Harry's Games (12 page)

The only thing that does make sense is that Redknapp must have felt that he actually needed the £100,000 severance payment. He could make do without four months' wages when he still had the guarantee of a job and the promise of a regular salary in the future but, when the plug was pulled, he felt insecure. Like most of us, Redknapp appears to be happiest making the big gestures when life is sweet – or sweet enough – but when the pressure is on, self-interest kicks in.

Remember what it was like in the early 1990s. Property and share prices had crashed in the late 1980s and were still struggling to recover. If Redknapp's investment portfolio, such as it was, was in good shape it would have been a miracle. Remember also that Redknapp was probably not quite so confident about the future as his happy-go-lucky public persona might have suggested. He might have hoped – or indeed been promised – that his
old friend, Billy Bonds, would come running to his rescue to offer him the job of assistant manager at West Ham, but he couldn't be sure. People make a lot of promises in football and not all of them come true.

In May 1992, Redknapp was forty-five years old and hadn't exactly taken the football world by storm. He'd done relatively well at Bournemouth and had acquired a reputation both for lively one-liners in press conferences and as a manager whose teams played decent football and could pull off the odd remarkable result. But Bournemouth were pretty much in the same position in the Third Division as they had been when he had taken over. Redknapp had got them promoted and he had got them relegated, and they were now in a much worse financial state. This wasn't a CV to set the hearts of potential employers racing, and it must have occurred to Redknapp that it was just possible his time in football – the one thing he loved doing above all else – was coming to an end. The prospect of driving a yellow cab around Bournemouth must have been even less enticing than it had been ten years previously.

And that's almost certainly why he took the £100,000.

February 2012

In the week following Spurs' 5-0 victory over Newcastle, football's aristocracy queued up to pay homage to the England manager in waiting, who had gone to Dubai for four days' R&R with his wife to unwind from the stress of the trial. ‘There's only one candidate in my mind . . . and a lot of people's minds,' said Mark Hughes, manager of QPR. ‘They will get the man they want in the end.'

‘Harry has the experience, the knowledge and also the support of 90 per cent of the people in England because he is the one,' said Paolo Di Canio, who had played under Redknapp at West Ham and was now proving himself a more than capable manager at Swindon.

‘If Redknapp decides to stay and they give me a call, I wouldn't be available,' said Alan Pardew, Newcastle's manager and one of the few others notionally in the frame for the England job. ‘Six or seven years down the line, maybe I would be. I think Harry is the right age and has the right experience.'

The West Ham manager Sam Allardyce was similarly unequivocal. ‘It's obvious. He hasn't just been talked about now, he's been talked about since he started to become successful at
Tottenham. It's not unusual that Harry is the number-one choice in the country.'

Most emphatic of all in his endorsement was Sir Alex Ferguson, the most successful club manager in English football history. ‘There's no doubt Harry is the best man,' he said. ‘He's got the experience and that's important. He's got the personality, the knowledge of the game, and he's changed the fortunes of every club he's been at. It's the right choice.'

It had all the feel of a political party's leadership election, with the grandees having checked which way the wind was blowing and making sure their nomination for the clear front-runner was duly heard and noted. Even Gary Lineker, the BBC
Match of the Day
presenter, who usually grabbed the opportunity to sit on the fence on any given issue, came out in support of Redknapp. Get your favours in early; that way, there's a greater chance of them being returned some time later. If anyone had any doubts about Redknapp, they were keeping them to themselves. After all, why risk making a potentially extremely powerful enemy?

England international footballers were also rushing to get their congratulations in first. England striker Wayne Rooney tweeted, ‘Got to be English to replace him [Capello]. Harry Redknapp for me.' The Manchester United defender, Rio Ferdinand, was quick to agree. ‘Everyone wants Harry to be the next England manager,' he said – a tweet he would have some cause to regret several months down the line. And just to prove he had no hard feelings at being left on the substitute's bench by Redknapp for much of the season, Spurs striker Jermain Defoe also joined in the Redknapp love-in – although some people might have detected the faintest evidence of gritted teeth.

Redknapp took it all in his stride on his return from Dubai. There had been no official confirmation of the FA's thinking – or even any sign it was ‘thinking' at all, although that in itself was not unusual – about whether a shortlist had been drawn up for
the England job or if a time frame for the appointment had been decided. Redknapp abhors a vacuum and he happily filled in the blanks with the confidence of a gambling man who could spot an odds-on favourite when he saw one. No diplomatic silences for him.

First, he insisted he was committed to staying at Tottenham until the end of the season and urged the FA to delay making any announcement until the end of May. ‘I wouldn't want the players to think, “Is he going . . . is he staying?” I've got to be here until the end of the season, whatever happens. I owe that to Tottenham,' he said, apparently unaware of, or different to, the fact that just by making that statement he had guaranteed his players would spend the rest of the season thinking, ‘So he's going then.'

Redknapp then went on to talk through the complications arising from England's participation in Euro 2012 in Poland and the Ukraine that summer. Initially, he appeared to have ruled out one suggestion that had been floated of the FA making a short-term appointment just for the tournament. ‘If somebody takes it to the end of the Euros and it does not go well, where do you go then? Back to your club with your tail between your legs? I think it's a job that somebody has to do full-time. You have got to make a decision on somebody and give it to them.' Redknapp then raised the possibility of his becoming the England manager on a part-time, job-share basis for the duration of the Euros in the event that the FA wanted to delay making a permanent appointment until afterwards.

As with most of Redknapp's streams of consciousness, his was a decidedly disjointed narrative. Indeed, it left things even more vague and unsettled than if he had said nothing. He'd be staying at Spurs . . . he wouldn't be staying at Spurs; he'd accept the England job . . . but only on a full-time basis; he'd manage England for the Euros . . . he wouldn't manage England for the Euros; he'd consider a part-time job . . . he wouldn't consider a part-time job.

To add to the sense of the surreal, Redknapp was highlighting precisely the issues you would have expected a spokesman for the FA to be raising; and in the FA's silence, it was hard not to assume that Redknapp had become the de facto voice of the FA, that what he was saying had their approval.

Redknapp might have been a bit demob happy following his acquittal, but he was no mug. If he'd thought he was stepping out of line and jeopardizing his chances of getting the England job, he'd probably have shut up sharpish. It's stretching things to imagine Redknapp's press interviews had been Machiavellian brinkmanship to force the FA into giving him the job before they were ready, so the only logical conclusion was that, while no official approaches to Redknapp had been made, the unofficial channels were taking care of business to the satisfaction of both parties.

That's certainly the way the football press seemed to read the situation. There were a few highly speculative reports that the FA were considering Barcelona's Pep Guardiola and Real Madrid's José Mourinho – they should have been so lucky – but the overwhelming consensus was that the next manager had to be English. And, when the names of Roy Hodgson, Sam Allardyce and Alan Pardew – all of whom were more-than-competent club managers but hardly men who gave the impression they could inspire a team to take on the Spanish or the Germans – were offered as possibilities, that manager had to be Harry Redknapp.

Many papers went so far as to report confidently that the FA were prepared to wait until the end of the season before making an approach for Redknapp. The only uncertainty was the exact amount of compensation the Spurs chairman, Daniel Levy, would be able to extract from the FA for allowing Redknapp to break his contract. Spurs had paid Portsmouth £5 million to secure Redknapp's services in 2008 and the club would definitely want that back, and Levy would almost certainly demand every
penny of the fifteen months left on Redknapp's Spurs contract, so a figure of £8–£10 million seemed likely. A significant amount of money, but not one that anybody suggested might be a deal breaker.

What nobody gave any real thought to was whether Redknapp actually wanted the job. After the trial had finished, Redknapp had made a lot of the right noises: ‘Who wouldn't want to be England manager if everyone thinks you can do a good job?' But he had also raised one very obvious drawback. ‘Everyone who's had the job has been slaughtered at some stage, haven't they? Terry [Venables] is the only one since Alf [Ramsey] who hasn't had any grief. We've seen Ron Greenwood, a great manager of mine at West Ham, and Bobby Robson, a fantastic football man, get terrible stick as England manager.' He might just as well have added Kevin Keegan, Steve McClaren, Glenn Hoddle and Graham Taylor to that list.

Neither was he under any illusions about the difficulties that lay in wait after Euro 2012. ‘Going to the next World Cup in Brazil [in 2014] isn't going to be easy, is it? Not even for Spain, as good as the reigning world champions are,' he added. ‘If one of the South American teams doesn't win that World Cup, it would be a shock, wouldn't it? Even so, you look at all that, then realize that someone has to manage England. As an eternal optimist, why wouldn't you think, “I can do that”?'

Because the England team wasn't very good might have been one answer. The so-called golden generation of Rooney, Gerrard, Lampard and Ferdinand hadn't exactly covered itself in glory at the previous few international tournaments, and now that most of them were coming to the end of their careers there weren't any obvious superstars-in-waiting to take their place. So there was no expectation of improvement. Misplaced optimism – the belief that you are the one who can overturn historical inevitability – is a necessary part of any manager's make-up, so you can
understand Redknapp's qualified bullishness. But there was still something crucial missing. Where was the gung-ho ‘This is the job I've always wanted since I first started out in management' that was supposed to be seared on the tongue of every new England manager?

‘There's an assumption that often comes with any high-profile job that the person in line for it must really want it,' says Martin Perry, a sports psychologist and confidence coach who has worked with a great many football managers and players. ‘The ambition for a particular job is seen as one of the requirements for getting it. We don't always like obvious signs of ambition, but we have come to expect them. The idea that someone might just slip into an important job almost by accident and without having dedicated themselves to getting it just doesn't feel right.

‘This expectation is passed on to, and understood by, every candidate. It feels wrong to be half-hearted or ambivalent about a job you know thousands of others would dearly love to have. You feel unworthy, as if you have let yourself and everyone else down, by not being utterly focused and desperate for it. So there can be a temptation to pretend that you care more than you do. Only the individual himself can truly know just how much he wants something, but asking yourself just how ambitious you think Redknapp really was for the England job seems to me to be a very interesting question to start with.'

It was a question almost no one had given any proper consideration, having been swept along by the mantra that being England manager was a job to which any right-thinking English football manager must have automatically aspired. It was also one that drew out some unexpected answers. Redknapp was forty-five when he resigned/was forced out as Bournemouth manager, the age by which many men will have hoped already to have made their mark. He had also already turned down supposed offers to join West Ham, Aston Villa and Stoke. He then went on to West
Ham as number two to Billy Bonds before inheriting the top job at Upton Park a couple of years later. After that, he returned to the south coast to manage Portsmouth and Southampton, both clubs – like West Ham – with no great expectations of instant success. He had turned down the job at Newcastle and the Spurs job had also rather landed in his lap. He hadn't been actively seeking it and a significant factor in his accepting it seemed to be that London was close enough to his home in Sandbanks for him to commute daily.

This may have been the career of a hard-working and talented manager, but it wasn't one driven by the vaulting ambition of a Fergie, a Wenger or a Mourinho, the alpha males of football for whom anything less than 110 per cent, heart-on-sleeve commitment to being the best is an intolerable admission of weakness. Redknapp's ambition appears to fall somewhere well short of theirs, somewhere comfortably and recognizably classifiable within the well-adjusted band of the spectrum. He wants to do well, he's prepared to work hard to succeed, but the bottom line is that there are other things that mean more to him than football. Redknapp's main aim had always been to make a living out of football, to earn enough money to provide for his family while doing something he enjoyed.