Harry's Games (9 page)

But it wasn't quite like that. ‘He later told me just how desperate that time had been for him,' said Pete Johnson. ‘His money was running out, the phone wasn't ringing and he was seriously considering forking out his last £17,000 on a taxi and licence.' It was another Londoner, the former Chelsea player David Webb, then managing Bournemouth, who saved Redknapp from a career driving a cab round Bournemouth – and his passengers an earful – by offering him a coaching job at the club that had slid into the Fourth Division.

Football has never operated in the same way as other industries
when it comes to employment law. And back in 1981, it was like the Wild West. Few posts were ever formally advertised and many jobs were almost arbitrary, with appointments – and sackings – decided on a ‘who you know' basis, together with moveable selection criteria, rather than a formal recruitment process. Sometimes no one even knew there was a vacancy until the right man turned up to fill it. So it's hard to know whether Webb was actively seeking a new coach for Bournemouth, or whether he just ended up chatting to an old mate who was short of work and reckoned he might be a useful addition to the set-up. Either way, it was a win-win situation as the cost of one more less-than-generous salary could easily be absorbed into the club's overall wage bill without the chairman, local solicitor or millionaire Harold Walker batting an eyelid. And if it worked out, all well and good; if it didn't, then the arrangement could be ended at a moment's notice.

The partnership worked well, apart from Redknapp allowing his arm to be twisted into making a final appearance as a player in a league cup tie against Manchester United, during which his most incisive contribution to the defeat was an own goal. Despite that minor setback, Bournemouth were promoted to the Third Division in Redknapp's first season. The fans were thrilled, if not always quite able to understand just why Webb and Redknapp were such a successful combination. ‘Webb had always seemed great at getting the players fired up,' said Keith Rodgers, a Bournemouth regular throughout the 1980s, ‘but he didn't have that good a reputation among the players on the training ground. And in some ways, Harry was quite similar – he was good at the technical stuff and well liked by everyone, but neither he nor Webby were tactical geniuses. It was all fairly basic 4-4-2, but somehow it worked. What we lacked in nous and planning, we more than made up for in team spirit.'

Within a year, though, the partnership came to an end when
Webb was sacked. The trouble started when Webb began to think he was too big for the club, that Bournemouth had no ambition and that he ought to be in charge at Chelsea. Redknapp tried and failed to talk him out of his megalomania – not least because he was concerned that if Webb was fired then he'd be out, too. When the chairman began to believe that there was evidence that Webb had been plotting to oust him, the point of forgiveness had long passed. Webb was fired in December 1982. This put Redknapp in a dilemma. He liked working at Bournemouth and he needed the job, but there was football's unwritten code of honour that said if Webb was sacked – no matter how out of order he had been – then Redknapp should resign as a matter of principle.

‘Webb definitely expected Harry to walk out with him,' says Pete Johnson, the veteran reporter on the south coast, ‘and he was surprised and disappointed when he didn't. He felt that he had given Harry the job and Harry should stay loyal to him, no matter what.'

Part of Redknapp undoubtedly felt the same way. ‘I didn't want to be manager. I was very happy with Webbie,' he said, but when he was offered the job of caretaker manager after several players had petitioned the chairman to offer it to him, he couldn't turn it down. Webb may have seen this as a stab in the back – he's certainly never had a good word to say about Redknapp since. In a very strict sense it was a betrayal, but it wasn't about ambition, as is so often the case in football.

‘Harry never had any great ambition to be a manager,' Pete Johnson continues. ‘He was very happy just taking a back seat doing some coaching. “There's only one thing that ever happens to a manager – he gets sacked,” he said to me. “And I don't need all that grief.” '

Just as much as the regular income, Redknapp wanted stability for himself and his family. He didn't want to go looking for another job; he'd had enough of all that. In all probability, if
Webb had been in demand, and had been offered a bigger job at a bigger club with Redknapp part of the deal as his number two, then Redknapp would have walked out, too, and been happy to talk up the virtues of loyalty. But only Torquay eventually came calling for Webb, so Redknapp stayed put at Bournemouth. The need for stability, security and self-preservation won the day.

There was no great honeymoon period in his new job, either. In fact, the 9-0 defeat to Lincoln in his first match in charge has become part of the Redknapp legend, the epitome of the man who can look adversity in the face and laugh. ‘The Lincoln pitch was like concrete,' he later wrote in his autobiography. ‘No way could you play on it. But the ref somehow gave the go-ahead. Kirky, the physio, got the boots out and I asked him where the ones with rubber studs were. “We haven't got any,” he said. All we had were boots with long nylon studs, almost suicidal on a rock-hard pitch. I couldn't believe it.

‘The Lincoln players came out with those boots with little pimples for studs, playing one-twos in the kick-about, pirouetting about like ballet dancers. We trundled out and right away three of our players went arse over tit. It was a joke. Crash, bang, wallop, we were 3-0 down at half-time. I said to Kirky, “If we're not careful, this could end up six or seven.” That was a bit optimistic as it turned out. Lincoln scored their ninth with eighteen minutes to go, so it could have finished twelve or thirteen. But luckily they eased off. We were lucky to get nil!'

This is Redknapp at his media-friendly best – funny, self-deprecating and always ready with highly quotable anecdotes. Listening to most managers give a press conference is enough to make anyone feel as if they have been slipped a Mogadon. Dull, dreary and defensive, their abiding principle is ‘Say nothing interesting . . . see nothing interesting . . . hear nothing interesting'. It's as if they've received their media training from the three wise monkeys – and missed out on the wisdom. Redknapp lights up a
room; a minute with him feels like a minute, not an hour. And if he sometimes goes on a bit no one cares, as he's writing the story better than you could yourself.

What often goes unnoticed is that Redknapp is also a master of misdirection. While everyone is busy having a good time, various inconvenient truths can be overlooked. Take the Lincoln game: it was played in the middle of a cold spell on the last weekend before Christmas. Several other league fixtures had been called off, so a rock-hard pitch can hardly have been unexpected. Yet no one in the Bournemouth back-room team had given the correct footwear a moment's thought. Once the players had arrived at the ground on the morning of the game there was even time for someone to nip out to a sports shop to kit out the team with the right trainers, or borrow some, if money was really that tight. But no one apparently noticed. The team was underprepared and the manager ultimately has to carry the can for that.

The same could be said for Redknapp's tactics. He joked that the reason Lincoln didn't win by even more was because they eased off, not because he tried to alter the formation to limit the damage. It was as if he was bewitched by the situation and unable to react. Even if a manager feels powerless and the situation is out of his control, he has to act as if there is something he could do differently and do it. Do something ... anything. If Plan A isn't working, then there must be a Plan B, if only to prove to the fans that you understand Plan A is a failure. But Redknapp didn't have a Plan B at Lincoln. You could forgive him for this; it was his first game in charge as caretaker manager, he was inexperienced and didn't know better. Yet it's worth bearing in mind because, for many Harry-watchers, it's a fault that often goes unnoticed to this day.

One of the reasons Redknapp's misdirections work so well is that they feel uncontrived. Sam Delaney is a journalist who once ghosted a magazine column for Redknapp and has also worked
extensively with celebrities and politicians. ‘Of all those I've observed at close quarters,' he says, ‘only Harry is right up there with Tony Blair and Katie Price as someone who understands his own brand. He has the gift of being able to perfectly communicate the message he wants to put across. He can get you to believe what he wants you to believe. There's nothing calculated about this. Unlike Blair, who would spend hours going through a speech, checking for nuance and practising his inflection and plausibility, I don't believe for a second Redknapp prepares what he's going to say in advance. What he does isn't an act, it's an innate talent; he just goes out there and says the first things that are in his head.'

That's partly what makes him so lovable; Redknapp is believable because, unlike other managers, he does actually believe what he's saying. It's just that what he believes is often not the whole story; it's the one that will get him the most laughs and show himself up in the most sympathetic light. Which makes keeping track of all those things he doesn't say every bit as important as the things he does when trying to understand Redknapp. Keep the text close and the subtext closer.

Redknapp might be a media natural, but it still took him a while to realize just how useful the press could be to him. ‘He was always good company, the life and soul,' says Pete Johnson, ‘but when he first took over at Bournemouth he didn't seem to appreciate how the relationship with the media could work to his advantage. It was only when I pointed out to him there were actually a couple of local journalists who were interested in what was going on at the club and that if he kept us in the loop he would have a much better chance of getting his point across. Once he understood that, there was no stopping him and he would call me frequently. And I was more than happy to talk to him at any time, because he had an instinctive nose for what kind of story I was after.'

There wasn't much of an improvement in the game following
the Lincoln fiasco, with Bournemouth losing 5-0 to Orient, but results began to pick up and Redknapp was on the verge of being offered the full-time job of manager when Walker sold the club. The new chairman, Anton Johnson, an erstwhile nightclub owner and full-time wheeler-dealer, and managing director Brian Tiler appointed Don Megson in his place. Redknapp considered an offer to be assistant manager at Brighton before deciding to stay at Bournemouth.

‘Meggy was a good bloke and I liked him,' said Redknapp. ‘But things didn't go so well for him at Bournemouth. The team was struggling and he fell out with Brian and Anton. Brian used to give him some grief. I don't think he thought Meggy was up for the job. After about eight months, Meggy got the bullet and, in October 1984, I was back in charge, this time not as caretaker.'

As so often with Redknapp, this apparently straightforward account of Megson's time in charge of the club – he got the job . . . the team did badly . . . he got sacked – bears a second reading. For what it doesn't say is whether Redknapp felt any personal responsibility for what was going wrong at the club. Sure, it was Megson's neck on the line, but a good number two should also be watching out for the number one. We get no idea if Redknapp was a loyal lieutenant to Megson, pointing out the things he thought were wrong with the team, or if he had actually got the hump at not being given the job in the first place and being quite happy to adopt a passive attitude by sitting back and letting Megson fail. Or, indeed, whether he was even aware that there might have been a possible subconscious conflict of interest.

Redknapp's appointment as Bournemouth manager owed as much to his friendship with Tiler and with him being a relatively cheap option – the club was short of cash at the time – as to a genuine belief in his managerial talent. At the time, the jury would still have been out on that; the feeling might have been that he couldn't do any worse than Megson as he knew the team
and stood as good a chance as any of keeping them in the Third Division. And if he didn't, then the club could get rid of him at the end of the season.

It's hard to get an accurate idea of what Redknapp's managerial style was like in his first season. Some former players described him as tactically naïve; others said that he had a very definite idea of how he wanted the team to play. His man-management skills were also up for interpretation. For some, he was the touchy-feely type, being one of the few managers whom players called ‘Harry' or ‘H' rather than ‘Gaffer' or ‘Boss'. Others simply felt frozen out.

‘Players often feel that the manager has favourites when they aren't playing,' says John Williams, the former Bournemouth central defender who now works for Radio Solent. ‘Harry wasn't the best at making me feel as if I was really important to the side when I was out injured and I did find it hard to deal with. But he wasn't the worst either. That's just the way it was back then. There wasn't the back-room staff to look after us. I'd just go in to the club to see the physio in the morning and then go home. I wouldn't necessarily see anyone else all week.

‘Harry wasn't the most brilliant tactician. More often than not, his instructions to me would be, “We've got some good players in midfield. Just give them the ball.” But I knew exactly what he meant. And he was quite fair. If you made a genuine mistake, he could live with it, but if he thought you weren't giving a hundred per cent, he would get stuck in and have a row. What he was good at was assembling a team to do a job. At Bournemouth, he put together a resilient side, capable of getting out of the Third Division. We weren't all the best ball players, but Harry could spot players with other strengths. Having said that, Bruce Rioch, the Middlesbrough manager, once said to me that the difference between Bournemouth and the other teams in the league was that we were a lot better off the ball. So there was some degree of organization.'