Harry's Games

by John Crace

  Far from being a distraction, the court case might have been the catalyst for one of Redknapp’s most focused periods of football management, when he was alive to nuances in player moods and team tactics over a sustained period of time. Spurs’ results over the previous six months would back up that analysis. But it was the other half of this psychological equation that would have the most devastating consequences, as far from being more focused after the trial, Redknapp was more likely to be far less on the ball. It’s probably pushing it a bit to suggest he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, but it isn’t to reckon he can’t have been a bit demob happy.

  There’s only a certain amount of time that anyone can hold everything together without something having to give. And Redknapp had done a brilliant job keeping himself and his football club on track during a prolonged period of stress. Only very rarely, such as in his courtroom outburst against Detective Inspector Manley, had his jokey, chatty persona cracked, and even then his poise had been regained within minutes. It would have been entirely natural, then, for Redknapp to have relaxed his grip. Once the initial euphoria of the ‘not guilty’ verdict had worn off, the enormity of what he had been through – that had been hitherto repressed as the only way of coping with it – would have begun to sink in. Juries are notoriously unpredictable, and the possibilities of how close he might have come to a ‘guilty’ verdict and long-term imprisonment must surely have had their impact at some point. How could a few dropped points or a couple of sulky players in the dressing room possibly feel quite such a matter of life and death as it once had after that? It’s like getting a cancer all-clear from the oncologist; for a while, routine worries are put in perspective.

  All this would have been taking place at a subconscious level, so it’s unlikely Redknapp would have given any of this a moment’s consideration; on his own admission, he isn’t a man much given to introspection. He was putting in the same long hours, so he must be doing the same job in the same way, right? Except that he wasn’t. Like most of us, though, he was unwilling to accept that his performance might have dropped a little.

  There are plenty of statistics to measure a player’s performance; goals scored, passes completed, yards run, tackles made . . . You name it, someone somewhere will have been quantifying it. How much relevance any of these stats have is beside the point; what matters is that they exist and there are benchmarks against which you can argue whether a footballer is playing well or not.

  For a manager, these yardsticks are far less visible. League position? It tells you something, but by no means everything, as it doesn’t always reveal the extent to which a team is in that position because of, or despite, the manager’s influence. Essentially, it doesn’t give you a value-added index. If a team continues to lose, it may be a near inevitability the manager will be sacked – the chairman needs someone to blame and part of a manager’s job description is to be the fall guy – but that doesn’t necessarily make it a fair outcome.

  This creates problems of its own. For even if a manager knows his performance has dropped, he doesn’t necessarily know why, or what he can do about it. Blackburn Rovers, by Christmas 2011, had only won two league games all season. Statistically, it would have been hard for anyone with no managerial experience whatsoever to have done much worse than Steve Kean, the Blackburn manager. During his more sleepless nights, Kean couldn’t have failed to have been aware of this, but was powerless to do anything about it. Time and again, he would have analyzed those games where his team had been successful, looking for differences between then and now. He would have considered different formations, changing personnel, shouting at players he had previously been nice to and being nice to those he had previously shouted at. And yet . . . nothing. His team were playing just as badly, whatever he did.

  Worse still, Kean was in a double bind, because the one thing a manager can’t admit to anyone – probably not even himself – is that he doesn’t know why his team is playing badly. In March 2012, the Burton Albion manager, Paul Peschisolido, said he was baffled to explain the loss of confidence in the team that was on a fourteen-game winless streak having been battling for promotion earlier in the season. That statement, as much as the run of poor form, cost Peschisolido his job. The moment a manager admits he doesn’t have a clue, he’s lost the confidence of the chairman, players and fans. Not knowing what’s wrong is simply not an option for a football manager unless he wants the sack. If he doesn’t know what’s wrong, he somehow not only has to convince himself he does, he has to convince those around him, too.

  Here was Redknapp’s perfect storm. No matter what he said to the contrary, speculation over the England job was unsettling him and his players; his concentration and intensity levels were compromised at the very moment he needed to up his game. And even if he was aware his eye wasn’t wholly on the ball, he wasn’t entirely sure which part of his team’s performance needed tweaking to restore it to its pre-trial consistency. Into this mix, you then have to add the players.

  ‘Footballers do notice these things,’ says Perry, ‘and they take advantage. It would be nice to think of the players as mature adults, but not all of them are. Some of them are spoilt young men in their late teens and early twenties and, if they spot an opportunity to get away with stuff, they will. The relationship between the leadership and the players grows weaker, and there is a subconscious realization that there are fewer consequences for stepping out of line. Loyalties that are, at best, often, only ever fragile, begin to break down once a manager’s hold on his players weakens.

  ‘Sir Alex Ferguson is probably one of the finest examples of a manager who can gather round him a squad of awkward characters and impose on them a desire to win at all costs. He makes them bow to his will through sheer strength of personality. Yet when he announced he intended to retire at the end of the 2001/02 season, even he was powerless to halt a decline in his team’s performance. The resolve of players who had been utterly committed to the cause weakened when they thought the manager was half way out the door.’ And that resolve returned when Ferguson changed his mind and stepped back in later in the season.

  Faced with a manager who was distracted on three separate fronts, it was almost inevitable that the players with a tendency towards laziness in the Spurs squad became just that bit lazier; those with a tendency towards blaming everyone else for their own failings started pointing the finger elsewhere just that bit quicker; and those who were thinking about moving clubs at the end of the season asked their agents to begin making a few more phone calls. Given all this, the last thing Redknapp needed was any extra distractions. But one came along anyway – this time one that nobody could have foreseen – when the Bolton mid-fielder Fabrice Muamba had a cardiac arrest on the pitch forty-one minutes into a fifth-round FA Cup tie.

  Thanks to the swift intervention of the paramedics and a cardiologist who happened to be in the crowd, Muamba’s life was saved, but for everyone who witnessed his collapse and resuscitation it was a profoundly affecting experience, a reminder of the precariousness of existence that was all the more shocking for taking place in a location where the only things expected to die were dreams. For a week or so, it was Muamba’s near miraculous recovery rather than football that rightly dominated the back pages, but any relief that Redknapp might have ordinarily felt at being given an unexpected, if temporary, respite from being the centre of attention would have been offset by the extra problems he knew would be created. The last thing he needed in a Spurs team low in confidence was any reason for his players to be any less committed to him. Yet after seeing an apparently fit athlete come within moments of death – and, indeed, ‘die’ for several minutes before being revived – who could blame any of the Spurs players for wondering if the same thing might happen to them? A manager asking them to put their bodies on the line for the cause must have lost its appeal once the demand no longer seemed entirely metaphorical.

  A goalless draw away to Chelsea bought Redknapp a little more breath
ing space from those accustomed to Spurs’ long history of dire results at Stamford Bridge. But those watching the game more closely drew less comfort. No matter what Redknapp may have said in his post-match press conference, his Tottenham team was still misfiring badly and the away point owed more to Chelsea playing with as little confidence as Spurs as any revival in form. And if Redknapp couldn’t see that, then the FA should have.

  The FA might have originally acted with the best of intentions by delaying the appointment of the new English manager until the end of the season but, six weeks later, at the end of March, it was obvious their procrastination was proving to be every bit as unsettling as a declaration of their intent. Now was the time a bold and far-sighted organization would have cut its losses, admitted its selection time frame hadn’t worked out as planned, named a new manager and lived with the consequences. But when there’s a timid and myopic path on offer, English football’s governing body rarely hesitates to embrace it, and so the FA passively allowed itself to become a key player in what was to turn out to be a very English Greek tragedy.

  7

  Rival Bids

  Summer 2001

  One of Redknapp’s favourite moans towards the end of his time at West Ham had been how badly paid football managers were in comparison to their players. Strictly speaking, he was absolutely right; many of Redknapp’s signings were earning a great deal more than him. But the way he talked often made it sound as if he was hard up and badly done by. That was stretching the truth. His basic salary at West Ham had been about £1 million per year before bonuses, and it’s reasonable to assume that the Rio Ferdinand transfer hadn’t been the only one from which he had benefited financially. So Redknapp was more than comfortably off – he was secure. He was now in his mid-fifties, living in a house worth several million pounds on which his pay-off from West Ham could virtually clear the mortgage, he had business interests outside football, his youngest son, Jamie, was earning a seven-figure salary as a professional footballer and life was sweet. Driving a cab was no longer a career option that needed to be given serious consideration.

  Harry Redknapp was also by now a football name; if not ‘A’ list, then certainly top of the ‘B’ list, a man who could be relied on to make a few gags and have an opinion on almost anything. Want a story on why foreign footballers find it hard to get on in English teams, or why they don’t, for that matter? Redknapp was your man. He even had a regular column in the Racing Post, although hopefully nobody took much notice of his tips. ‘Harry was a hopeless punter,’ says local south-coast news reporter Pete Johnson. ‘He used to tease Alan Ball for betting with his heart rather than his head, but Harry was just as bad. There were days when he’d bet on almost anything from the three o’clock at Doncaster to a baseball game in America he knew nothing about. It used to drive Sandra mad.’

  With his high public profile and perfectly respectable track record at West Ham – falling out with the chairman is generally treated as an occupational hazard and rarely warrants a black mark on a manager’s CV – there was a general expectation that Redknapp’s next job would be with another Premiership team. Instead, he slipped down a division to Portsmouth. There were good reasons for this: he hadn’t been flooded with other offers; he wasn’t so ambitious about climbing the football management career ladder that he was prepared to hold out until the perfect job came along; and Fratton Park was a very easy commute along the south coast from Poole.

  Any of these might have been enough in themselves, but there was one more factor which was the clincher. When Redknapp had been playing for the Seattle Sounders in the 1970s, one of the men with whom he had become friends was Milan Mandaric, the Serbian billionaire who had made his fortune in personal computers after arriving in the US with next to nothing, and then took over the San Jose Earthquakes football team. After leaving the US, Mandaric had moved back to Europe, buying football clubs first in Belgium and then in France, before settling in Britain and buying Portsmouth in 1999, at a time when the club was drowning in debt and had gone into administration. After first saving the club from going bust and then helping to save it from relegation, Mandaric had become the town’s local hero. And he was about to become Redknapp’s as well, by offering his old friend a job as director of football.

  In an interview for Les Roopanarine’s biography of Redknapp, Mandaric says that Redknapp’s response to being offered the job was, ‘By the way . . . can you tell me what the director of football job is?’ This was almost certainly a classic piece of Redknapp disingenuity, because he had every reason to know exactly what a director of football was, having seen – or been party to, depending on whose version you believe – Billy Bonds’ exit from West Ham some seven years earlier having been offered just that job. For men like Bonds and Redknapp, director of football was the ultimate non-job. There was no getting grubby with the players out on the training pitch, selecting the team or doing any of the fun, hands-on stuff they both enjoyed; the director of football was just another suit, a board member detached from the action whose main responsibility was identifying potential players to buy from other clubs.

  Redknapp had always accepted jobs that had been put his way by friends, but why did he accept one that he must have known he wasn’t going to enjoy that much? The money must have helped; it came out in the 2012 court case that Redknapp had originally agreed a salary of £1.75 million, a breathtakingly high salary for a job of that description in the First Division (now Championship) at the time. But even so, it didn’t make a lot of sense. Mandaric may have been extremely rich but he wasn’t a man to chuck money away on salaries unnecessarily, and Redknapp wasn’t so desperate he had to accept the first job he was offered.

  It makes rather more sense if you allow for the possibility that, right from the off, Redknapp was being lined up as a replacement for Graham Rix, Portsmouth’s then manager. Not that there was ever a formal agreement along those lines, more a mutual understanding – a nod and a wink. Mandaric was fundamentally a decent man and he didn’t want to get rid of Rix just like that, but his patience must have been running thin. He had invested millions into the club and had got precious little in return except league finishes of eighteenth and twentieth. Rix was a manager who inspired neither the team nor the fans. So a hedge bet on Redknapp must have seemed a good idea.

  ‘Harry is somebody who knows a lot of players and has a lot of character,’ said Mandaric. ‘I needed that at Portsmouth, because nothing was going in the right direction. That particular year was a breaking point for me. I didn’t have room for a manager at that time, but when I found Harry was available I called him immediately. I didn’t really know what he was going to do, I just yanked him in to be somebody I could lean on, if nothing more.’ Hmm. Perhaps.

  On taking up his new job, Redknapp made all the right noises about not wanting to be a threat to the manager. ‘It’s not easy for Graham and I to understand his situation,’ he said in a newspaper interview. ‘When someone tells you there will be a director of football coming in, who will suddenly be responsible for buying and selling players, you suddenly think, “Hang on, what’s going on?” But I had a meeting with Graham the other night and the one thing he knows is that I don’t want his job. I don’t want to be the manager.’

  How reassured Rix would have been by this is anyone’s guess. Under the circumstances, Redknapp could hardly have said anything else. ‘Well, you know how it is, lads. The chairman’s not too happy with the way the manager is performing at the moment . . .’ Even Redknapp wouldn’t have gone that far.

  If there had been an implicit understanding that the manager’s job was on offer if Rix didn’t shape up, then Redknapp would have been the man to read the signals. He had inherited David Webb’s job at Bournemouth within a year and Billy Bonds’ at West Ham within two, so he knew the form. Or at least the possibilities. And it’s equally hard to imagine Redknapp accepting the job of director of football at Portsmouth without having some kind of conversation with Mandaric along the lin
es of, ‘I don’t much fancy being stuck in a fucking office all day, Milan. It’s just not my style . . .’

  Maybe there were no prior deals – implied or otherwise – as Mandaric and Redknapp have since insisted, but within nine months of joining the club as director of football, he had his feet under Rix’s desk. And no one was surprised or upset by his appointment, as Redknapp had become a firm favourite with everyone in the town. It felt like a home from home for him, a piece of the East End transposed to the south coast, a working-class, one-club town.

  ‘He immediately seemed to “get” the club in a way other managers never had,’ says Julian Guyer, a Portsmouth season ticket holder and sports writer for Agence France-Presse. ‘He could remember when it had been a footballing force. I had started going to matches in the late seventies and, by then, Portsmouth was a fairly rubbish second or third division club and fans of my generation felt we had missed the boat . . . that we were condemned to listen to the old boys in the pub talking about the glory days and that my grandparents’ 1939 FA Cup Final programme was as close as we would ever get to a trophy. Redknapp filled that longing within the fans for the sleeping giant to awaken. None of us thought he was cut out to be a director of football. It was a job description that smacked of European sophistication – something neither Portsmouth nor Redknapp possessed. So we all thought he’d either leave quite quickly or become manager.’

  This assessment proved to have been spot on. Redknapp did admit to getting bored. ‘I miss picking the team and all the aggro that goes with it,’ he said. ‘The life I’ve got now is easier with no aggro or pressure but perhaps I thrive on them. It can get boring. If something comes along, then who knows?’