Harry's Games (10 page)

‘I'd put him into the category of the old school-type manager . . . it is all about the football, it's [all about] getting the result on the Saturday,' says Steve Claridge, who signed for Bournemouth as a seventeen-year-old in 1984 and now works as a BBC football pundit. ‘Harry is not going to go out of his way to man-manage or mollycoddle you. You are either going to be a proper person, stand up to it and be a man about it or go under, and if you go under he will get rid of you, that's the type of person he is. I can't say I always knew what I had to do to get his attention; he's the sort of manager who uses you when he needs you and forgets about you when he doesn't. He's got that ruthless streak . . . and along the way, you are going to upset people, but ultimately it will be for the good of the football club.'

Despite only playing eight times for Bournemouth before being sold on to Weymouth, Claridge has no bad feelings about how he was treated. ‘As you get older, you become more introspective about the reasons your career didn't pan out as you had hoped. When you're young, you don't really know why you're playing well or badly. If you're playing well, you assume it's down to you and, if you're not, you blame the manager. You've got no perspective. I enjoyed my time at Bournemouth. Harry was very settled, there wasn't a lot of pressure and we had a lot of fun. But there were limits to what we could all achieve. Sure, it was a come-down returning to non-league football, but the bottom line was Weymouth were in the top three of their division and Bournemouth needed the money.'

Whatever his technical or interpersonal deficiencies, Redknapp always had two vital things going for him: he knew a decent footballer when he saw one and he wasn't lazy. At his trial in 2012, Redknapp made a great deal of how he could ‘barely read or write', but those with long memories at Bournemouth remember that he was seldom without his well-thumbed copy of the
Rothmans Football Yearbook
. ‘He knew virtually every stat of every
player in every division,' says Pete Johnson. ‘He could tell you exactly how many appearances he had made, how many goals he had scored, what position he had played. It was amazing. He was a walking encyclopaedia and would spend every spare minute out scouting players. Nor, like many managers, did he ignore the non-league clubs; quite the reverse. He went out of his way to go to the places, such as Maidstone and Weymouth, to snap up talent on the cheap that everyone else had missed.'

In a post-match television interview after Spurs had lost to Wigan, Sky's Rob Palmer jokingly referred to Redknapp as a ‘wheeler-dealer'.

‘I'm not a wheeler-dealer. Fuck off!' Redknapp snapped before storming out. The conversation continued off camera. ‘Don't say I'm a fucking wheeler-dealer. I'm a fucking football manager.'

Redknapp's hypersensitivity to the word ‘wheeler-dealer' was no doubt explained by his having recently been charged with tax evasion. Taken in a certain context, wheeler-dealer can be shorthand for a wide-boy. But in its other sense of a person who loves the thrill of buying and selling, who can't resist a deal, Redknapp is most definitely a wheeler-dealer, and a very capable one at that.

Back in 2003, Michael Lewis wrote the bestselling
Moneyball
, a gripping account of how the 2002 Oakland Athletics baseball team (known in the US as the A's) – with a payroll of about $41 million – took on and beat much higher-rated teams, such as the New York Yankees, that could afford to pay their players three times as much, by ignoring the conventional methods of assessing the value of a player to a team. Instead of using the same statistics as every other team – batting averages and stolen bases – to judge a player's ability, the A's' analysis, known as ‘sabermetrics', led them to believe that other criteria, such as on-base percentage and slugging percentage, which were undervalued by everyone else, were a far better guide to potential. As a result, the A's were able to recruit a number of players in whom the bigger teams had
no interest at a salary level the club could afford. They became competitive as a result by setting an American league record of twenty consecutive victories and winning the American League West in the process.

Following the success of the A's and the publication of
Moneyball
, some baseball traditionalists dismissed sabermetrics as a fluky piece of back-room bullshit. But just as many, including, significantly, the big spenders such as the Yankees and the Red Sox, who had lost out when the A's out-smarted them in the draft and transfer market, thought there was something in it and employed their own sabermetricians. The geeks had finally found a place at the high table of the all-American game.

The potential for
Moneyball
analysis wasn't lost on other sports, either, although football has yet to come up with a definitive measure for ranking the effectiveness of player stats. If it had, you can't imagine Liverpool paying £35 million for Andy ‘He's big . . . he's English' Carroll or Chelsea forking out £50 million for Fernando ‘He's quick . . . he's Spanish' Torres. But many clubs now employ people to spend days in front of a screen replaying old matches, searching for the holy grail of those features of players' performance that have previously been disregarded and mark them out as something special. Used properly,
Moneyball
cuts both ways; not only does it help you to pick up potential match-winners on the cheap, it helps to prevent you from paying over the odds for duds.

Redknapp is a long way off being a football geek, or any type of geek for that matter – he likes to give the impression he can barely operate a DVD player. But there is a sense in which he instinctively grasped the principles of
Moneyball
long before the boffins turned it into a science. He had a feel for the kind of player he was after and scoured the country to find them on the cheap. You could argue that he had little choice, as Bournemouth didn't have the resources to pay a few million for the big stars;
but then neither did any other manager in the lower divisions and Redknapp consistently outplayed them in the transfer game.

‘Some of it wasn't rocket science,' says Pete Johnson. ‘There's a fairly standard formula for getting promotion from the lower divisions. Get two big centre-backs, a playmaker in midfield, a big strong centre-forward to knock in the goals and build the rest of the team around them. And Harry knew that better than anyone as he'd had lumps kicked out of him at Bournemouth as a player, which is why he often made a point of signing precisely the type of players who used to terrify him.

‘But other managers in the division worked the same system and were looking for similar players and Harry was a bit of a genius at getting the players others had missed. If he fancied a player, he would go all out to get him. He would chat to him, charm him, do whatever was necessary to get the signature. One tactic that always worked well was to pounce early at the end of May when the rest of the football world was only thinking about going on holiday. He picked up both Efan Ekoku from Sutton and Ian Bishop from Carlisle ahead of the opposition in that way.'

One of Redknapp's first acquisitions, the striker Colin Clarke, who was signed from Tranmere for £20,000, was a typical example of Redknapp's financial nous, and one he has always been happy to shout about from the rooftops. Curiously, perhaps, he remembers that deal as much for the money he personally lost as for the value he bought to the club. When he'd originally approached the chairman for Clarke's £20,000 fee, he'd been told there was no money available. Whereupon, Redknapp suggested putting together a syndicate in which he and three others would personally put up £5,000 each and – in a forerunner to the Peter Crouch arrangement that would later be the subject of his court case – split any profits on Clarke's subsequent sale. The chairman turned this suggestion down and finally came up with the money himself.

‘So Clarkie played for a season,' Redknapp said, ‘got 36 goals and then we sold him to Southampton for £500,000. My syndicate was gutted – that would have been a profit of almost half a million pounds – but at least it confirmed to me that I could spot a player and had a big future in the management game.'

The Clarke deal is yet another of the great ‘loveable Harry' stories, pitched artfully somewhere between bigging himself up for having been so clever and taking the piss out of himself for having missed out on a bumper payday. It diverts us from thinking about what was really going on in any depth. We're meant to think, ‘That Harry . . . what a geezer. Gets a player the chairman doesn't even really want for next to nothing and then flogs him for a fortune in next to no time.'

This is really only half the story, though, because what gets left out is that, in the summer of 1986, Clarke was picked for the Northern Ireland World Cup squad in Mexico and was one of its few stars, scoring a consolation goal in the defeat to Spain during the group stages. Most pundits reckoned that showcase goal more than doubled his eventual transfer fee. So while Redknapp deserved credit for spotting and developing talent, the size of the profit owed a great deal to post-World Cup hysteria. Good as Clarke was, Redknapp can never have imagined he was a half-million-pound player.

More significantly, though, the deal glosses over Redknapp's failure sometimes to distinguish between the private and the public good. It's as if his default position is that anything that benefits him automatically benefits those around him and, yet again, it raises questions about where his loyalties ultimately lie – to himself or the club? This is a recurring theme with Redknapp. The Clarke transfer might suggest that, on that occasion, Redknapp was rather more concerned about his own lost opportunity, as what he seems to remember most clearly is that he missed out on the chance of making a quick and easy £120,000. There
is no record of him ever having said, ‘Thank God the club did so well as it was struggling a bit at the time.'

The aftershock ripples of the Clarke transfer didn't end there. Had the money stayed with Redknapp, it would probably have been put towards buying a bigger home or invested in a local business; he would later buy an Italian restaurant in Bournemouth. And the club might have stayed in the Third Division. As it was, the half million proved to be the financial launchpad for Redknapp to acquire the team that was to win Bournemouth promotion to the Second Division in the following season. It bought John Williams, a centre-back from Port Vale whom Redknapp has often described as his best-ever signing; defender Tony Pulis from Newport; strikers Dave Puckett from Southampton, Trevor Aylott from Crystal Palace and Carl Richards from Enfield; and goalkeeper Gerry Peyton from Fulham. All of them turned out to be shrewd acquisitions by Redknapp, and they would never have been possible without the Clarke windfall.

The John Williams deal shows just how cannily Redknapp operated. ‘I didn't really want to leave Port Vale,' says Williams. ‘I had just bought my first house in Holmes Chapel and I was feeling settled. But Clarkie [Colin Clarke] had tipped Harry off about me and he wouldn't take no for an answer. Eventually, I agreed to go down to Bournemouth and Harry took me straight out on to the beach. After Port Vale, I thought I was in Magaluf. He then chatted to me and my wife about the best private schools in the area . . . he later told me his trick was to sign the wife, not the player.

‘Anyway, it worked on me. I think I agreed to the move on the spot. I got a small signing-on fee, but it wasn't about the money. My weekly wage only went up from £250 to £300. I signed because I liked Harry.'

Redknapp began his career as full-time manager at Bournemouth on a tide of goodwill from the supporters; he wasn't Megson and
he was a former Bournemouth player, someone who understood the club and had demonstrated his loyalty by buying a house and settling in the town. Within a month, he had become a local hero when his team beat Manchester United 2-0 in the third round of the FA Cup. ‘That was the thing about Harry,' said Glenn Rodgers, a Bournemouth season ticket holder. ‘He could deliver these fantastic days, when the impossible seemed to become possible, that you knew you would remember for the rest of your life. It was a bit like having the most fantastic sex with your girlfriend; you instantly forgot all the times she had played hard to get or ignored you. Memories of defeats that shouldn't have happened quickly melted at the prospect of another good time just round the corner.'

And the good times did continue, at least for a while; Bournemouth avoided relegation and won the Associate Members Cup (now the Johnstone's Paint Trophy) in Redknapp's first season. Two years later, Bournemouth won the Third Division Championship and were promoted to the Second Division. Within three years, they were relegated and no one was exactly sure why. Redknapp was still talking a good game to the local press, he was still active in the transfer market, bringing in high-profile and high-value players, such as Gavin Peacock from Gillingham for £250,000, George Lawrence from Millwall for £100,000, Bobby Barnes from Swindon for £110,000 and Luther Blissett from Watford for £50,000, but the team just didn't gel on the pitch.

‘There was a lot of head scratching,' says Pete Johnson, ‘because on paper the team looked easily strong enough to stay up, despite a long late-season injury list. So had Harry just found his level? Was he a good manager for the lower divisions but didn't have the tactical nous for the higher ones? Had he become so focused on buying and selling players that he had taken his eye off the day-to-day running of the club? Did the players think they were on to a cushy number at Bournemouth and were not as committed as
they should have been? Was he just too matey with the team, too quick to join in with the daily trip to the bookie's after training? No one could work it out.'

For John Williams, the immediate blame for relegation rested with an injury list that took out the entire back four. But he also wonders if the team wasn't as professional as it might have been. ‘There was a big drinking culture at the club,' he says, ‘and we could be a bit of a handful at times. Harry tried to keep one step ahead of us, but he didn't always manage it. It was the same at a lot of clubs, mind. I also think it must have been awkward for Harry, as a few of us were good friends with his son Mark. He probably didn't always know whether to talk to us as the boss or a family friend.'