Harry's Games (16 page)

‘There was the time when our team were at the airport at the same time as Arsenal. The Arsenal team were all kitted out in matching club suits and were waiting in the business class lounge to board; we were all dressed in jeans and jostling with the public to board an easyJet flight. There was the time the team was supposed to be boarding the coach to play Stockport County away in the League Cup and Raducioiu was out shopping in Harvey Nichols. And then there was the time we fielded a cup-tied player [Emmanuel Omoyinmi] in a match against Aston Villa and were ordered to replay the tie. How could anyone at the club make such an idiotic mistake? You just couldn't imagine it happening to anyone but West Ham.

‘Individually, all these things probably seem quite amusing, but taken together they were just embarrassing. They made us look unprofessional. There were often occasions during this period when supporting West Ham felt more like watching a circus act rather than a football club, with Harry being only one step away from being the Barry Fry-like, novelty-act ringmaster.'

These comic, quasi-slapstick tales have become part of both West Ham's and Redknapp's legend. There isn't a Hammers fan from the 1990s who doesn't have instant recall of them – usually accompanied by a curious, hybrid grin-cum-cringe. Seldom does anyone ask why they happened but, if they do, the answers tend to go no deeper than ‘that's Harry and West Ham for you'. But why should it have been that way? Redknapp may not be a well-educated man, but he is extremely quick-witted and nobody's fool. Neither is he the slightest bit lazy; he puts in more hours than most managers. So why did he and the club so often end up looking a bit stupid?

The easiest answer is that he was looking in the wrong direction at crucial times. Everyone who has worked with Redknapp
says he is something of a control freak, a man who likes to have a finger in every available pie. And with so many different things going on at a football club at the same time – and with Redknapp invariably giving priority to which players he was planning to buy and sell – it was inevitable that something was going to give from time to time.

But this analysis only gets you so far. Redknapp was nearly 50 by this time and the strengths and weaknesses of his personality couldn't have been any surprise to him. You therefore have to question his choice of management team. Most of the off-field disasters were ones that shouldn't have got anywhere near the manager. The Christmas party, Raducioiu's shopping expedition and Emmanuel Omoyinmi's ineligibility; they were all complications that should have been dealt with by the back-room staff. So why weren't they?

There are two possibilities: either Redknapp had hand-picked a management team whose most important quality was loyalty to him rather than administrative competence; or the level of his constant interference in the way his staff went about their daily jobs resulted in them feeling disengaged. It's easy to imagine someone thinking, ‘I can't be bothered with this as Harry will only come along and change it all.'

You also have to question what the club thought it was doing. Even if Redknapp wasn't self-aware enough to assemble a management team who could compensate for his weaknesses and were good at the details which didn't interest him, then the West Ham board ought to have been. Fifteen years ago, football clubs may not have been the slick corporate machines they are now, but there was enough money and expertise around to have kept some sort of eye on what was going on. A single phone call to the Bournemouth board of directors would have told them all they needed to know about where Redknapp was likely to need help. If Redknapp wasn't going to make the right appointments, then
the board could have stepped in and insisted on making them for him. But they didn't. Exactly why they didn't is something to return to later.

For now, what matters is that Redknapp was left exposed. Unlike in government where ministers can use their special advisers as fall guys, in football the manager always gets the blame. So when things went wrong, Redknapp was in the firing line and, as someone who does not always engage his brain before opening his mouth when under pressure, he was left to make contradictory statements – ‘we're not a drinking club' . . . ‘the players don't drink enough together' – that only ever made a bad situation look worse.

Even at the best of times, though, when he wasn't being asked awkward questions, Redknapp was prone to lapses of tact and judgement, especially when the opportunity for a one-liner presented itself in a room full of appreciative reporters. It's a hard temptation to resist sometimes.

For Redknapp, the consequences were sometimes rather more serious. Asked why Stan Lazaridis had yet to join the club from Australia, Redknapp said he was probably still shagging sheep. Talking about Ian Dowie's aerial threat, he said, ‘Judging by the look of Dowie's face, I'd reckon he's headed a lot of balls.' After signing Dani, a Portuguese striker with boy-band good looks, Redknapp joked, ‘Dani walked into the dressing-room and all the lads said they're not bringing their wives to the games any more. He looks like a film star. The other teams won't know whether to mark him or fuck him!' And so it went on . . .

Taken individually, none of these gags was totally out of order; the damage came in the cumulative effect, which was to make Redknapp appear abusive. Unless he is a big star, a player has little comeback against a manager who takes the piss out of him in public. Make a fuss and he looks thin-skinned, someone who can't take a joke. Worse still, he could find himself in the reserves
for a spell. It's largely a one-way power relationship, with the player having little choice but to roll with the punches. But the crime does not go unforgotten and, on a cold February afternoon, the team finds itself with a player disinclined to put his body on the line in the last twenty minutes when only absolute commitment is enough to hang on for a draw.

It's not only those players who find themselves on the wrong end of Redknapp's humour who are affected. The whole team knows that if it can happen to one of their number, then it can happen to any of them. No one knows who is going to be next, and the insecurity spreads – possibly as far as a player trying to goad Redknapp into having a laugh at another's expense, merely to deflect attention away from himself. Much as Redknapp might try to pass off his gags as ‘spur-of the-moment, harmless fun' – a way of relaxing the team and bringing it together – in many cases his humour will have the opposite effect. It will make the players treat him less seriously and, more crucially, trust him less. There's a time and a place for a manager to give a player an earful, and if you're hoping to provoke a positive response, that time and place is not in front of a room full of journos.

Trevor Morley never got on the wrong end of one of Redknapp's gags but he did know what it was like to be both in and out of favour. ‘Harry has the gift of making you feel really special,' he says. ‘After he'd been at the club for six months or so, he took me aside to say that he's been told that I might be trouble but that he'd been really impressed with my attitude. That kind of thing made a difference. He also noticed things. In those days, many players used to report back for pre-season training overweight and unfit, but I used to go and play for the Norwegian side Brann over the summer and he used to comment on how sharp I was looking and that I was guaranteed a place in the starting line-up.

‘The downside of this is that it's much harder when things
aren't going well. In my last season at the club, I got badly injured, tried to come back too soon, got injured again and knew my days were numbered. I was never a big one for going to bang on the manager's door, so I just felt I was left in limbo a bit. It's the same with most managers, I suppose. When you're in, you're in – when you're not, you're not. The manager just hasn't got the time to reassure players who aren't in line for a game at the weekend. But because Harry had once made me feel so good about myself, being ignored by him was hard to take psychologically.'

There were also knock-on effects to the image of West Ham as a club on the edge of chaos with a joker for a manager, as outsiders came to look for the worst in any possible situation. One case in point was the final game of the 1996/97 season at Old Trafford when the ball was passed to Paul Kitson at the kick-off, whereupon the striker launched an optimistic kick down-field that went straight into touch. The crowd laughed, but the bookies blanched as some punters reportedly made a killing on a spread bet for the time of the first throw-in.

In his autobiography, Redknapp was adamant that nothing crooked had taken place. ‘Looking at replays of his attempted pass,' he said, ‘I'd have to admit it wasn't Kitson's most elegant ball. That match, or at least the poxy kick-off, would have been long forgotten had it not been for a story in the
Racing Post
the following week. Spread-betting firm Sporting Index apparently reported a large number of sellers at sixty-five seconds, forcing the line down to 50–65. The inference was clear. Someone had cleaned up at the bookies' expense. And the finger of suspicion was pointing at West Ham United. Kitson's misplaced pass looked worse and worse the more you saw it.

‘I suppose you have to admit the circumstantial evidence was pretty strong but, believe me, that's all it was – circumstantial. But if you looked at all the characters involved in the supposed coup you'd realize it was a cock-and-bull story. There were no
punters at West Ham except John Hartson who wasn't even playing and Kitson knows about as much about betting as I do about nuclear science. I didn't even have a spread-betting account. And who won this small fortune? Sporting Index claimed they saw a large number of sellers but they later said little damage had been done. Our kick-off that day was one we and, indeed, most clubs in the Premiership followed regularly. It just didn't come off.'

He then added a curious coda. ‘The betting riddle made a good story, sure, but there was nothing in it. And even if there was, do you think I'd ever admit it? They'd lock me up!' In other words, you shouldn't rely on him to tell the truth. In which case, you might ask, why should we trust that he'd done so now? Nothing was ever proven and no charges were ever brought, so there is no reason to think that Kitson was guilty of spot match-fixing. But you can't help thinking that the reputation of the club at the time went a long way to creating the air of suspicion that something iffy had taken place. Redknapp has to take his share of the blame for this, and not just because he was known to fancy the odd flutter himself. If Kitson's attempted pass had gone straight into touch when Ron Greenwood or John Lyall had been in the dugout, the chances are that no one would have given it any further thought.

What's more, the rumours have persisted. Talk to the West Ham players of that era about the incident and you are met with a knowing smile. And if Redknapp and his players weren't involved in a petty betting sting, then, if the
Guardian
's Secret Footballer (a veteran Premiership player writing anonymously for the newspaper) is to be believed, they were among the few who weren't. In his book published in 2012, the Secret Footballer wrote, ‘When I started playing professionally, in-play betting had just come to the market; nobody really knew if it was going to take off but that didn't stop every bookmaker from offering his own version. The service has been refined in the
intervening years to maximize the bookies' profits but there was a small window of opportunity where the punters and the players were able to take advantage.

‘An old team-mate of mine was one beneficiary. Throughout the season, a team will usually win the toss fifty per cent of the time, but away from home, even if a captain loses the toss, the home team will forfeit the kick-off so that they can kick towards their own fans in the second half. If you intentionally go after the kick-off and you don't care which end you kick towards first, then you could easily end up with seventy-five per cent of the kick-offs over the course of a season. And if that happens, then it becomes ridiculously easy to bet on which team will win the first throw-in.

‘As a young, naïve kid, I simply thought that this player was hopeless. We'd take the kick-off, pass it back to him and every time, without exception, he'd hit the ball towards the touchline and out of play. It was so easy that nobody noticed, and it wasn't until years later when a few of us from the team were talking about the old days that it dawned on me what had been going on. Whenever I tell that story to a player who was also plying his trade back then, his reply is usually the same: “Oh yeah, we had a lad who used to do that, too. He made a fortune.” I have heard of the same being done with corners, goal kicks, fouls and even yellow cards.'

Redknapp's judgement had also come under scrutiny earlier that season when Michael Tabor, an East End bookie and racehorse owner, had made a hostile bid to take over West Ham with promises of a large cash injection into the club's finances. The board rejected Tabor's bid, with managing director Peter Storrie pointing out, ‘The offer is not as straightforward as it seems. Of the £30 million, £22 million would be in the form of loans which would, therefore, put West Ham largely in his debt . . . He has, perhaps, given the impression that he is a white knight riding in
to save the club, but the supporters should know that there are a lot of strings attached.'

As Steve Blowers reported, sometime later it became general knowledge that it was Redknapp who had brokered the original meeting between Tabor and Storrie at the Cheltenham races, leaving everyone to wonder what exactly was in the deal for Redknapp and when had it become part of the manager's remit to set up a possible deal to sell the club he was running. Redknapp, as ever, had a positive spin on the situation. ‘It is possible that Michael Tabor's interest indirectly saved us from relegation,' he said. ‘I think the fans clamouring for Tabor's money, and my offer to resign, perhaps forced the chairman's hand. He knew we'd go down unless drastic action was taken and, all of a sudden, he found the money to buy Hartson, Kitson and Lomas, three signings which kept us up.'