Always Managing: My Autobiography (23 page)

He used to ask me back sometimes to help him, because I was a quick winger. At first, if I pushed the ball past him, I could
give him five yards start and still meet it first. Ron was right – he couldn’t run. Yet the more he got those spikes working, the quicker he got, and by the end he would take me on in a proper race. And when he had finished his hour or so at the training ground, he would get home and run again. He’d put a sweat suit on and go on a four-mile run. Sometimes he wore a sweat suit for his sprints, too. And he never missed a day. I can picture him now, walking out from the changing room with his spikes, in the opposite direction to the rest of the players, who were coming in. Typical footballers, they all took the mickey. ‘Look at him, who is he trying to impress …’ But Frank did not give a monkey’s about any of them. He had a determination that was unbelievable. You got in his way, and he would trample all over you. And his boy was exactly the same.

I remember when he came to the club. Just like his dad: technically a good little player, but a bit dumpy, and not quick. The next time I saw him, he had spikes on. It was like watching old Frank all over again. He would practise for two hours like that every day. And what an athlete he became. Recently a clip of an old fans’ forum at West Ham surfaced on YouTube. There was a supporter taking me to task for picking Frank Junior. It made interesting viewing with the benefit of hindsight:

Fan: I’d like to ask Harry if the publicity he has given young Frank here warrants it because, personally, I don’t think he’s quite good enough yet. In the last couple of years you’ve let some good midfielders go for peanuts, like Matt Holland and Scott Canham.

Harry: No, they definitely weren’t good enough. He is good enough, and he definitely will be good enough. I let Scott Canham go, he was a good kid and worked very hard; he’s gone to Brentford and he can’t get in Brentford’s team. He’s 21 and I let him go because young Frank is 17 or 18, and he’s miles in front of him.

Fan: Well, that ain’t really true.

Harry: That is true. That’s my opinion and that’s why I get paid to make judgements on players. It’s a game of opinions. You’ve got a right to your opinion, but I’ve also got a right to my opinion. I keep the players I want to keep. Young Matt Holland – yes, I think he may bounce back and may be First Division. He’s a decent player – and young Scott Canham is a decent player, don’t get me wrong. He’s a decent young player, we offered him a two-year contract and he didn’t want to stay. But we can sit here in front of all these people and I’ll tell you now without any shadow of a doubt, there will be no comparison between what Frank Lampard will achieve in football and what Scott Canham will achieve in football.

Fan: But you’re giving him the opportunity.

Harry: I don’t give him the opportunity. There is no favouritism; in fact, I’m probably holding him back more because I’ll tell you what—

Fan: You played him at Arsenal when he clearly wasn’t ready to play.

Harry: I don’t think he did badly at Arsenal: I think he came into the side and I felt the kid did well. But I’m telling you now, and I didn’t want to say this in front of him, but he will go right to the very top, right to the very top, because he’s got everything that’s needed to become a top-class midfield player. His attitude is first class, he’s got strength, he can pass it, he can play and he can score goals.

Fan: Well, I do go to reserve games, so I do know.

Harry: I’m not saying you don’t. It’s your opinion. It’s fine, but this is my opinion and I couldn’t feel more strongly.

I should be a fortune-teller, eh? I know I come across forcefully there, but I had absolute certainty in my opinions. It wasn’t even an argument, really. Those fans who had it in for Frank hadn’t seen how hard his dad worked to get to the top, so didn’t know I had identified exactly the same qualities in his son. By then, we had all noticed how outstanding Frank’s attitude was. He loved football, he wanted to be a player, and he had that essential determination. Rio Ferdinand was very similar. Early on in his time at the club, I remember sitting down with him and his little group at the training ground, with Rio quizzing me on what the players ate before matches, what boots they wore; he wanted to know it all. ‘What does Paolo Di Canio eat, Harry?’ I remember he was fascinated by the way Di Canio stayed so fit. I just sat there talking
to those lads for hours, with Rio leading the way, asking about everything. ‘What was Bobby Moore like, Harry?’ He’d seen a big picture of Bobby on the wall, then gone off and read about him. That group was great to deal with. Rio and Frank were mates, and they drove each other on; they were both excellent trainers, both good influences.

Certainly, Frank’s attitude would have inspired a lot of boys at the time, because I’ve never seen anyone work harder. There wasn’t a day when he wouldn’t do extra. I remember one week he went away to play for the England under-18 team. It was quite a long journey across Europe and they didn’t get home until about 3 a.m. The next morning, the first one in at Chadwell Heath was Frank Junior. Very impressive. Then, later in the afternoon, when everybody had gone home after training, I looked out of the window and I could see a lonely figure, as far away across the field as possible. By then it was lashing down with rain, and I couldn’t make out who it was. I thought some local kid had climbed over the fence to do a bit of practice. Running with the ball, and sprints. An hour later, he was still there in the rain, this nutter. I looked again, more closely the second time. It was Frank. Home in the small hours, first in, last out. Spikes on, just like his dad. An amazing talent.

I feel very upset about the way Frank is treated by West Ham supporters now. After Joe Cole left he would return to a standing ovation – the same with Rio Ferdinand – but the abuse they used to give Frank was merciless. I have never understood what he is supposed to have done wrong. When they got rid of me in 2001, they kicked Frank Senior out as well and, unsurprisingly, having seen his dad and uncle sacked, Frank Junior didn’t want to be there. Glenn Roeder, the new manager, saw it could be difficult and was
happy to let him go. The club got good money from Chelsea for him. What was the problem? I think people were often suspicious, resentful or just plain jealous of Frank. Even when he was playing well, I would sometimes have the oddest conversations about him. I can remember one match at home, when we were just hanging on to a 2–1 lead, and I introduced him late to give us some energy and keep the ball, which he did. It was an important game, a big win for us, but afterwards Terry Brown accused me of only playing Frank to get him some appearance money. I was furious. Frank Senior was coming up the stairs as the row broke out, but he could do nothing to calm me down.

‘That’s right,’ I told Terry. ‘His dad’s got two hundred houses. When we were playing snooker at 17, he was out buying houses; he’s got a fucking property empire – he probably owns half of the East End of London, but I thought, “I’ll bring Frank on – he probably needs a hundred quid.” I didn’t care that the people behind me were giving me grief like you’ve never heard, or that I’d get absolutely fucking slaughtered if we drew the game, I just thought, “No, what matters is that Frank comes on for fifteen minutes and cops a hundred quid.” Are you sure, Terry? Or are you mad? Because if that’s really what you think we should book you in with a psychiatrist, because I don’t think you’re right in the fucking head.’

And that’s still the polite version of the conversation. Frank said he couldn’t believe I was talking to the chairman like that, but I had lost it. So if that was the attitude of the board, no wonder young Frank got such horrific abuse from the fans. I would have expected people inside the club to have thought more sensibly about him, though.

I certainly have never enjoyed having him on the other side. Box to box, box to box, that’s what you get from Frank. When I was at Portsmouth we played against him at Stamford Bridge. He headed a corner out of Chelsea’s penalty area, then ran ninety yards to get on the end of a cross. The ball came into our box, and who was there to put it in? Frank. And I’m told he is the same now as he was as a kid. Practice, practice, practice. Always determined, always the last to leave the training field, according to his managers. Take the ball to the left of a cone – bang. Take it to the right of a cone – bang. Left-foot shot, right-foot shot, twenty-five yards, then thirty yards. Take a cross down and hit it. Still doing his sprints; every day he’s got his spikes on. He is his father’s son, except with greater natural talent; and he has made himself into an unbelievable player, among the best in the world. I’d say there is no one like him – but there was one bloke.

I am proud of my seven years at West Ham, but it wasn’t always easy. The game was changing and the days of sending out eleven boys from the East End – or eleven British players at least – were over. This was never going to be an issue for the manager of Bournemouth, but as a Premier League boss, I had to learn how to blend the different nationalities, and learn fast. I inherited a club that could never be sure of its place in the top division from one year to the next. We were down the bottom of the league most seasons and couldn’t always afford to play the best football. The domestic market, at that time, had grown ludicrously expensive. It wasn’t like going into Tottenham Hotspur fourteen years later and looking around the dressing room to see Luka Modrić and Aaron Lennon, players that could change a match. We had Trevor Morley as our striker, often on his own. The youth system was great, eventually, but no manager, not even Sir Alex Ferguson, could send out eleven kids and hope to win – no matter how good they were.

You can’t simply walk into a failing club and turn it around with the same group. I knew I had to buy and I know, looking
back, that some of those buys were controversial, but what was our alternative? I could either hold fast in the arrogant belief that I was some super coach who could turn rubbish into a good team, or I could do something about it. At various times, I decided I had to take drastic action to improve the team and, if I hadn’t, West Ham would have gone down.

If I had to pick out one favourite signing from my time at West Ham it would be Paolo Di Canio; and getting him to rub along with the extremes of football culture in England was one of the biggest challenges of my career. I took him in 1999, after he had served an eleven-match ban for pushing over referee Paul Alcock. Paolo was cheap at £1.7 million, but a lot of people thought I was mad. One newspaper wrote that I was walking a tightrope without a safety net – but I couldn’t understand the fuss. The way I saw it, we were getting a great footballer for a bargain price – there was no down side. And Paolo was a great player for West Ham, so much so that they still have a function room named after him at Upton Park. Yet was he easy to deal with? You’ve seen him – what do you think? Paolo couldn’t understand why some of the British players, like our central defender Neil Ruddock, for instance, did not share his approach.

He had such a focused outlook that even the slightest disturbance on the training field would send him into a rage. He would come storming off. ‘Hey, fucking gaffer, hey boss! We are warming up, we are supposed to be stretching. Razor Ruddock, he is talking about drinking last night, he is talking about shagging – how can this be right? This is not right. Johnny Moncur, he is fucking laughing, he is meant to be concentrating. What is going on?’

And out I’d go. ‘All right, Paolo, I’ll sort it.’

He was high maintenance, but I told the young lads to watch and learn. Paolo was as fit as a fiddle, a fanatic about conditioning. He used to come in every Sunday to work with his personal fitness coach, and stay for at least two hours. He wasn’t a drinker – just the occasional glass of wine – and he ate all the right foods. That was what the best foreign footballers brought to this country: a serious athletic approach. Before that, there was just a drinking culture, from the bottom up. You would meet 16-year-old kids, who had not even played a game, and who thought football was about putting away as much lager as you could handle all week and then having a match on the Saturday. Players like Paolo stopped that, they helped others make the change. So, while taking him was a gamble, he soon showed he was an amazing talent and a great influence.

Something had to alter because English football could not carry on like it had. The rest of Europe had adopted a more professional approach, but we were still stuck in the old ways. If anything, things had moved on from a few lagers on the train home: at one time there was a spell when West Ham’s players would smuggle hard alcohol on to the team bus, with bottles of brandy being passed around at the back. The smarter ones would mix up concoctions in plastic bottles and pretend they were only having soft drinks, but inside was brandy or vodka, with Coke. One night we took a team down to play a testimonial at Dorchester Town, a club in the Conference South. We stayed at a hotel, and when we made to leave at 5 p.m. several of the team were missing – Iain Dowie, John Moncur, Don Hutchison – all nowhere to be seen. We didn’t have a clue where they were until they turned up about thirty minutes before kick-off, absolutely legless. I couldn’t do anything then, but when the game had finished we had murders. Sure, it
was only a testimonial, but a lot of people had turned out to see West Ham play, and what they did showed no respect. It should have been a great night; instead, I hired a driver and sent them all home. Football was a different game by then, and we couldn’t have players on the booze – the supporters expected more.