Always Managing: My Autobiography (47 page)

He was always talking about how unfortunate he was on this one, or what bad luck I’d had with that tip he’d given me. One day, a horse I part-owned was in one of his races and he said if it was going well, he’d ride to deliberately try to block off any challengers. That got beat as well. When I switched clubs, however, Lee’s allegiance to Tottenham turned up not to be as strong as he made out. Now he was going everywhere with Queens Park Rangers. On the last day of the season, he came up to Liverpool as my guest, sat in the directors’ box at Anfield and, at the end of the game, pleaded poverty again. ‘I’m riding down at Newbury tomorrow, Harry, and I’m not sure I’ve got the train fare.’ He even cadged a lift to the station out of me, which took me completely
in the opposite direction to home. I just felt sorry for him. He was always on his own, and he obviously wasn’t making much money, despite being a top apprentice. And then I got a phone call from Willie McKay.

‘Do you still speak to Lee Topliss, Harry?’ asked Willie.

‘Yeah, I do,’ I said. ‘He’s always calling me, more losers than winners, mind you, but, yeah, I speak to him two or three times a week. He says he’s working with some two-year-olds that are going to be fantastic.’

‘Right,’ Willie continued. ‘Well, I think I know why his information isn’t so clever.’

‘Why?’

‘He’s not Lee Topliss. He’s a potman at a boozer in Newmarket. He picks up glasses – he’s not a fucking jockey.’

Three years he’d had me. The best seat in the house, good restaurants, lifts here there and everywhere – and heaven knows what in hand-outs. And it was a sheer fluke that Willie found out the truth. Were it not for a chance meeting at Doncaster, he could still have been taking me for a ride. A while ago, ‘Lee’ had called me and said he had just ridden one beaten by a short head at Doncaster. Another hard-luck tale. We were chatting and I mentioned that Willie had a box there. I said I would ring him and see if he could invite Lee up. When Willie called, Lee said he was just leaving for Newmarket because he had to be up early on the gallops. There was one going that night, however, that was well fancied. He gave Willie the tip and, lo and behold, it won. The next time Willie was at Doncaster, he saw Lee Topliss’s name on the card and wanted to thank him – but when he saw him ride around in the parade ring, it didn’t look like Lee Topliss. Taller for a start. Willie put it down to
the protective racing helmet he was wearing and thought no more of it. Then, a few races later, he saw Lee with his back to him in the paddock. Now was the chance to say something. He tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Hello, Lee, I’m Willie, Harry’s mate, thanks for the horse you gave me, good lad, it ran well,’ he said. The jockey stared at Willie as if he was mad. ‘I’m Harry Redknapp’s friend,’ Willie repeated. ‘If you ever need anything, give me a ring.’ Again, he was staring back at Willie as if he had landed from the moon. Then Willie began to study the lad’s face. It wasn’t the Lee Topliss he knew, the one he had met with me at Les Ambassadeurs. And then Willie started making enquiries.

I thought I was streetwise. This guy was a different class. I’m told when Istabraq won the Champion Hurdle, ‘Lee Topliss’ led the horse into the winner’s enclosure waving the Irish tricolour. Everyone thought he was part of the trainer Aidan O’Brien’s stable, but it turned out they didn’t have a clue who he was either. He was a conman preying on the racing scene, and the little Irish rogue had us all. I’m told he was working the same racket with Glen Johnson, plus a couple of football agents and other managers. I can imagine him now, in his room full of signed shirts – Robbie Keane, Aaron Lennon, Gareth Bale, all collected through me. So I’d got sacked by Tottenham, relegated with QPR, my mate of three years turned out to be an Irish crook, and my last memory was of him disappearing off to Lime Street station with another £150 of my money. Oh yes, it was one hell of a year.

There is a story that, in many ways, encapsulates my thoughts on management. It was told to me by Graeme Souness. He was captain of Liverpool when they played the 1984 European Cup final against AS Roma in the Olympic Stadium, Rome. About ten days before the match, Graeme went to see Joe Fagan, the manager, with a message from the players. ‘Joe,’ he said. ‘It’s been a long season. The players feel washed out – they’d like to go away for a few days before the final, to recharge their batteries.’ Joe didn’t have a problem with it, so off they went to Ayia Napa in Cyprus. It was a real jolly boys’ outing. Graeme said they were lying in the sun, on the booze all day, back to the hotel, quick change, then out every night, staggering home along the beach at all hours in the morning. David Fairclough, the pale-skinned, red-headed striker known as Super Sub, didn’t put any sun scream on and got burnt to a crisp, so badly that he blistered. It was mayhem. They flew back on the Sunday, and the next day left for Rome, where AS Roma had been living at altitude, coming down only to train at precisely 8 p.m. each night, which was the time the match would kick-off.

Graeme said that when Liverpool arrived on that Monday it was pouring with rain, so they were ordered not to go anywhere near the stadium pitch. There was an alternate training facility, but Fagan thought it was too far away. ‘Come on, we’ll go to the park,’ he said. They walked to an open space up the road from their hotel, put some training gear down as goalposts and played a nine-a-side game. By the end there were loads of fans watching them, because word had got around. Graeme said they all knew it was a crap practice session, but they didn’t care. The following day, more rain, so it was back to the park again. Meanwhile, AS Roma were bobbing up and down the mountain, back and forth to their own training camp in order to be super-fit for the biggest match in the club’s history. On the day of the game, Liverpool got to the stadium and went out to look at the pitch. Joe Fagan pulled Sammy Lee, their tigerish little midfield player, to one side. ‘Sammy, Sammy, come here,’ he said. ‘I want you to do a man-for-man job on their playmaker.’

‘What number is that, Joe?’ asked Sammy.

‘I don’t know,’ Joe replied. ‘You’ll see him when you’re out there – he’s the one that keeps getting the ball. Stick with him, son.’

Half the players were up in arms because they thought it was a negative idea, but Joe knew his football and was insistent. ‘He’s a good player, so Sammy should mark him.’ All sorted. Right – Liverpool went out and beat AS Roma, at their own place, on penalties, to become champions of Europe. The moral to the story: if you’ve got good players who understand the game, managing can be easy. It’s the rest of us that get driven mad by it.

As I said already, I had a heart scare a few years ago. It was towards the end of October, 2011, in my last season at Tottenham.
A very stressful time. My court case had been dragging on for years and, when I finally got a trial date, it was delayed. The case against Milan Mandaric and Peter Storrie was proceeding first, before mine, and they sat through five weeks of a six-week trial only for the judge to be taken ill. It was put back a week, and then two weeks, but the illness was serious and the trial was put off completely and had to start all over again. So my appearance was held back, also, and maybe all the worry and the drawn-out process got to me. It just seemed to be dragging on and on. Jamie came over to visit one morning and we went to Parkstone Golf Club to play a few holes. I walked the first and couldn’t breathe, I was absolutely gone. I didn’t feel good, and Jamie said I looked grey and was breathing in a peculiar way. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ he asked. I wasn’t – I was wiped out. We finished the hole and headed back in – Jamie carried my clubs all the way because I had no energy at all. He wanted me to go to a doctor’s but I said to wait until the morning. We’ve got a treadmill at home which I often use for running, but after about five minutes the next day I had to stop that, too. I was knackered. I knew something was wrong. I saw our doctor at Tottenham and he took me straight to Whipps Cross hospital in Waltham Forest, east London. I saw a specialist and the diagnosis must have been quite dicey, because they took me in that night at the London Independent hospital for a coronary angioplasty. It isn’t major heart surgery, but they have to put stents in to help unblock coronary arteries. After that, I was fine, but I don’t think the stress helped – the court case more than the football. There was so much uncertainty about whether and when the trial would go ahead – in the end it just got to me.

I felt a lot better for the operation. I have to go back every six months and have a check-up, but I can’t say I really think about it. As far as I’m concerned I’m OK now, I’m better. I might have been in trouble had I not been so active, but we caught the problem early and now I feel good. Even those times when I don’t, I know I can’t change my ways at my age. I can’t tell myself, ‘Don’t get het up.’ I couldn’t do the job any other way. I went to see the specialist last season, when QPR were right in the doldrums, and he told me I was fine to carry on. He said if he was worried, he would tell me to stop – and I think if I can handle the aggravation with QPR last season, I can handle anything.

I’m not moaning. I know what a lot of the public think: ‘Managers earn a lot of money, the country is in a recession, people like you wouldn’t know what stress is.’ I understand that, but I’m not talking about financial stress. I’m not comparing my life to a single mum trying to feed her kids, or low-income families living on the breadline. I didn’t come from a wealthy household. I know what that stress is. This is a different type of pressure – I am representing people who love their team. There are the owners who are investing money, but also the fans, and, as a manager, you are in charge of their happiness. When you lose, it feels like you have let them down. So you take it all on your shoulders, and it isn’t a lot of fun in a season that doesn’t have too many good days. That’s when you get low and I think it starts to affect your health. But you do it because you love it. Sam Allardyce, Sir Alex Ferguson, they’ve all had minor heart problems – but it didn’t stop them.

Do I worry about the affect my lifestyle has on Sandra? Of course I do. She’s very placid, very laid back; but, no, it isn’t good for her to see me at a low ebb. Obviously, it concerns her. I’d love
to be one of those guys who can get home after a hard day’s work and go out to a nice restaurant with his wife, but Sandra knows it takes me a day or two to recover if we lose. She’ll cook me a bit of pasta, maybe open a bottle of wine, but it isn’t the same. My head’s gone and I’m still buzzing. Sunday, I’m just about getting over it – and then Monday I’m back to work and it starts all over again.

Sandra sees the side of me that others don’t. People have opinions about you, write books about you, presume all kinds of knowledge, speak to people about you that have never met you – there is a whole conversation going on when a person is in the public eye. Yet all of these people, these experts, they don’t see how you live your life, who or what you care about, do they? But when you live with someone, they know.

Sandra’s wonderful. She has never really put any pressure on me to stop, has always left it up to me. She knows I’d get bored, probably, once the summer golf season has ended. I’ve got nothing else to do, really. I’m useless round the house, I’m not a gardener. I love looking at the garden, love to see it looking nice, but I wouldn’t know one flower from another. I suppose Sandra thinks, without football, I would just sit there and fade away. I’m not even one for going on the television and talking about the game, really. I did
Match of the Day
when I was out of work, after Tottenham, but it was a long slog. Getting up to Manchester, sitting around there all day in those new BBC buildings – very soulless compared to the old place. I thought I just wasted my time, really, and then I got back to Bournemouth at 4 a.m. It wasn’t something I would look forward to doing again.

Pat, Sandra’s sister, died on 24 April 2008, and that was a sad and sobering moment for all of us, not least me. I had known Pat
almost as long as I had known Sandra, because of her relationship with Frank Lampard, my best friend at West Ham, and that probably changed how I viewed my life as a football manager. After that, I don’t think there was ever really a chance of me taking a job that kept me away from Sandra all week. She would have moved anywhere at first, obviously, but that was many years ago, and now we are settled and like where we are. It’s home for us. The grandkids are down here, so moving away and staying up north wouldn’t work for me at all. If I can get home, I do. If that means getting up early to go back to work, I set the alarm. The number of clubs I have managed on the south coast gives something of a clue to the way I feel, and the swiftness of Pat Lampard’s passing probably brought it home. The time I spend with Sandra is so precious. Pat died of pneumonia, ten days after she was admitted to hospital – it was so unexpected and sudden. One moment she was here, the next gone. It was terribly traumatic for Sandra. I don’t think a day went by when she didn’t speak to her sister. I think it brought home how much I relied on her, too. Seeing Frank without Pat made me think what I would be like on my own. Useless, really. She has waited on me hand and foot for years. I wouldn’t have a clue what to do without her support. It is certainly not a dull life being the wife a football manager, yet she has ridden through it all – the grief, the abuse from the boatmen coming past our garden, the trial, the highs and the lows. And she’s so quiet, so shy, I don’t think I have any idea how difficult it must have been. How many times must she have thought, ‘What have I got myself into here?’ That’s why I get home at every opportunity. I owe her. I owe them – my sons and their wives, and our lovely grandchildren. The little boys are just starting to play football now.
I hope I can be as much of a friend and a fan to them, as my dad was to Jamie throughout his career.