Harry's Games (11 page)

Within months, no one at Bournemouth was thinking much about football. During a holiday in Italy with Brian Tiler to watch the 1990 World Cup, the minibus in which they were both travelling was hit by a car travelling at 90 mph on the wrong side of the road. The three Italians in the oncoming car and Tiler were killed instantly. Redknapp, who had been sitting next to Tiler, suffered a fractured skull and was in a coma for two days. Initially, the doctors didn't expect him to live, but after three weeks in an Italian hospital he was well enough to be flown home to convalesce. Or rather, that was the idea. He had been warned not to go to any matches, but in a matter of weeks he was back at Dean Court, disguised in sunglasses and a baseball cap, watching Bournemouth play Aldershot in a pre-season friendly.

‘When I look back on the accident now,' he later wrote, ‘it hasn't altered my outlook on life although I suppose for a while it put things into perspective. I thought at the time that there was no way I'd allow football to be the be-all and end-all of life for me, that I would be able to switch off. But within a few months I was just like I'd always been – still getting the hump when we get beat, and taking everything too personally. I'd be lying if I said it
radically changed my life. For a while, I completely lost my sense of taste and smell; I wouldn't have a clue what I was eating. The taste came back, though not fully, after about six months but even today I can't smell anything.'

Spoken like a man. More than that, spoken like an English professional footballer brought up in the school of hard knocks. But should we believe that he hadn't really been affected by the accident? ‘Those of us who did observe Harry close up reckoned the accident did change him,' says Johnson. ‘He had always had his favourites and he wasn't afraid of showing it; if a player wasn't one of those he really valued, he wouldn't go out of his way to put an arm round him and make him feel good about himself. If he was angry about something, he would let him know it. The onus was always on the player to get back in Harry's good books.

‘But after the accident, his mood swings did get more extreme and he could suddenly lose his temper over next to nothing. It definitely affected the players. There was one lad, Wayne Fereday, a winger whom Harry had signed from Newcastle, who turned out to be absolutely hopeless. Harry regularly humiliated him in public by getting him to come in and do extra training, running round the pitch, on a Sunday. It wasn't Harry's judgement that was off – Fereday regularly features in the top two or three of any poll for the worst footballer to have played for Bournemouth – it was his handling that was off. Fereday's confidence was clearly shattered; what he needed was some TLC, not humiliation.

‘He also had a go at me for no reason whatsoever. All I'd done was write in the local paper that Jamie's [Harry's son] transfer to Liverpool from Bournemouth for £350,000 was a big move for a seventeen-year-old . . . which it self-evidently was. There was nothing controversial about it whatsoever, but Harry rang me to shout at me for about half an hour and, for a while, I was persona non grata.'

John Williams also thought the accident took its toll. ‘Harry
would almost never talk about it,' he says. ‘It was as though he kept that bit of him to himself, and would only let us see the same fun and jokey side of him. But I think it did make him a bit harder, a bit more determined. As if he realized he had come so close to losing everything and that he now owed it to everyone to make the absolute best of every opportunity that came his way.'

Clearly, such a serious accident must have had some effect on Redknapp. He'd experienced a severely traumatic event, his skull had been fractured, and who knows what peripheral damage may have been caused to his neural pathways? Indeed, he may even have suffered post-traumatic stress disorder; mood swings are a classic symptom. And then there was survivor's guilt. Tiler had been one of his best friends and the two of them had been sitting next to each other. If Redknapp had got into the minibus first he might have been the one killed. As it was, his friend was dead and he was alive. Left untreated or unacknowledged, that kind of guilt, however irrational, can gnaw away at a person indefinitely. All things considered, it would have been more remarkable if Redknapp hadn't been changed somehow by the accident.

Tiler's death certainly had one very concrete knock-on effect. Together, Tiler and Redknapp had been a powerful, virtually unassailable, double act at Bournemouth. They looked after one another, affording each other protection. If someone wanted to knock one of them, they had to be prepared to take on the other. But with Tiler's death, Redknapp was that bit more vulnerable. And he was even more so as Bournemouth showed no signs of making a return to the Second Division.

Having had a set-to with the Bournemouth chairman, Ken Gardiner, for being disrespectful about Tiler's death, Redknapp then fell out with Norman Hayward, a local businessman, who had joined the club board and wanted a more hands-on role. At the end of the 1991/92 season, Redknapp handed in his resignation. Did he jump or was he pushed? Both, probably. Hayward
must have been aware that treading on Redknapp's toes would eventually provoke the inevitable resignation letter and, when it duly arrived, no one at the club tried to persuade him to stay.

By the time Redknapp left, Bournemouth found themselves in a financial crisis with debts of £2.6 million; at one point that summer, the club was within fifteen minutes of going into administration and, with the team not making much headway on the pitch, Redknapp was an expensive overhead. And not just because of the salary and bonuses written into his own contract. As with all managers, Redknapp was quick to point out his transfer successes, such as Shaun Teale, who had been bought from Weymouth for £50,000 and sold two years later for £500,000; and Ian Bishop had been bought from Carlisle for £20,000 and sold to Manchester City a year later for £465,000. If the club's finances were rocky, then it was nothing to do with him, surely.

Except Redknapp had everything to do with Bournemouth's financial woes as the straightforward profit and loss account on the buying and selling of players only ever tells half the story. It's the wage bill that tells the other half and Bournemouth's was out of control. ‘Harry was brilliant at persuading footballers who might not normally have considered dropping down to the Third Division – Paul Miller, Kevin Bond, Jimmy Case and the like – to come and play for him at Bournemouth,' says Pete Johnson. ‘Part of the persuasion was pure charm; Harry would make them feel special, as if moving to Bournemouth would showcase their talent and make them a target for the big clubs within a year. The other part was money. Harry would offer them salaries that were far higher than other clubs in the division were paying. By the end of the 1992 season, the wage bill was running an unsustainable 100 per cent of the club's turnover.'

You could argue this was a case of ‘chairman beware'. It's the manager's job to get in the best players he can and, if the chairman is stupid enough to sign off unaffordable salaries, then it's
his and the club's lookout. Nothing to do with me, guv. But even if you go with this line of argument, it doesn't say much for Redknapp's sense of financial awareness or responsibility, because another important part of a manager's job is to build a team for the mid- and the long-term future, to preserve the club for the fans and the community. Walking blindly into a situation where a club would either require a massive injection of capital or fire-sell its best assets to survive is folly. If Redknapp didn't know that the club was nearing financial breaking point, he ought to have made it his business to find out; and if he did know but didn't think it was in some way his responsibility, then he lacked judgement.

Whichever it was, Redknapp doesn't seem to have been willing to work out a solution with the club. When Hayward wanted more say in the day-to-day running of the club, Redknapp got the hump. His role was being compromised. If Redknapp had just walked away at that point, then the Bournemouth fans might have waved him off and wished him well.

‘Whatever his down sides, he had been a good manager,' says Glenn Rodgers. ‘He'd given us some great times and, even though the club was in a financial mess, no one really blamed him for it – though looking back at how he's managed other clubs since, maybe we should have. It was the fact he insisted on taking £100,000 in compensation with him. He might have been legally owed the money, but it just felt as if all those times he had gone on about how much he loved the club and how Bournemouth meant everything to him had just been bullshit really. The bottom line was that what really came first for Harry was Harry. He didn't mind if the club went to the wall so long as he got the money he was owed. We appreciated he might have gripes with the chairman and the board, but taking the money was a classless slap in the face for the fans.'

Redknapp didn't see it that way. He felt he had given the club eight years' loyal service, adding he had turned down approaches
from West Ham, Aston Villa and Stoke to manage them, though just how advanced these conversations had ever become was not made clear. He had also made the club money on transfer deals and said he'd opted not to take a salary for four months to help the club's cash flow, which rather suggested he did know precisely how precarious Bournemouth's finances really were. But he took the £100,000 pay-off anyway.

‘If those cynical fans still believe I shouldn't have been paid that hundred grand,' he said, ‘then I give you the name of Jamie Redknapp, signed for nothing and sold for £350,000 with another £350,000 eventually reaching the club after Jamie had made so many appearances for Liverpool. A man's entitled to £100,000 if a club gets £700,000 for his own kid.'

Jamie's transfer to Liverpool did work to Bournemouth's advantage, but it wasn't entirely through the altruism that Redknapp chose to portray. Even as a young kid, Jamie had shown exceptional football talent and Harry had never hidden the fact that he regarded his son's career as his own special, long-term project, and it's become another landmark of the Redknapp legend that he used to tell Sandra he was taking Jamie to school when he was actually driving him to extra football coaching.

By the age of fourteen, Jamie was considered to be one of the best prospects in the county – so much so that the local FA had to step in to limit the number of games he could play to make sure he didn't get injured, as on some weekends he was in demand to play for his school, the Bournemouth youth side and the Dorset county side. ‘He was remarkable,' says Pete Johnson. ‘He would join the Bournemouth first team for a training exercise where everyone would get points for which part of the goal target they hit – the corners being worth the most – and he regularly came out as one of the best. Even the pros were impressed.'

Jamie made his debut for Bournemouth as a sixteen-year-old in 1990 and, at the beginning of the 1990/91 season, was
loaned out to Spurs. He was recalled to the club before Christmas and the following January was sold to Liverpool for £350,000, making him one of the most expensive seventeen-year-olds in English football at the time. Pete Johnson had been on the wrong end of Redknapp's tongue for suggesting it was a big move, but he wasn't the only one to be surprised by the deal. ‘As far as I remember,' says one Spurs insider, ‘the reason Jamie was recalled to Bournemouth from us is that he was feeling homesick. So it did come as rather a shock to see he'd gone to Liverpool just a few months later. I guess he'd got over his homesickness by then!'

The lasting impression of Jamie's transfer to Liverpool is that it has Harry's fingerprints all over it. Harry and the then Liverpool manager, Kenny Dalglish, had been friends since the Scottish striker had had a brief trial spell at West Ham in the late 1960s before signing for Celtic, and both Harry and Sandra had been to stay with Dalglish the year before Jamie joined Liverpool. ‘I think he was a little bit too young to leave home then,' Dalglish told Liverpool TV in 2011, ‘and his mum didn't want to let go of him. The meeting that we had at West Ham all those years ago wouldn't have done any harm with that. The fact that it was Liverpool that Jamie was coming to, a club Harry has a great deal of respect for, wouldn't have done any harm either. He's a good guy and there is a bit of a friendship there.'

There was nothing coincidental or fortuitous about Jamie's move; it was the maturation of the long-term investment that Harry had made in his son's career ever since he'd given him his first coaching lesson. The transfer may have been good for Bournemouth, but it would never have taken place if it hadn't suited the plans of the Redknapp family as a whole. So to cite his son's move as a symbol of everything Redknapp had done for the club and a justification for taking the £100,000 is – not to put too fine a point on it – disingenuous.

This, then, makes the reason for Redknapp taking the money
all the more fascinating. Calling him greedy is just too glib. As Redknapp said at his trial, he had refused the offer of the payout he was due when he left Portsmouth for the first time, suggesting the club donate the money to a youth charity. This wasn't the action of an inherently greedy man who would satisfy his selfish aims regardless of circumstance. Neither does the suggestion that he took the money because it was a matter of principle really stack up; he had been owed the Portsmouth money and he had been owed the four months' wages he had declined, which was hardly the act of a man who insists that every last contractual obligation has to be paid in blood. Indeed, four or five years later, when he was settled at West Ham, Redknapp made an interest-free loan to Bournemouth to help them through another financial crisis. Again, this isn't the action of someone who is by nature greedy, rather it's the action of someone big-hearted – albeit, possibly, a big-hearted person who wasn't entirely comfortable with how he had behaved when he left the club, but was still living in the area and wanted to make some kind of amends.