Harry's Games (22 page)

Redknapp characteristically refused to see his move to Southampton as a betrayal. ‘I don't owe anybody anything,' he said. ‘It's my life and this is a great opportunity for me. I left Portsmouth halfway up the Premiership table and circumstances at the club had changed. It did not suit the way I wanted to work and I decided to move on. A new chap was director of football which wasn't a situation that suited me. I've sat at home for the last two weeks watching football on TV and didn't enjoy it. I got a phone call late on Monday from the chairman and it was too good a chance to refuse.'

Apart from being an outright contradiction – something Harry-watchers had grown used to even then – of his previous statements that the appointment of Zajec had played no part in his resignation from Portsmouth, it wasn't quite true that Redknapp had spent two weeks just sitting at home. He had gone out of his way to put himself in the frame for a possible move to Wolves and had gigs lined up as one of Sky Sports match pundits, so he wasn't short of options. And yet he took on the Southampton job, even though he must have known he didn't have the full backing of Southampton chairman Rupert Lowe. ‘He wasn't really my choice,' Lowe told Les Roopanarine, ‘but the board wouldn't support my wish to reappoint Glenn Hoddle. I probably should
have resigned when the board wouldn't do what I wanted to do with Hoddle but, being a team player, I followed the board's wish and ended up working with Redknapp – much to my regret.'

Once Mandaric had pointedly given interviews after Redknapp's departure saying how good it was to be now working with a man, Zajec, whom he thought he could trust, Redknapp would have had to have had the self-denial of a Buddhist monk not to have wanted to stick two fingers up to his former club, and taking the Southampton job would have been the ultimate in the two-fingered salute. Or he might simply have had the lack of awareness of a complete fool. As we've seen, though, Redknapp is neither a saint nor a fool. But there were also other attractions to Southampton – not least its geography. The two towns weren't merely close to one another, they were also close to his home in Sandbanks. Taking the job would cause no major upheavals for him.

A further reason for the rivalry between the two clubs was that, for all the perceived class and cultural differences between them, they actually had a similar profile. They were both clubs – despite Southampton's FA Cup Final defeat to Arsenal the previous year – that had experienced little by way of success for some time, clubs that were visibly shrinking in front of their supporters' eyes, clubs of which little was expected. Much the same could also have been said of West Ham and Bournemouth when Redknapp joined them. So Southampton would have been a club at which he instinctively felt at home, one at which he understood he could be a big fish in a little pond, where his every move wouldn't be under the microscope and relatively small successes would bring him big headlines and the gratitude of the fans.

In his first game in charge, Southampton contrived to squander a two-goal lead and Redknapp was not slow to do what he usually did when he arrived at any new club – expressing grave reservations about the squad he had inherited. Lowering people's
expectations is never a bad way forward, and proposing his familiar solution could do no harm. ‘For us to stay up now would be a terrific achievement,' he said. ‘It's the toughest job I've taken on. I will have to try to beg, steal and borrow a few players because this group would not even get us out of the Championship. Somehow, this club has accumulated a lot of players but we are short of quality. I can't make them better. I haven't got a magic wand. We need to get some players with a bit of character who might just turn us around.' And in a warning shot to his new chairman, he added that Lowe had to accept a bit of a blow to his wallet. ‘He has got to know that it's no good saying we have got all these good players, because they're second from bottom. We need to strengthen somehow.'

If Redknapp had imagined Lowe would be an easy touch, a posh public schoolboy with more money than sense, then he had misjudged his target, as for the first time in his managerial career he came up against a chairman who didn't pull out his cheque book every time he said ‘Open Sesame'. Lowe was a man who took the club's finances as seriously as its football and Redknapp was also expected to balance the books. Having declared he was desperate to retain striker James Beattie, Redknapp discovered he was obliged to sell him when Everton offered an irresistible £6 million and, for once, Redknapp's transfer radar was seriously off with the players he was allowed to bring into the club with some of the proceeds. Henri Camara and Nigel Quashie couldn't stop the rot, and buying his own son, Jamie, from Spurs was an unrewarded act of faith as his knees were almost completely knackered by that stage of his career.

But his worst signings were at the back. It had been Southampton's defence that had been mainly responsible for the position the club was in, and plugging the holes by bringing in Calum Davenport and Oliver Bernard looked inadequate even to the most optimistic Saints supporter.

There were a few wins – most notably an FA Cup win against Portsmouth in which Peter Crouch scored a last-minute winner from the penalty spot that prompted a ‘I thought he was going to head it' Harryism in the post-match press conference. But in the league, Southampton were equally prone to conceding last-minute goals and were relegated on the last day of the season. There had been speculation that Redknapp would call it quits after Saints dropped into the Championship but, a week later, after talking to Lowe, he announced he would be staying on. ‘We had a good meeting,' Redknapp, said. ‘It was nice and positive. When I walked off the pitch on Sunday, the fans were fantastic and there was no doubt that I wanted to stay at the club.'

Some of the fans had misgivings, though. ‘I'd been thrilled when Harry arrived at the club,' says Jason Rodrigues, a lifelong Southampton supporter. ‘Paul Sturrock and Steve Wigley had been a disaster and Harry had done well with Portsmouth. The fact that we had annoyed everyone in Portsmouth by taking their manager was just an added bonus. The line that Harry kept feeding us was that we would have stayed up if the chairman had allowed him to bring in more players. And there was some truth in that, but he totally ignored the fact that the squad of players we did have – among them Peter Crouch, Kevin Phillips, Graeme Le Saux, Antti Niemi and Anders Svensson – should have been good enough to stay up regardless.

‘Harry came billed as a great motivator but he couldn't get the side to play for him and we never seemed able to hang on to winning positions. Nor did he seem to have the tactical nous to think round problems and change the shape of the team when the formation he was playing wasn't working and he never got to grips with the team's defensive frailties. It was fair enough for Harry's Plan A to be to buy new players but, when that wasn't on offer, he should have been able to adapt and come up with a Plan B. But he couldn't and he didn't. It wouldn't be fair to blame
him entirely for us going down, but seeing as he would have been happy to take most of the credit if we had stayed up, he has to shoulder some of the responsibility.'

There was further trouble looming when Lowe appointed the English World Cup-winning rugby coach, Sir Clive Woodward, as the club's performance director. With no experience of professional football, Woodward was a strange choice – the notion that all performance skills were completely transferrable between rugby and football was completely untested – but Redknapp instinctively perceived him as a threat, in much the same way as he had Zajec at Portsmouth the previous year, though with far less reason. Lowe had been openly toying with the idea of bringing Woodward into the club long before Redknapp's arrival, so he couldn't have been taken by surprise and the demarcation lines should have been clear.

So his reflex response suggests there is something more to Redknapp's difficulties with working with people imposed on him than mere – sometimes justified – paranoia or a guilty conscience. It also indicates an inability to work with people who might disagree with him. When Redknapp had joined Southampton, he had brought with him Jim Smith and Kevin Bond, both solid journeymen who understood football but could be relied on not to question his judgement. In football, a manager surrounding himself with yes-men is often mistaken for a sign of strength, when it's actually a sign of weakness. One of the reasons Redknapp had no Plan B for the latter half of the season in which Southampton was relegated is because there was no one else at the club capable of working it out for themselves or who dared tell him what it was. A manager can't be expected to think of all the solutions, so he needs to have assistants who can see things he can't. Throughout his career, Redknapp has always been deeply suspicious of people with a different world view; more often than not, this insecurity has not cost his teams that much. At Southampton, it did.

By the end of September 2005, relations were so bad between Redknapp and Woodward that the club had to call a press conference to let everyone know how well they were getting on together. ‘I have no problem with Clive . . . we get on fine,' said Redknapp. ‘We want to clear the air once and for all. There's been so much written about how we don't get on. There has not been one problem. Clive does not come in and tell me, “You should do that . . . you should play him . . .” and everyone knows I wouldn't stand for that. Clive is here to help with the youngsters and does not interfere with me in any way. Clive is a high-profile person so we know you are always going to get these stories. He's given up rugby and wants to try his hand at football.'

No one was fooled. By saying that Woodward had ‘given up' rugby and was ‘trying his hand' at football, Redknapp could hardly have been more dismissive of Woodward and, from then on, everyone at Southampton was counting the days until he made his excuses and left. Even so, only Redknapp could have come up with a return to Portsmouth. And only Redknapp could have got away with it.

Having come unstuck with Alain Perrin, a Frenchman who had failed to live up to his billing as the new Arsène Wenger, Milan Mandaric was in the market for a new manager and appeared mysteriously to remember how much he missed Redknapp after bumping into his brother-in-law, Frank Lampard senior, in a restaurant. ‘I can't encourage Harry on anything because I am not allowed to talk to him,' Mandaric said, having asked Southampton's permission to approach Redknapp and having been refused. ‘I don't know how much Harry is enjoying it there. If he comes here, fine. If he doesn't come here, fine, we'll still be friends, no matter what. I don't think we fell out. I think it was created by the media. I have no problem with Harry whatsoever.'

It may not have been how everyone remembered the bitter feud between Mandaric and his ex-manager, but Redknapp was also
apparently quite happy to slip into revisionist mode, promptly insisting he could no longer consider himself employed by Southampton once permission to talk to Portsmouth had been refused.

‘On Thursday, December 1, I spoke to Harry,' said Lowe, ‘who told me that he had been considering his future and that he believed Portsmouth to be his spiritual home.' The written request from Portsmouth to talk to Redknapp soon followed. ‘I did not give that consent immediately,' continued Lowe, ‘as I wanted to be sure that Harry meant what he had said, given some of the comments made by himself and Mandaric not much more than a year ago. I spoke to Harry again on Friday and he confirmed what he had said to me and that he wanted my consent to speak to Portsmouth.'

And that was that. Not for the first time – and not for the last – Redknapp's departure was messy, mysterious and undignified.

Within days of returning to Portsmouth, Redknapp set about mending the bridges he'd demolished a year earlier. ‘When I went back, it felt like I had never been away,' he said. ‘It's still the same people and they call everyone by their first names and not surnames. They're not addressed as “Redknapp” – the chairman calls everyone by their first names, Milan treats us as equals. It's nice to be treated like that by everybody, so it's good.'

Mandaric and Redknapp had always been a better double act than Lowe and Redknapp. Mandaric and Redknapp were both working-class, self-made men who – despite Mandaric's Serbian origins – spoke a noticeably similar language with one another than either did with Lowe . . . or most other people in football did with Lowe, for that matter. Yet for all they had in common, no one could quite work out just how or why there had been such a spectacular and unexpected rapprochement between Redknapp and Mandaric.

‘There were all the usual rumours going round,' says Pete
Johnson. ‘Deals here, counter-deals there, but I think it was just a simple matter of expedience. They both needed one another at the time. Harry was in a job that he hated, working for a chairman with whom he didn't get on, and Portsmouth had been going backwards since Harry had left, so Milan urgently needed a manager who could stop the club joining Southampton in the Championship. They also understood how each other operated and it was a case of “better the devil you know than the devil you don't”.'

It's also possible that Mandaric knew he was on the way out and therefore reckoned he had less to lose. When Mandaric sold a fifty per cent share of the club to Alexandre Gaydamak in January 2006, the financial crisis was still a distant nightmare, and the arrival of the son of Russian oligarch, Arkady Gaydamak, was widely seen as the building block for a new Portsmouth empire. Roman Abramovic's bottomless money pit had bought Chelsea success; Gaydamak's would surely do the same for Pompey.

‘I don't think Mandaric had any inside knowledge of Gaydamak's finances,' says Julian Guyer, ‘and he must have believed the Russian would have been good for the money. But, admittedly with hindsight, I do think there was more to the timing of Mandaric's sale than was first thought. It had long been common knowledge that the only way the club could begin to pay its way as a Premiership club was to increase the ground capacity from 21,000 and, right from the time we won promotion, there had been various different redevelopment proposals on the table.