West Ham largely in his debt . . . He has, perhaps, given the impression that he is a white knight riding in to save the club, but the supporters should know that there are a lot of strings attached.’
As Steve Blowers reported, sometime later it became general knowledge that it was Redknapp who had brokered the original meeting between Tabor and Storrie at the Cheltenham races, leaving everyone to wonder what exactly was in the deal for Redknapp and when had it become part of the manager’s remit to set up a possible deal to sell the club he was running. Redknapp, as ever, had a positive spin on the situation. ‘It is possible that Michael Tabor’s interest indirectly saved us from relegation,’ he said. ‘I think the fans clamouring for Tabor’s money, and my offer to resign, perhaps forced the chairman’s hand. He knew we’d go down unless drastic action was taken and, all of a sudden, he found the money to buy Hartson, Kitson and Lomas, three signings which kept us up.’
Redknapp might well have been right in his assessment. Tabor’s interest may have kicked the board out of inertia. But there are other significant aspects to the bid which aren’t so readily apparent. Such as, by appearing to get involved in the boardroom deal, Redknapp’s concentration on how the team was performing on the pitch may have been less than total. Perhaps this partly explains why West Ham were battling to avoid relegation. And even if Redknapp was right in his summing up of the Tabor bid, his response reaffirmed his style of management. You don’t try to play your way out of trouble by getting the best out of the existing squad: you buy your way out of trouble by adding to it.
When Redknapp had offered his resignation in the early months of 1997 during the Tabor takeover bid, West Ham had already been embarrassingly knocked out in the third round of the FA Cup at home to Wrexham, and were in the relegation mix in the Premiership table. It’s an offer that many chairmen might have accepted, given that the club could hardly be said to have overachieved in Redknapp’s first two seasons with fourteenth-and tenth-place finishes. So why didn’t the West Ham board replace him?
Pragmatics came into it. The available gene pool is significantly reduced mid-season, with most managers tied in to their clubs until at least the end of the season, and the ones that can be tempted to make themselves available often come with an inflated price tag – a price tag that West Ham’s stretched finances couldn’t meet. So the board may well have looked around and decided there was no one better than Redknapp for the money they had.
But there were also more positive reasons for keeping him. Redknapp was fun to be with, well liked (by most people) within the club and he did know what he was doing. Cut through his wheeler-dealing tendencies and there was a man who understood the game, could identify good players and had the potential to make the team successful.
Within a matter of months, the club’s faith in Redknapp had been rewarded as West Ham finished the season in fourteenth place, having managed to avoid relegation. The next three seasons would prove to be their best ever since the mid-1950s, with successive Premier League finishes of eighth, fifth and ninth and victory in the Inter-Toto Cup – not something that most clubs would choose to make much noise about these days if the competition still existed but, for fans more used to trips to Liverpool and Birmingham, the opportunity to play Jokerit of Finland and Metz of France was not to be passed by.
‘I was there when we won the Inter-Toto Cup in Metz,’ says Sam Delaney, ‘and the game still stands out as one of the highlights of my life as a supporter. We had lost the first leg at home and to win aw
ay in France and qualify for the UEFA Cup was just incredible. It wasn’t what was supposed to happen to West Ham. Up till then we had always been condescendingly referred to as “the neutrals’ favourite” – the team that played attractive football but for ever came up short. We’d have great days out, such as winning away at Manchester United, but then fall on our arses by losing to Coventry the following week.
‘The Inter-Toto was the first cup we had won for almost twenty years and we had done it with a team that included Di Canio, Kanouté, Wanchope and Ferdinand – players of genuine star quality – so it didn’t feel as if we had got a bit lucky and sneaked a win against the odds. It felt deserved. Like the team had made the transition from underachievers to genuine contenders. It was a great time to follow the club.’
As Delaney points out, the West Ham teams of 1998–99 had real talent, with Redknapp as active in the transfer market as ever, acquiring Paulo Di Canio, Freddy Kanouté, Paulo Wanchope, Ian Wright, Marc-Vivien Foe and Shaka Hislop . . . and not forgetting Neil ‘Razor’ Ruddock. For all the plaudits and, from time to time, criticism, Redknapp attracted for playing expansive football, he never forgot the lesson he had learned as a player that a brick shit-house at the heart of the defence never did any harm. Redknapp also proved to be as able a salesman as he was a buyer; getting Wimbledon to hand over £7.5 million for an overweight and out-of-form John Hartson has to be one of the best pieces of business he ever did.
Ian Wright didn’t turn out to be quite the landmark acquisition Redknapp had hoped. His £750,000 transfer fee netted just nine goals (and an infamous sending off against Leeds) in twenty-two appearances before moving to Celtic on a free transfer, and there’s a suspicion his purchase had more to do with sentiment than acumen. Redknapp has never tired of telling the story against himself about how he missed the chance while managing Bournemouth to sign Wright as a teenager before he went to Crystal Palace. Mind you, the story has changed over the years. The first of a couple of versions has it that Carl Richards, the player Redknapp had signed from Enfield, told Redknapp there was a great player he should take a look at.
‘Is he any better than you?’ Redknapp asked.
‘No,’ said Richards.
‘Then I don’t think I’ll bother,’ Redknapp replied.
In the other version, Redknapp was watching Richards play before he bought him and one of Richards’ mates said he shouldn’t bother with Carl and go and watch a player called Ian Wright instead. Either way, missing out on Wright was not something a man like Redknapp could easily forget.
If Wright turned out to be a mixed blessing, Di Canio most definitely wasn’t, as the Italian striker quickly became the club’s talismanic figure, not least with the fans who adored him for his style as much as his goals. Di Canio wasn’t quite so well loved in the dressing room, as he was a player who adored himself every bit as much as the fans did and quickly acquired a reputation for being extremely high maintenance. One of Redknapp’s greatest pieces of man-management at West Ham was to keep the rest of the squad – more or less – happy and to keep Di Canio at the club.
Di Canio recently described Redknapp as ‘one of the most intelligent managers I have ever worked with’ in an interview with the magazine, Four Four Two, although not even the Italian may quite have appreciated just how skilful Redknapp had been in handling him. ‘Paulo was a strange character,’ said a former member of the West Ham board, ‘who always used to refer to himself in the third person. He’d say things like, “Paulo Di Canio thinks . . .”
‘It was very odd and made dealing with him on a one-to-one basis quite tricky. So when Manchester United openly expressed an interest in buying him, there was a lot of soul-searching about the best way of persuading Paulo to remain at a much smaller club. It was Harry who cracked it by suggesting we should call him into the boardroom for talks, having put up photographs of Bobby Moore and Paulo side by side next to each other on the wall. Harry opened the conversation by saying, “Bobby Moore is the greatest footballer ever to have played for this club. You are the second greatest.” After that, it was never really in doubt that Paolo would stay with us.’
It wasn’t just the bought-in superstars who were catching the eye at this time. For some years, West Ham had been running one of the best football youth academies in Britain and the dividends were beginning to be returned in the shape of Rio Ferdinand, Frank Lampard junior, Michael Carrick and Joe Cole. Redknapp was not slow to spot their potential and was happy to ease them into the first-team squad where they soon became established regulars. This three-year ‘youth policy’ window – combined with the close attention he paid to his own son’s junior career – has become another permanent fixture of the Redknapp legend and goes a long way to explaining why a pundit as smart as Gary Neville might be led to believe that Redknapp would embrace a new generation of young players if he were to become England manager. It’s also another aspect of the Redknapp stories that bears closer examination.
Tony Carr had been West Ham’s director of youth policy since 1973 and there was an established network of talent scouts throughout the East End, Essex and south-east London long before Redknapp arrived on the scene. So the idea that the Redknapp regime was the catalyst for a major hunt for emerging talent is a non-starter; rather, the opposite is true. ‘It was widely felt within the club that Harry wasn’t particularly interested in the youth team,’ says Sam Delaney. ‘When Harry is interested in something he tends to want to meddle, and he didn’t meddle at all with the youth team. He let everyone get on with their jobs. All he really did was listen to the advice of Frank Lampard senior and others that some of the youth squad were ready to be tried out at a higher level.
‘To be fair, he does deserve some credit for that as he could have just said no or not given them enough time to settle, but you rather feel that any decent manager would have spotted the potential of players such as Ferdinand, Lampard, Carrick and Cole. The fact that the four of them came through at the same time while Harry was manager was just a fortunate coincidence that has carried on working to his advantage ever since.’
The youth-team player who was to make the greatest impact in the West Ham side was Rio Ferdinand, and it was his sale that ultimately set in motion the chain of events that led to Redknapp leaving West Ham at the end of the 2000/01 season. How Ferdinand came to prominence at West Ham is open to debate. There is the dull account, in which Ferdinand had been spotted at an early age by talent scouts in Peckham and nurtured by West Ham until he was ready to make his senior debut. And then there is Redknapp’s, in which it was his father, Harry Redknapp senior, who happened to notice Ferdinand’s true potential in a South-East Counties League Cup Final in 1995.
Redknapp recalls his dad saying, ‘ “What a player you’ve got there . . . I’ve never seen anyone like him,” he told me. For the life of me I couldn’t work out who he was talking about. “You know,” he said, “the big lad . . .” fumbling for the match programme, “. . . Ferdinand.”
‘ “Oh yeah,” I said, thinking my dad had gone a bit nuts. I’d watched Rio in training for some time on Tuesday and Thursday nights and, while we all thought he was OK, we’d seen little hint of the enormous talent to blossom.’
The circumstances of Ferdinand’s departure from the club would turn out to be equally disputed. By the middle of the 2000/01 season, Ferdinand was one of West Ham’s biggest assets, a central defender whose price seemed to be increasing weekly after becoming the transfer target of several big clubs. ‘Why should we sell Rio Ferdinand?’ Redknapp had said around Christmas time. ‘Are we a Premier League club or are we just a feeder club for bigger clubs? If we start selling players like Rio, where is the club going to go?’
Within a month, Ferdinand had been sold for a record fee of £18 million to Leeds, with Redknapp claiming the credit for a last-ditch act of brinkmanship that forced the price up another £3 million.
‘Rio was special to us and he was happy here,’ said Redknapp. ‘But £18 million was
just an amazing offer. What can you say to that? We just couldn’t turn it down.’ Redknapp’s take on the transfer was regarded as the last word on the subject by the football press and the fans. No one really wanted Ferdinand to go, but £18 million seemed like silly money at the time and was a lifeline for a cash-strapped club. For that price tag, West Ham would surely have no problem buying an equally good defender as Ferdinand’s replacement and have plenty of money left over in the bank.
One suspicious mind saw the deal rather differently and, in his book, Broken Dreams, the investigative journalist Tom Bower revealed that Redknapp had personally made £300,000 as his share of the deal. Countering Redknapp’s suggestion that he had been an innocent bystander in the Ferdinand sale, Bower claimed he had been the one to talk West Ham chairman, Terry Brown, into it.
‘Terry Brown was watching cricket at the Oval,’ wrote Bower, ‘when Redknapp telephoned. “I’ve just had a bid for Ferdinand from Leeds,” he said. “They’re offering £15 million.” Brown was puzzled, not least about why the manager and not the chairman should receive the offer.
‘ “What do you think?” Brown asked.
‘ “I know you can’t reject it because it’s best for the club.”
‘Brown expressed his astonishment that Redknapp was suddenly so willing to lose a key player. “This doesn’t sound like you to let Rio go.”
‘Redknapp sounded unusually measured. “No, I think this is best for the club.” ’
And, by implication, best for Redknapp.
‘That’s pretty much the way I remember it, too,’ says a former West Ham director. ‘I can’t be sure who instigated what, but once Rio’s price had got up to £15 million, Harry became a lot keener on the deal. He said he needed the £300,000 because his mum had cancer and he wanted to make sure she got the best treatment.’