Harry Redknapp - Loyal to the Last

Sean O'Conor

"I'll buy my own players, make my own decisions - good or bad - and he must get on with it."

Harry Redknapp's fighting talk last week on announcing he was joining Southampton after leaving local arch-rivals Portsmouth was spoken from the heart. The cockney coach is an old-style a manager as they come: Arrogant, strong-minded and unquestionably the boss.

He has no time for the increasingly popular ‘continental-style' set-up with a director of football overseeing transfers, contracts and the various teams at the club whilst the ‘manager', as coaches are traditionally termed in England, is confined to coaching the first team.

Redknapp's departure from Fratton Park was in many ways a tragedy after having a barnstorming two and a half seasons at Portsmouth which saw them get promoted and then consolidate a place in the Premiership having some famous victories along the way and invigorating a previously moribund club and set of fans. The Pompey chimes were truly ringing under ‘Arry like they had not done since their last spell in the top flight at the end of the eighties.

But personality clashes often upend the best-laid tables in football and chairman Milan Mandaric's appointment of Velimir Zajec as a director of football made Redknapp throw a tantrum which ended up with him storming out, citing the old cliché of irreconcilable differences. The only thing was, Zajec and he had yet to work together. It was perhaps the same as Henry VIII deciding to divorce Anne of Cleves on his wedding day.

Yet although the manager-director of football symbiosis between Jacques Santini and Frank Arnesen caused the Spurs coach to leave his job only weeks earlier, Redknapp's fury over the very idea of a man ‘above' him was still extraordinary.

“You tell me one time in England when a manager and a director of football combination has worked,” he fumed when it became clear he was no longer going to have free rein over Fratton Park.

After all, no-one seems to have mentioned the fact that it was as Director of Football that Redknapp himself came to Portsmouth in the first place in 2001 before taking over the coaching from Graham Rix a year later.

The truth of the matter lies in the second half of his next sentence: "I've not seen the manager/director of football link-up work and we don't know each other."

Harry Redknapp the man was illuminated for all to see in Tom Bower's remarkable and devastating book “Broken Dreams – Vanity, Greed and the Souring of British Football”, which won the William Hill Sports book of the Year in 2003. Devoting an entire chapter to Redknapp, Bower, a well-known investigative journalist, paints a picture of an exceedingly greedy and apparently wholly unscrupulous individual with no loyalty to anyone but himself and his bank balance. “Readies Redknapp” unashamedly admits in the book, “Don't rip anybody off but if there's a chance to earn a few quid take it”.

He lives perhaps the most extravagant of lifestyles of any Premiership manager from his mansion in the millionaires' row encircling Poole Harbour in Dorset, recently listed as one of the highest concentrations of wealth per square metre on the planet. It was a far cry from the East End barrow boy and used car salesman whose father was a docker.

Whilst having his own way he seems oblivious to the obvious hypocrisies: He insisted as West Ham boss he would never let Rio Ferdinand leave before urging his chairman to sell him to Leeds United, for which Redknapp earned £300,000 according to Bower.

He claimed there was no drinking culture at Upton Park and then complained his foreign players' teetotalism was hurting team morale. He criticised Duncan Ferguson's violent conduct whilst defending his own player John Hartson's and now he has joined arch-rivals Southampton barely two weeks after leaving Portsmouth whom he professed to love to death.

“Harry made his demands and he got them,” complained Bournemouth's financial advisor Roy Pack, after Redknapp left the club relegated and £4.4million in debt.

His tenure at West Ham produced some outstanding young players in Rio Ferdinand, Joe Cole and Frank Lampard but also a bizarre succession of expensive signings of mediocre and often ageing players from Europe that the club earned the soubriquet “West Ham United Nations”.

These acquisitions included Florin Raducioiu, who famously went shopping at Harvey Nichols when he should have been playing, Paulo Futre, who was clearly past his best and quickly succumbed to injury, and Marco Boogers, who was certified too mentally unstable to play.

Redknapp was clearly up to something as the training ground was awash with agents on their mobile phones and the manager was frequently seen with them in exclusive London restaurants. West Ham had had enough of his profligacy and decided to fire “'Arry the ‘Ammer” when he demanded a further £12 million for transfers in 2001.

Although illegal commissions from transfers have never definitively been linked to Redknapp, if it true that there is no smoke without fire then there must have been a conflagration given the plume of smoke hanging over his business methods. Only someone exceptionally naive or with something to hide would claim ignorance over Terry Venables' wrongdoings in the transfer market and insist Brian Clough was “totally innocent” of similar shady dealing.

Money seems to dictate everything in the Premiership and there is little or no loyalty in football as a whole these days, thanks to the lack of a salary cap. Pompey fans are thus charmingly deluded in their anger at Southampton's appointing of ‘their' man, especially as that man was Harry Redknapp. At the same time Redknapp deserves some level of opprobrium when the two sides meet again in April. Mark your calendars now.

Whatever he has done or alleged to have done, Redknapp is back in charge of a Premiership club again, albeit one staring relegation in the face, ten points and nine places behind his last club Portsmouth.

It seems a curious marriage for the aristocratic and penny-pinching Saints chairman Rupert Lowe to have hired the wide-boy with a burning wallet but he has pursued Redknapp before, when he first left West Ham in 2001.

There promises to be more fireworks for the neutral to savour on the South coast and I am sure this union will end in glorious acrimony given the colourful character we are dealing with. Rather like a couple announcing they are planning their divorce before they have started their honeymoon, Redknapp ominously proclaimed before his first match in charge:
"It is his (Rupert Lowe's) club and he seems a nice man but how is he going to poke his nose in? He knows the job I have to do.”

Sean O'Conor

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