Harry's Games (3 page)

What is for certain about Redknapp's childhood was that school didn't feature highly on his list of priorities, other than as a place to showcase his football talent. That he would go on to play professionally seemed self-evident to most people who watched him as a slightly built, but devastatingly quick, teenager. But then these same judges often have a tendency to forget the many other youngsters for whom they predicted great things and whose football careers never got further than schoolboy trials.

So just how good a player was Redknapp? These days, it's much easier to reach an objective assessment of a player's ability. Every game in every division is televised and, for those with the time and inclination, you can make a detailed analysis of every minute of a player's entire career. Not just the goals scored and the assists made, but the yards run, the tackles missed, the passes
uncompleted and the team-mates blamed. It may not give you the player's whole story, but it will give you more than enough to make an informed judgement.

You can't do that with Redknapp. When he began his professional playing career, very few matches were televised; fewer still were shown in their entirety. The BBC's Saturday-night
Match of the Day
programme featured the highlights of just one, sometimes two, of the afternoon's First Division fixtures. ITV's Sunday-afternoon show,
The Big Match
, had just one game. A bit of bad luck with an injury or loss of form and even one of the best footballers could go through a whole season without appearing on television once. Search all the available archives, and you'd be lucky to come up with even ninety minutes of Redknapp's career on film.

What you're left with then are memories of those who played both with and against him, of those who paid a few shillings at the turnstiles to stand on the terraces of Upton Park and Dean Court. And memories fade over time, so that the distinctions between what's real and what's imagined become more blurred. This is especially true for a player like Redknapp, whose contributions, even at the time, were frequently overshadowed by those of his more famous team-mates, in particular Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters, the triumvirate of World Cup winners. Some memories will be rose-tinted, some unduly negative, and a great deal more almost certainly blank. There are few clear ways to differentiate between questionable contemporary evidence and hard fact. So whose word is to be believed – that of Redknapp's friends and admirers, which is likely to be spun in the most favourable light, or that of his detractors, which will most definitely not be? And where does this leave Lord Macdonald, Milan Mandaric's defence QC – a man who one would hope would favour evidence over opinion – who described Redknapp in court as a not very good footballer?

The bare bones of Redknapp's career are 149 first-team appearances for West Ham between 1965 and 1972, 101 for Bournemouth between 1972 and 1976 and just 26 for Brentford, Seattle Sounders and Bournemouth (again) in the final six years up until his retirement in 1982, with a total of just 12 goals for all clubs. It does indeed appear to confirm the ‘below-average journeyman' of Lord Macdonald's description. But what the statistics don't provide is an answer to the more interesting question: Was Redknapp a talented player who underperformed, or an unskilled makeweight who did well to play professional football at all? Here, as is so often the case with Redknapp, the waters quickly become very muddied.

One long-time West Ham fan remembered that Redknapp arrived at the club as a youngster with a big reputation. ‘Harry was a local Cockney boy so everyone knew he had been a good sprinter and a very promising right-winger at school,' Dave Newton told me. ‘We all had high hopes for him.' As did others, as Spurs and Chelsea had also been in the mix to sign Redknapp as an apprentice teenager in 1963.

Initially, his career at West Ham flourished; he was an integral member of the team that won the FA Youth Cup in his first season, was picked for the England Youth team the same year and had a promising first couple of seasons in the first team. But, somehow, the sparkle vanished and he struggled to hold down a regular first-team place.

John Sissons, the left-winger who joined West Ham at much the same time as Redknapp in the early 1960s, is still not entirely sure why Redknapp's career didn't flourish more. ‘When I played alongside Harry in the youth team, he was always the quickest player on the pitch,' he says, ‘and we all had him marked down as someone who would go far. He was outstanding in our FA Youth Cup run, a real live wire who was more than a handful for anyone. But then he didn't quite develop in the way we imagined.

‘I think he may have been a bit unlucky. Harry was a winger, pure and simple; he'd push the ball past defenders and outrun them. And he was a good crosser of the ball. But wingers began to go out of fashion in the game . . . Ron Greenwood started to play 4-3-3 and Harry couldn't adapt his style of play so he gradually became marginalized.'

Sissons isn't alone in reckoning Redknapp was a bit unlucky. Several other ex-footballers have voiced a similar opinion that Redknapp just didn't get the right breaks every player needs at certain points of his career. Luck only gets you so far as an explanation, though. To dismiss the random completely is to misread the universe, to fail to understand what it is to be human; it is equally so to throw up your hands and, like the hero of Luke Rhinehart's satire
The Dice Man
, leave every decision to a metaphorical roll of the dice and relinquish all personal responsibility. The timing of the winger's decline in English football may have been beyond Redknapp's control, but his ability to adapt his game to the new reality wasn't.

Redknapp's loss of form wasn't a particularly unusual phenomenon. Kids develop at different rates, both physically and emotionally, and many child prodigies fade into obscurity; very few England schoolboys go on to play for the full international side. In his autobiography, Redknapp offered his own explanation: ‘Looking back,' he wrote, ‘I know I should have done better, but the game was changing a lot then. Full-backs suddenly weren't slow any more. Now they were as quick as wingers, not giving you a yard to control the ball. Suddenly, whenever you got the ball you were clattered within a split second. It was getting harder to play in that position, unless you played in a dominant team which enjoyed a lot of possession and could feed the winger regularly. We stayed out wide, never came in, and were expected to do something with the ball on the few occasions we got it. Suddenly, wingers died out, as Sir Alf Ramsey underlined with
his England side. As my form dipped, so did my popularity at Upton Park. My confidence was draining and, for a long spell, the punters hated me.'

All of which makes sense, yet doesn't quite tell the full story. It's the comments Redknapp almost throws away as asides that are the most fascinating. Consider his phrase ‘unless you played in a dominant team which enjoyed a lot of possession'. West Ham was unquestionably not a dominant team at that time. In the years that Redknapp played for the club, it only had one top-ten finish – eighth in 1968–9; in the other seasons, it finished twelfth, fourteenth (twice), sixteenth, eighteenth and twentieth. That's a horrible series of results for a club that was generally lauded for the style of its football and, in Ron Greenwood, had one of the league's most respected managers. It's even worse when you take into account the team had Bobby Moore (one of the best centre-backs in the world), Geoff Hurst (one of the two best strikers in the country), and Martin Peters (one of the country's best mid-fielders). With these players at its spine, West Ham was a team that ought to have been contesting the league title, not propping up the division. If Redknapp was underperforming, he wasn't alone; underperformance was endemic in the club culture.

‘It's the million-dollar question every one of us is always asked about that team,' says Sissons. ‘With the players we had, we should have achieved far more than we did. You could argue that in some cases Ron Greenwood just wasn't ruthless enough and failed to accept some players were past their best until a couple of seasons too late. You could also say Ron didn't control the team as firmly as he should have done . . . he was too nice and he let the bigger personalities dominate him. But the bottom line is that it was our fault. We knew we were a talented team but we just weren't professional enough.'

You have to be careful making judgements across generations. Back in the 1960s, diet and fitness weren't taken nearly
as seriously as they are now. A pre-match steak and chips followed by a couple of cigarettes to get the lungs working properly was considered fairly standard, almost self-denying. And a post-match drinking binge was often obligatory for some players. But even by these standards, West Ham acquired the reputation of being a party club. And wherever there was a party, Redknapp seems to have been at its centre. ‘It was a good time,' Rodney Marsh, another footballer noted as much for his fondness for the high life as his on-field brilliance, said in Les Roopanarine's biography of Redknapp. ‘We drunk a lot and ate a lot and we laughed a lot, and Harry was at the forefront of all that.'

Bobby Howe, a West Ham team-mate of Redknapp's, also agreed that Harry was the life and soul of the dressing room. ‘Harry was a real product of the East End,' he said. ‘His wit and story-telling were fantastic. He was also a prankster and incredibly street smart.' In his autobiography, Redknapp tried to play it both ways; he couldn't resist telling great stories about how he and the lads – Bobby Moore in particular – would go out on the lash but still turn up for training on time and play out of their skins. As far as Harry was concerned, he was doing nothing wrong; he wasn't ‘giving it large' in the West End like some of the glamour boys, he was just going out and having a few bevvies down the local with the lads. He didn't help his cause, though, by calling that particular chapter ‘Win or Lose – on the Booze'.

It's hard to avoid the image, then, of Redknapp as a gifted player who rather took his talent for granted and let it slip slowly, like grains of sand, through his fingertips. There was no spectacular George Best-style self-destruction – he wasn't an alcoholic. Rather, he was an ordinary young bloke who never thought too much about the future at the time. He'd shown talent as a kid, and those who knew him had always said he'd play professional football and he'd gone on to do just that. The achievement had almost been preordained. Redknapp had never had to think about a career;
the career had come to him. And like many young men in that situation he had thought himself immortal – that life would somehow stand still and the good times would roll for ever. But eventually the lifestyle found him out; the bottom line was that he didn't quite have the innate talent – or possibly the desire – of a Bobby Moore who could perform flawlessly week after week, no matter how hard he had been partying. Redknapp was good, but not that good. His sharpness was blunted and the cracks began to show.

The other phrase that stands out in Redknapp's self-assessment is ‘Suddenly, whenever you got the ball you were clattered within a split second.' The key word here is ‘clattered'. In the 1960s and 1970s, by the time the season had reached the winter months many pitches were mud-baths and the balls were heavy and waterlogged; as a result, skinny, nippy wingers like Redknapp did not have the advantage their counterparts do today. Both the ball and the winger got stuck in the pitch, making it easier for opposing full-backs to neutralize their threat – as often as not, by crunching them as hard as possible in the tackle. If the winger didn't bounce back up immediately, so much the better. A limp made him even less of a problem for the rest of the game.

And Redknapp was regularly injured; the knee injury that forced him out of English professional football in 1976 was just the last in a long catalogue that had gradually destroyed his pace and effectiveness. Perhaps if he had been playing these days with better pitches, better physiotherapy and higher levels of fitness his career might have fulfilled its early promise, but that's another story.

John Sissons has a lot of sympathy for Redknapp. As a fellow winger, he was often on the wrong end of the treatment himself. ‘It was a tough, tough game for a winger,' he says, ‘especially as you didn't get much protection from referees. If you went past
some players, such as Norman Hunter, early in a game they'd make a point of catching up with you a little while later and saying, ‘If you do that again, I'll break your legs.' You tried to ignore them and just get on with the game, but it did make you think twice, because you knew they were being serious.'

The impact of the ‘clattering' wasn't just physical. Intimidation is just as much in the mind; a full-back who knows that a forward is going to pull out of any 50-50 ball has a significant advantage. And a few early, heavy tackles – with possibly a yellow card as collateral – can shift the balance even more, with opponents not going for the balls that are 60-40 in their favour. Then the game really is up for the forward, and this is the reason that one old-time West Ham fan gave for the Upton Park crowd turning against Redknapp. ‘We never doubted his ability,' he said, ‘and no one had a problem with him being a bit of a joker. What annoyed us was the sense we began to get that he just didn't really fancy it that much. When the chips were down and the studs were flying, he would go AWOL.'

Football fans can be an unforgiving bunch; they expect things of their players that they wouldn't dream of doing themselves and offer little thanks for it in return. They demand their players make that potentially career-ending tackle, and when the bone does break or the ligaments do snap, they say, ‘That's a shocker', before wondering whom the manager is going to bring on as a substitute and whether the formation will have to be switched. Even before the mega salaries of the Premiership, footballers were just a commodity in an ongoing entertainment, and a relatively cheap commodity at that. But supporters can read the game, and if they can sense the fear from the terraces, then it must be obvious to the players and the manager.