Harry's Games (8 page)

But loyalty to all his players? That seemed a bit of a stretch. Just take Peter Crouch, a player whom he had bought and sold on several occasions while manager of both Portsmouth and Spurs. The transfers might have been in the best interests of the clubs
– and they were certainly on at least one occasion in the best interests of Redknapp – but were they always in the best interests of the player? Crouch had definitely appeared less than thrilled at being transferred to Stoke from Spurs at the beginning of the 2011/12 season.

Every footballer enters the game knowing he is a tradeable commodity, so perhaps sentiment shouldn't come into it. In which case, why does football so often still insist on priding itself on old-fashioned values, such as loyalty? Most modern players have as little sense of loyalty to the club they are playing for as the club does to them. Loyalty is strictly a market transaction that holds good for as long as it financially suits both parties, as Redknapp himself made clear when he said of Crouch, ‘I've done all right by the boy. I've made him a lot of money.' And so he had, as Crouch had made millions in signing-on fees and contract renegotiations. But did it count as loyalty? For Redknapp – possibly even for Crouch, too – the answer was yes. Yet it wasn't necessarily a description of loyalty anyone outside football would recognize.

His friendships also appeared more complex than the happygo-lucky surface caricature with which the court and the media were more often than not willing to run. Sitting next to each other throughout the trial, Redknapp and Mandaric looked like old muckers; they smiled at one another, chatted during the lulls and, from time to time, openly joshed with one another. Yet when I thought about it later, I had no idea if the two of them really were still good friends, or whether they would still have exchanged two words with one another if they hadn't found themselves contesting the same charges.

That they had once been extremely close was indisputable, as was the fact that there had been a significant breakdown in their relationship when Redknapp walked out of Portsmouth to take over as manager of their arch-rivals, Southampton. By any reading of the situation, that move hadn't just been ‘one of those
things', the right job coming up at the wrong time. It had been a very definite ‘Fuck you' to his old employer. But the cause of the deterioration in their relationship remained a mystery. Spectators wondered whether it been Mandaric or Redknapp who had initiated the ill feeling, whether it was a row about football or a clash of personalities, and how it was possible for them to patch things up less than a year later when Redknapp returned to Portsmouth. Had that been a marriage of convenience or a genuine rapprochement?

So the trial may have shone some light on the Redknapp enigma; many people might still think he was a bit of a geezer, but no one could now say he was a dodgy geezer. But much about the man remained fascinatingly opaque, not least the fact that he had somehow emerged from a two-and-a-half-week ordeal, in which his personal and business life had been exposed and sometimes ridiculed, even more of a national treasure than he had been before.

Within hours of the ‘not guilty' verdicts, the Redknapp story had moved to yet another level, as the news broke that the England manager, Fabio Capello, had resigned. This didn't come as a total surprise. There had been rumours among the football writers at the trial that Capello's resignation was on the cards, ever since the FA had sacked John Terry as England captain the previous week, while his court case for allegedly racially abusing the QPR defender, Anton Ferdinand, was still pending. It wasn't the sacking of Terry that had annoyed Capello – that had seemed the only reasonable response given the circumstances and the seriousness of the allegations – so much as the fact that he hadn't even been consulted about the decision.

Capello's pique was totally understandable; it was almost as though the FA had gone out of its way to insult him so that he had no choice but to walk out of the job. There hadn't been much
love lost between the FA and Capello for some months; Capello had already made it clear he intended to quit after the Euro 2012 finals. He had never shown much enthusiasm for England or anything English, and he couldn't wait to return to live full-time in Italy.

It was the timing of the resignation that felt significant. Having danced gently around each other for some time in an uneasy truce designed to limit the damage to the England squad until the Euros were played out, it felt as if the FA had seen which way the wind was blowing at the Redknapp trial and had decided to force the issue. At least that's the way Capello looked to have read the situation, as he had announced his resignation within hours of the one obstacle to Redknapp's appointment as his replacement being removed. If it was all just one big coincidence, then it was the sort of coincidence that only happened to Redknapp. His legend was growing by the minute.

‘You must be feeling gutted,' said an email from one of my editors at work. ‘No sooner has Harry been cleared than he's going to leave [Spurs] and be England manager.' As it happened, I wasn't that gutted since it didn't feel as if very much had actually changed. Capello's departure may have been brought forward but it had been an open secret for about a year that neither Capello nor the FA had any desire to renew his contracts after the Euros and, like most other fans, I had always assumed Redknapp would walk into the England job during the summer. Just as it had never occurred to me that he would still be Tottenham manager the following season, so I also didn't believe Redknapp would walk out on the club mid-season. So while the Capello–Redknapp story made both the front and back pages of the following day's papers, it felt pretty much like business as normal at White Hart Lane.

But it did make me think. How, when and why had the ‘Harry for England' bandwagon become so loud and insistent that
everyone had come to accept it as a sacred truth? There wasn't a doubt in my mind that Redknapp would get the job; not because he was so obviously a brilliant manager and the right man for the job – although, at the time, I didn't think he was the right man, as I thought he could do better than wasting his time managing a second-rate international side – but because it seemed to be as much of an historic inevitability as a royal succession.

A Redknapp sceptic later claimed that a Jamie Redknapp column in the
Sun
several years earlier, following another disappointing England performance under Capello, was the original source of the ‘Harry for England' campaign. Even if this claim was true – it couldn't really be verified one way or the other – it didn't feel right. This was partly because Jamie has written a lot of stuff in his
Sun
columns over the years to which no one has paid any attention, so there was no reason why the collective subconscious of England's footerati should have latched on to this one in particular. But it was also because ‘Harry for England' had overtones of a Shakespearean rallying cry that had been lying dormant for centuries, awaiting the man who would rise up and lead us to the promised land of football glory – in the Ukraine or Brazil, if not at Agincourt.

So why Redknapp? His Englishness was certainly part of it. The country – and, in particular, its football writers – had become fed up with a foreign manager being in charge of the national side. Sven-Göran Eriksson had been good for a few off-pitch stories but had been fairly dull on it, and Fabio Capello had never even bothered to learn the language, which wasn't necessarily a problem for the players but was a major no-no for reporters expecting good quotes and the inside track. So Sven and Fabio had both been judged useless and had to go. In football terms alone, the calls for their removal had been quite harsh; both managers had steered England to the finals of every major competition they had played, and their failure to progress beyond the
quarter-finals of any tournament had more to do with the ability of their raw material than with managerial lapses. Any sensible FIFA list would have put England somewhere between sixth and tenth in the world rankings, so the team had merely been playing to its potential.

But fairness has sod all to do with football, especially the England team, where all perspective is forgotten the moment any tournament starts, as many pundits invariably talk up the squad to make us favourites to win. Or, if they are being exceptionally impartial, second favourites. So when the team is knocked out early – as it almost always is – the inquests are invariably bloody. And Sven and Fabio had both long since run out of white knights to champion them.

What was needed, according to the general will – or what approximated to it – was an English manager to lead the England side. Poncy foreigners in smart suits might be good at managing Premiership clubs because they all had loads of foreigners in their squads anyway. But only an Englishman could really get a team of Englishmen to play like Spaniards. How quickly the legacy of Graham Taylor and Steve McClaren had been forgotten.

Redknapp was an English manager through and through, one of barely a handful in the Premiership, among a disproportionate number of Scots. He was also a football writer's dream. Always ready to chat, good company and with a natural gift for the one-liner, he could be relied on for regular stories and brilliant headlines. So he naturally became the runaway favourite – make that certainty – to replace Capello even before he had gone.

The BBC sports reporter, Gary Richardson, did a short, telling interview with Redknapp's former West Ham colleague Geoff Hurst on the morning after Capello's resignation, with both men taking it as read that Redknapp would be the next England manager.

‘So tell me, Sir Geoff,' said Richardson, ‘when you played
alongside Harry, was there anything about him that made you think he would become a brilliant football manager?'

It was the perfect set-up question, one that in sports interviews invariably invited the full benefit of hindsight to be brought into play with a ‘Yes, Gary, there was something about him . . . he was always thinking tactically, that made me think this bloke could go all the way as a manager.' Only Hurst didn't say that at all. What he said was, ‘You know what, Gary . . . out of all the footballers I played with back then, Harry was the one I would have said was least likely to go into management. He really didn't seem to have any interest in it whatsoever.'

Richardson laughed, as did a million or so listeners, no doubt. It was funny. And very Harry Redknapp. How much more exciting and entertaining was it to have a manager who had never even thought about being a manager, than some geeky, four-eyed European with a degree in chalkboard 4-4-2 and a charisma bypass? No one really cared that Redknapp's twenty-five-year career in football management had hardly been decked out with trophies. Just one FA Cup, a Champions League quarter-final and a couple of promotions – with a relegation thrown in for good measure. All these achievements weren't so much water under the bridge as entirely irrelevant; Redknapp understood footballers. That's all that mattered. He could get under their skin. What he may have lacked in tactical nous, he more than made up for in powers of motivation. Above all, his teams played an attacking, attractive game. With Redknapp at the helm, English football wouldn't just put the smile back on its face on the pitch – the smiles would be seen on the terraces, too, along with a few belly laughs.

There were also laughs on the day before Spurs played Newcastle at Redknapp's first press conference back at White Hart Lane after the trial. When Redknapp was asked the inevitable, ‘Are you going to take the England job?' he straight-batted in typically dry style. ‘I know what you lot are like,' he said, ‘so
I'm keeping my mouth shut, 'cos if I'm not careful I'll go and say something that loses me the job before I've even got it.' You didn't need to read between the lines to see it wasn't just the rest of England who thought he'd get the job. It was Redknapp, too.

If the press conference had felt like a celebration, the Newcastle game was as good as the coronation. Newcastle had been one of the surprise form teams of the Premiership and nobody had found them easy. But Redknapp's Spurs simply took them apart 5-0 with one of the exhibitions of the season. The passing was slick, the pace devastating and the finishing clinical.

Everything Redknapp touched turned to gold. Many pundits had predicted that the purchase of Louis Saha would be waste a of money as he had failed and got bored at every other club. Saha, though, looked strong and keen and had scored twice on his home debut. Arsenal fans had said Emmanuel Adebayor would go AWOL before Christmas; in mid-February, he scored one and created four other goals. Intermittently, throughout the game, the fans would chant, ‘
We want you to stay . . . we want you to stay! Oh Harry Redknapp, we want you to stay
. . .' and each time Redknapp would get up from the dugout and wave to his people.

On the way out of the ground, I said to Mat Snow, the former editor of
Four Four Two
magazine, ‘I thought I'd seen it all with the Inter Milan game last season, but this was even better. I had no idea we could play so well.'

‘Me neither,' he replied. ‘And I doubt the team did either.'

As an audition for the England job – if one was still needed – it had been nigh on perfect. There can't have been anyone who watched that game live, or saw the highlights later on television, who didn't believe that Redknapp was the England manager-elect. Even Alan Hansen, the
Match of the Day
pundit who would generally rather slit his own wrists than say something complimentary about Spurs, was drooling over Redknapp.

1981

Harry Redknapp and Bobby Moore had left Oxford United within a year. Their time in charge hadn't been a great success; the team had underperformed, the club's wage bill had rocketed and almost everyone involved was miserable. Moore might have been driving a Daimler, but Redknapp had been running on empty, working out of a temporary Portakabin office. He made no secret of not missing the daily commute, but he was short of both a job and money. In the sanitized version of Redknapp's life story, the transition from Oxford back to Bournemouth was seamless.