Always Managing: My Autobiography (29 page)

So how do I see my time at West Ham now? Well, looking at their fortunes since, first and most importantly, we were never relegated. They went down under John Lyall, under Billy Bonds before I arrived, and they have gone down twice since then – and some would argue were lucky not to go down in 2007, too, the year of the Carlos Tevez transfer. But West Ham were not a yo-yo club while I was in charge. We established ourselves as a strong Premier League team with ambitions to play in Europe. I always looked to sign guys who could play, like Paolo Di Canio, and the youngsters we brought through the club were players that people would pay to watch all day. There were times when we would just destroy teams, or win against the odds, like we did against Manchester United at Old Trafford in the FA Cup. We finished above Tottenham three years on the spin from 1997–98 to 1999–2000 and the team that went down two years later wouldn’t have ended up relegated had I been in charge, I’m sure of that.

We came fifth in 1997–98. Which doesn’t sound much compared to the achievements of Sir Alex Ferguson, but then we weren’t Manchester United. I wish West Ham well in their move to the Olympic Stadium but, even if they can fill a 50,000 seater arena, unless someone comes in with mega money to buy the club, I think my Premier League record finish is safe for a long time yet.

I first met Milan Mandaric during my time in America. New York Cosmos had the star players but Milan had the highest profile of any owner. To the Americans, who didn’t know much about football, he was as famous as Pelé or Franz Beckenbauer. The fans had been told those guys were big stars – but Milan was one of their own. A big hitter in business – his computer component company pioneered the boom that led to the creation of Silicon Valley – and a big personality in soccer. His first franchise was the San Jose Earthquakes and he built a team around good technical players from his homeland, then called Yugoslavia, and a scattering of well-known players from elsewhere: George Best, Jimmy Johnstone, Colin Bell and Vince Hilaire all played for San Jose while Milan was in charge, and it was always a great place to go.

They didn’t get huge crowds, less than 20,000, but it was a small ground so it never looked empty, the football was good and the atmosphere was very different. Milan had a guy called Crazy George who would come on to the pitch before the game with a tiger on a leash, or a bear, warming the crowd up. He would jump
on your dug-out and start banging it with a drum or beating the drum right in front of you. It was all good fun, and quite mad, but it made Milan the biggest noise in the North American Soccer League and people wanted to work for him. My friend Jimmy Gabriel was manager of San Jose while George Best was there, but it didn’t last.

Now Milan was chairman of Portsmouth, via Charleroi in Belgium and OGC Nice in France. Coincidentally, I met him when he was taking over the club. I was still manager of West Ham and had arranged to play a testimonial for the old Portsmouth kit man, who had been there fifty years. It was the week after the end of the season and, typical West Ham, I remember it causing a massive row with the players because they were all looking to get away and start their holidays. In the end, we sent a good team – Ian Wright, Frank Lampard, Rio Ferdinand – but the situation down at Portsmouth was desperate. They were close to shutting the gates on the club, I was told on the night. That was when I met Milan. Bob McNab, the old Arsenal player, had brought him over. ‘How are you going, Harry?’ he said. ‘I’m thinking of buying this club – what do you think?’

‘It’s a fantastic club in terms of tradition,’ I told him. ‘They had a great team after the war, with Jimmy Dickinson. If you could get it going again, they love their football team down here.’ I don’t know if that influenced his decision, but he ended up buying Portsmouth and saving it from administration.

Three years later and I hadn’t long left West Ham when he got in touch with an interesting offer. The call came from David Deacon, whose family used to own the club. He was very polite. ‘Harry, I hope you don’t mind me ringing, but Milan Mandaric
is looking for a director of football and would like you to meet him,’ said David. I told him I didn’t really know what a director of football was. When Terry Brown offered the role to Billy Bonds, I took it to mean more a club ambassador than a role with a defined duty. ‘Would you just come to the meeting and Milan will explain?’ Deacon pressed.

We arranged to meet for lunch the next day at Chewton Glen hotel in the New Forest. And it was lovely. We hit it off straight away. We talked football, he was very charming and he offered me the job that afternoon. He had interviewed another three or four managers, but in our brief time together he made his mind up. ‘Harry, I want you to take the job,’ he said.

I was still uncertain. ‘I don’t know, Milan,’ I told him. ‘What is it that I actually do?’

‘Your main responsibility will be to find players,’ he explained. That was something I knew I could do.

‘I can’t pay you the sort of money you were earning at West Ham; I cannot get anywhere near that,’ he continued. ‘But I’ll pay you a reasonable basic salary and ten per cent of any transfer profit we make from a player you have brought in.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘We’ll see how it goes.’

He was right about Portsmouth’s status. The club was certainly no West Ham. To be blunt, it was a dump. Fratton Park was old and decrepit, the training ground was horrible, and they were only getting about 10,000 fans to matches. The money wasn’t a huge issue for me, though, because Terry Brown had paid up my West Ham contract in full, and at least this way I stayed involved in the game.

Graham Rix was the manager and, understandably, my arrival put him on edge. His initial reaction, and again I understand this, was that I wasn’t welcome at the training ground, but that didn’t bother me: I didn’t see going there as part of my role anyway. What I became, basically, was Milan’s mate and his driver – a shoulder to lean on because he had spent millions saving Portsmouth from administration and, frankly, the place was going nowhere. Graham was a good lad and, I’m told, a good coach, but it wasn’t reflected in the results. Portsmouth had finished 20th in Division One (now the Championship) in 2000–01, a point above the relegated clubs. The next season wasn’t much better. After a promising start the club went steadily downhill and lost 4–1 at home to Leyton Orient in the FA Cup, having already been knocked out of the League Cup by Colchester United. At those times, my job, as well as chauffeur, was to keep Milan in check. I remember one game at West Bromwich Albion, when we were 5–0 down at half-time. ‘Right, Harry,’ said Milan, ‘we are going home.’

I told him we couldn’t go home. ‘You’ve got to go to the boardroom,’ I said. ‘We can’t all just walk out. It’s bad manners.’

‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I am ashamed.’

‘Look, Milan, we’re losing, we’re getting killed, I know that,’ I reasoned. ‘But West Brom are a good team and you’ve just got to accept it.’

In the end, I persuaded him not to lead the entire Portsmouth board in a walkout after 45 minutes and we stayed. Fortunately, West Brom lost interest in beating us up further and the score stayed at five. Even so, we didn’t hang around too long. Milan’s relationship with Graham was only heading one way.

I should have borrowed Bobby Moore’s old chaffeur’s cap, because that’s all I was in the early days. I would drive Milan, his friend Fred Dinenage – who used to present the television programme
How
– and another pal, Terry Brady (Karren’s dad) around the country to games. One Saturday, Milan was away on business, Terry couldn’t make it and Fred fell ill, and I ended up driving Mrs Dinenage, just the two of us, from the south coast to Rotherham United and back. This was not my idea of directing football. Directing traffic, maybe.

Indeed, I had only been at Portsmouth a few months when I was given the opportunity to escape and return to football as a manager. Leicester City had sacked Peter Taylor and they wanted me to replace him. There were four or five candidates, but I met John Elsom, the chairman, and he offered me the job. I had even agreed the appointment of backroom staff. I was taking Frank Lampard and the former Wimbledon manager Dave Bassett with me as assistants, and they had agreed their deals.

And then, when I drove home from Leicester on the Friday night, it took me five hours to get back to Dorset. All the way, stuck on the M1, I was thinking, ‘I don’t fancy this. We love where we live. We’ve got the grandchildren, we’ve got the dogs, I’m never going to see anybody. I’ll be up in Leicester all week, I’ll never get home.’ It was a journey and a half. And getting up the M1 is as bad as coming down. It was a nightmare, I had been told. I spoke to John Elsom again. He assured me it must be a bad day for traffic and that it would normally only take, at most, three and a half hours. Oh blimey. ‘Don’t worry,’ Mr Elsom said. ‘Martin O’Neill was our manager and he didn’t used to come in much at all. If we saw Martin at training through the week we thought he
had got lost, but on Friday and Saturday when he picked the team he did fantastic things.’

John loved Martin, but I knew I wasn’t the same kind of boss. If I was Leicester manager, I was going to be there every day. I changed my mind and turned down the position. I rang the chairman the next day, thanked him for the offer, but declined. Dave Bassett ended up taking it instead, had a complete nightmare, and got sacked the same season. For my sanity’s sake, I probably made the right move. Imagine five hours on the motorway after every defeat.

Yet in between driving Milan and friends around, I did find some good players for Portsmouth. Peter Crouch is the most famous one, for obvious reasons, but we also brought in Svetoslav Todorov from West Ham, Alessandro Zamperini from Roma and Robert Prosinečki, the great Croatian international. He was Milan’s best signing. What a fantastic player. He was in a different class to anything in that league. He might have been coming to the end of his career but I would have paid to watch Portsmouth every week, just for him. He reminded me of Paolo Di Canio in the way he could do things with the ball. He was a man apart, with frightening talent. We played at Barnsley one night, won 4–1, and the home supporters gave him a standing ovation as he came off with six minutes to go. I don’t care what the level of the opposition was, it remains one of the best individual performances I have seen. He was a genius. He’d make out to cross, jump, come back this way, the defender would stick his boot in, and he’d be gone. If you look at his record, he played for all the great clubs in Yugoslavia, plus Barcelona and Real Madrid. How he ended up with us, I’ll never know.

One scouting trip I do remember took me to Japan to watch a goalkeeper, Yoshi Kawaguchi. It was a long flight. I arrived exhausted, got straight on to a train, another hour and a half to the hotel, and then another train to get to the match in Yokohama. I didn’t know where I was by the end. The game started, and I fell asleep. I was completely wiped out. I kept trying to open my eyes but it was no use: I was gone. The agent was with me, and every now and then, he’d nudge me and say, ‘That was good save, Mr Redknapp,’ and I’d say, ‘Oh yeah, good save,’ and pretend I had seen it, but in 90 minutes I don’t think I remember him touching the ball. I was fighting to keep my eyes open but whenever I did he wasn’t in the game. His team won easily, 3–0. After the match, I met him for dinner and quickly realised I was in the presence of a bona fide Japanese superstar. He was a nice kid, a good-looking boy as well, and everybody in the restaurant was all over him. They all wanted pictures with Yoshi. I could see why Milan had the hots for him straight away. He thought Portsmouth would make a fortune commercially in the Japanese market with Yoshi on the books. Some years later, he ended up the captain of Japan.

Back in England I told Milan it was hard to make a judgement because Yoshi wasn’t involved in much action. I didn’t have the heart to tell him the Rip Van Redknapp story. ‘He hasn’t touched the ball,’ I said. ‘The only thing we can do is get him over on trial.’

So we did, and he worked with our goalkeeping coach, Alan Knight, who wasn’t keen. Milan, however, wasn’t looking for a goalkeeper as much as a business proposition, and we ended up paying £1.8 million for him, which was a club record at the time. Sadly, Yoshi never settled in to English football. It was too physical
for him and he eventually played most of his career in Japan, where I’m sure he is still a hero.

The rest of my time as director of football was spent listening to Milan moan about Graham Rix. We’d sit in the directors’ box together and, if the team didn’t win, Milan would stomp back inside and slaughter Graham, sometimes to his face. Graham would just sit there and take it, but I would have to move away, embarrassed. I didn’t want to be involved in that but, from the other end of the room, I could still hear Milan going off. ‘This is rubbish, why am I paying for this rubbish?’ I thought Crouch would help us – he was a player Graham liked, too – but although he did well, the team continued to struggle. Portsmouth were second after seven games, but with twelve matches to go had fallen to 17th and Milan was genuinely concerned we would go down. He was putting considerable pressure on me to get involved.