Harry's Games (2 page)

Even more to the point, these were delicate times for Redknapp. With the trial over and his future up for grabs, Redknapp's advisers would be giving him a crash course in being as bland as possible, so even if he did give me an interview he would be bound to say next to nothing and still require copy approval of anything I wrote. So, much as I personally couldn't think of anything better
than hanging around the Spurs training camp and shooting the breeze with Redknapp, I had to accept it would be a waste of time for both of us. Another time, another book, maybe.

In any case, I didn't want to write a standard biography. Most of the important events of Redknapp's life were already public knowledge and trawling through his career, season by season, looked unlikely to turn up anything new. One of the most interesting men in football deserved better than that. I didn't want to indulge in either empty praise or bitchy back-stabbing – I wanted to understand Redknapp, to think about what he had achieved, to see how many different Redknapps there actually were and whether they could be unified into a consistent, if complex, whole. And given that the first six months of his sixty-sixth year were shaping up to be as dramatic as the previous sixty-five years put together, it would be especially fascinating to watch the present unfold and piece together just how much it was informed by the past.

But how to do it? Like many football fans, I've wasted rather too much time thinking about the managers of the club I support; in my case, Spurs. The manager is the club's heartbeat, the man who gets the credit when things go well and gets a kicking when they don't; he is the club's most visible symbol. So over the years, I've thought a great deal about Bill Nicholson, Keith Burkinshaw and Martin Jol and spent as much time trying to forget others, such as George Graham, Christian Gross and Jacques Santini. But of all the Spurs managers whose teams I've watched, I've spent more time thinking about Harry Redknapp than anyone else, principally because he's infuriating – yes; intoxicating – yes; heartbreaking – yes; embarrassing – yes. But dull? Definitely not. He's rarely out of the newspapers and his teams switch from the divine to the incompetent in the blink of an eye. Redknapp is nothing if not watchable.

Football specializes in narratives that are either dramatic or
sentimental. Last-minute equalizers, heroic underdogs and comeback kids are its lifeblood. It has no time for the narratives that are more mundane, the everyday unremarkable ups and downs of unremarkable games in unremarkable seasons. Yet these are precisely the narratives that committed football fans live and breathe. Newspapers don't care what a manager said a month ago, or even a week ago; all that matters is the next fixture, the next press conference, the next deadline. The only time a manager is held to account for the past is when he's sacked, and even then the slate is wiped clean within seconds, with everyone's attention focused on his replacement.

But fans remember the little things. They remember if a manager says he was going to buy a new striker and doesn't; they remember the bad substitutions; and, along with the triumphs, they keep a running tally of the chinks, the inconsistencies and the contradictions in the narrative. They make the connections others miss. And right from the start of his time at Spurs, it became clear that Redknapp would be worth watching as much for the way the team played under him as for his subtle manipulations of history.

Spurs were bottom of the Premier League with just two points from eight games when Redknapp took over as manager in October 2008; by Christmas, the team was comfortably positioned in mid-table and the football world had come to accept as gospel Redknapp's frequent assertions that he had turned a rubbish side into a good one. Everyone except the hardcore Spurs fans, that is. The way Redknapp had been talking, you could easily have believed he had taken over Northampton Town rather than the club that, in the three previous seasons before his arrival, had finished fifth in the Premier League twice and won the Carling Cup with near enough the same squad. Spurs weren't a bad team made good; Spurs were a decent team who had been playing badly.

That may sound like semantics, but it's not. It's an important, if
subtle, difference that was largely overshadowed by Redknapp's more dramatic and self-serving account. It wasn't that Redknapp's version was an outright lie; it was just that it was only about eighty per cent of the truth; and it was the other twenty per cent that was the most interesting and was the true connection between the past under Jol and Ramos and the present under Redknapp. After that, Harry-watching became an essential weekly pastime. The man was so charming, and his teams sometimes so good, that you'd find yourself believing anything given half a chance . . . and enjoy doing it.

There were practical drawbacks to relying on Harry-watching for the connections. Most obviously, I'd only become a proper Harry-watcher when he came to Spurs. Before that, he had just been another – if somewhat livelier than most – football manager. What I knew about him had all come from newspapers and I'd probably forgotten most of it. So I decided to track down the other Harry-watchers: the old-school, hardcore Bournemouth, West Ham, Portsmouth and Southampton faithful who had been paying good money to watch their teams long before Redknapp came on the scene and had continued to do so long after he had left. Like me, they would have observed Redknapp with an affectionate, yet objective, eye and remembered the connections others had missed.

And why stop there? It was time to track down the old local sports reporters who had turned up at deserted press conferences when no one from the national media would give Redknapp air time. Or talk to a sports psychologist who had worked closely with footballers from all divisions. And perhaps talk to the minor characters in the Redknapp story, people who had seen a lot but had previously said little. Put together all these people along with some of those who had had first-hand experience of Redknapp and I might just make sense of the man himself.

I talked to a football club chairman about my plan. I was
expecting him to knock it, to wheel out the usual canards that only those who have played the game or been on the inside of it are qualified to talk about it. But he didn't. ‘The supporters who watch the team week in, week out, home and away, aren't stupid,' he said. ‘They know their club and can see quite clearly what's working well and what's not. You can't pull the wool over their eyes. People sometimes try to make out football is a tremendously complicated game. It's not. If it was that complicated, most of the players wouldn't be able to make a living out of it.'

Traditional methods of biography hadn't really come close to pinning Redknapp down. He had remained everyman and no man, an elusive character in whom everyone saw the reflection that suited them. So maybe a less orthodox approach might just work. It might not reach the whole truth of Redknapp, but it would hopefully capture a truth – a recognizable, if different, truth. And if it didn't, then I'd be no worse off than anyone else who'd looked for the meaning of Harry Redknapp. At the very least, the journey couldn't fail to be fun and interesting. Just like Redknapp.

Some of the material I obtained in this way was eye-opening. Another chairman of a football club Redknapp had managed – he, too, would only speak anonymously – said, ‘Harry is a nice enough guy. You can have a lot of fun with him and he's certainly no worse or better than any other manager. What you've got to remember, though, is this: football isn't as bad as people say it is. It's ten times worse. The manager and the players are all in it just for themselves. The game should be called “selfish” not “football”. The only way to survive is to trust no one. That was my mistake. I did trust and it just about bankrupted me.'

Other stories and observations were just too potentially libellous to use. They may or may not have been true. But no one would put their name to them and, as Redknapp generates at least as many fictional stories as factual, I couldn't take a chance.

One remark did stand out, though, because it just about summed up everyone's feelings about Redknapp. It came from a former player who had been managed by Redknapp: ‘He's the best manager I ever played for and I can't help loving him. If I had a chance to sign for him again tomorrow, I would. But he can also be a complete arsehole.'

‘A true Cockney' . . . ‘Times were hard but we never went without' . . . ‘Always had a smile on his face' . . . ‘There was always a lot of love around' . . . These are just some of the standard, catchall phrases that everyone – Redknapp included – tends to trot out to describe his childhood, an easy shorthand for the typical working-class East End, post-Second World War upbringing that has become lodged in the national consciousness of those who didn't have to live it. Remember those feel-good Pathé newsreels of cheeky ten-year-old boys in shorts playing on old bomb sites without a care in the world? One of them could have been our Harry.

That isn't to say that Redknapp didn't have a reasonably happy childhood, or that his was any better or worse than many others growing up in the East End at the same time. Rather, that to sugar-coat it in a familiar sentimental gloss is to miss an important part of the picture. Redknapp was born on 2 March 1947, the only child of Harry (senior) and Violet. His father was a docker and decent amateur footballer and his mother worked for the Co-op. His grandmother, Violet, who made Harry his dinner when he came home from school, was a bookie's runner and often in trouble with the law. ‘Quite often my nan would be
getting carted away in a police car,' Redknapp once said. ‘ “Your dinner's in the oven,” she'd shout to me. “These bastards won't keep me for long. I'll be home in an hour, boy.” The police would have her down the station for a couple of hours, warn her off, and then she'd be back and do exactly the same again. They never put her off. She loved it.'

You couldn't have come up with a more stereotypical East End version of Redknapp's childhood: the ducking, the diving, the smooth-talking patter to dodge trouble . . . here it all was, handed down from one generation to the next. Redknapp makes it sound attractive – fun even – to have been a working-class boy in postwar London. So it probably was at times, but the more so in memory because it must also have been tough growing up in a family where rationing was severe and money was short. It must also have been frightening for him to see his grandmother being carted off by the cops on a regular basis. What ten-year-old child wouldn't be a bit scared? What most kids want most is to feel secure, for life to be predictable. Redknapp's was anything but.

And what of his parents? Harry's father had been a Prisoner of War and must have returned home scarred in some way. He must have seen and experienced things that would have had a profound impact on his subsequent relationships. The same would have been true of his mother, to a lesser extent, having experienced the uncertainty, terror and personal loss that the war meant on the home front. No one could go through something as extreme as that and expect to emerge easily able to form normal, healthy relationships; indeed, a whole generation was similarly traumatized.

Something had to give and the breaking point varied from person to person. But it's worth observing that those who work hardest to create an image of happiness about themselves are often those in whom the need to do so is greatest, as they are those for whom the idea of unhappiness is least bearable.

Taking Redknapp at face value is almost always a mistake; he's a far more complex man than he would want the world to think. Listen to Redknapp talking to the media with a big smile and his easy one-liners and you might be lulled into thinking he's a man with boundless self-confidence, a man who can handle himself in any situation. And so he can, but what if the way he handles himself isn't through self-confidence so much as learned bravado? Perhaps a big smile and a smooth patter were the principal tools of his trade out on the streets, the way he dealt with awkward situations. And perhaps he learned to keep his more vulnerable feelings hidden and chose instead to present to the outside world the versions of himself he thought people wanted to see. It would certainly make Redknapp a more interesting and attractive character; someone for whom it is easier to feel empathy. And it would also make a great deal more sense of the apparent contradictions his critics are often only too quick to expose.

Many Spurs fans gave a hollow laugh when Redknapp went out of his way to stress his connections to the club after his appointment as manager in 2008 by saying, ‘I am a big follower of the history of the game and Tottenham have been a great club over the years. I followed Tottenham, I trained there as an eleven-and twelve-year-old so I know the history of the club . . .' Those Spurs fans remembered that in earlier versions of his life he had claimed he and his father were ‘avid fans' of the North London club's main rival, Arsenal, and suspected it was this attachment that was the more real.

Redknapp's bullshit was soon smelt out. Most fans have little time for false protestations of loyalty; they understand that everyone in football is in the game to make a living and much prefer a manager who talks straight – ‘I've come to the club because it's a good move for me and I'll do my best to get the results everyone wants' – than one who trades in pathos and sentiment. Those two qualities are the preserve of the fans alone. So Redknapp's
arrival at Spurs immediately caused suspicions that he was a man not necessarily to be trusted, a man whom the fans should handle with caution.

Was it bullshit? His long-term affection for Spurs was unquestionably, at best, a very partial truth, but bullshit requires some intentionality. Was Redknapp deliberately trying to hoodwink the fans or was he just saying something he thought would go down well? There is a distinction to be made. Redknapp wouldn't thank anyone for suggesting he had anything less than an idyllic childhood – he has an image to protect – but, given everything that was going on, he can't have felt as secure as all that. And insecure children tend to grow into people-pleasing adults. They have learned the necessary mechanisms to hide their vulnerability, and the automatic response to any new and unfamiliar situation is to avoid any possible conflict by saying whatever they feel is required: a joke, a half-truth, whatever. It's worth bearing in mind, given the question marks raised over his loyalty and integrity at various points throughout his career.