Harry Redknapp - The Biography by Roopanarine Les

Author:Roopanarine, Les [Les Roopanarine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781843589426
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2012-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

They say a week is a long time in football; to Harry Redknapp, it must seem like an eternity. His wife, Sandra, once suggested his life story should be entitled Never A Dull Moment. It is easy to see why. In the forty-three days that elapsed between Redknapp’s departure from West Ham and his re-emergence as Portsmouth’s director of football, he maintained a frenetic level of activity. He ‘sat down, had a glass of wine and talked football’ with the Southampton chairman, Rupert Lowe, who was looking for a new manager after Glenn Hoddle’s defection to Spurs. He joined his son, Jamie, in supporting a campaign to raise awareness of testicular cancer. He enjoyed a day out at the races in Salisbury with Alan Hudson. He reportedly became a target for non-league Yeovil. He took up an informal scouting role with Notts County, where his old West Ham pal Peter Storrie, the executive deputy chairman, enthused about his ‘knowledge of the game’ and ability to ‘throw a few names to us’. He maintained a high media profile, continuing to write his regular Racing Post columns while pontificating on a bewildering array of subjects elsewhere in the national press. Frank Lampard’s switch to Chelsea? ‘It’s a smashing move, he will be perfect for them.’ West Ham’s struggle to find a new manager? ‘I would have thought that people would be falling over backwards to take the job.’ Glenn Roeder, his eventual Upton Park successor? ‘You couldn’t meet a nicer fellow.’ Like a beaten prize fighter refusing to look back, Redknapp, so recently laid out on the Upton Park canvas, was keeping busy.

Nor did he eschew the bright lights of the television studio. In a Channel Four documentary, Redknapp described the corrosive effect of foreign players on traditional team spirit. ‘In the old days you’d have a golf day, or a day at the races, and we’d all go out and have a crack,’ he said. ‘Then maybe on the way home you’d stop at a pub somewhere and have a drink. But with the foreign players it’s more and more difficult. Most of them don’t even bother with the golf, and they don’t want to go racing. They don’t even drink, most of them. So the sort of team spirit you could get a few years ago has disappeared.’

Redknapp was harking back to an era when drinking was so commonplace among players that, from a manager’s perspective, it was more easily harnessed as a mechanism of team bonding than contained. Ron Atkinson, for instance, routinely turned a blind eye to the institutionalised drink culture at Manchester United, allowing his players to enjoy benders of epic intensity so long as their bar-room bonhomie was indulged at a safe distance from match days. Memorably, Brian Clough even instigated the drinking on occasion, most famously when he plied his Nottingham Forest players with champagne the night before the 1979 League Cup final in a bid to ease pre-match tension. Thirty years on from Forest’s nerveless if bleary-eyed victory over Southampton, a similar scenario is unimaginable.

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