Always Managing: My Autobiography (38 page)

‘Gaffer, I can’t move,’ he said.

I thought he was joking. ‘Right, get your bags,’ I told him. ‘We’ve got to go.’

‘I told you,’ he said. ‘I can’t move.’

Our doctor reckoned his body had gone into mild shock with the exhaustion. We had to lift him up – it took a few of us – put him
in a wheelchair and get him out to his car that way. Then we hoisted him into the passenger seat and our masseur drove him home. He was one of those players that had to be handled differently. He used to ring me at 11.30 p.m. every Sunday, because he knew I’d be in bed, and leave a message on my answering machine. ‘Hello, Gaffer, it’s the King. I won’t be training tomorrow …’ and there would follow that week’s excuse. He had an upset tummy, his knee was hurting, he just don’t feel good, his calves have tightened up. Every week, without fail. It was fair to say he didn’t like Mondays.

He still lived in London and, basically, he wasn’t going to schlep to Portsmouth just for a warm-down. We would see him the next day, when training got serious. Some players are like that. You have to apply different rules. Paul Merson was another that needed kidding, so was Sol Campbell. Sol liked a massage rather than training some days, but I could live with that – providing the player was doing it on Saturday. They knew, if they put it in, they could get a little special treatment. I didn’t have a problem with it. Never have. With some players it will always be about the Saturday. Merson, or Kanu, couldn’t be bothered through the week, but they would come in on Saturday and win the game. Do that, and I won’t care if you feel a bit stiff and cry off on Tuesday – and I think most managers are the same. I am quite certain that if Ryan Giggs tells David Moyes he would rather have a rub down than train, he will be cut a little slack. Those players have been around. The manager knows they are not trying to dodge training. It is about peaking at the right time, and Giggs will know how to get the best out of his body by now. Saturday is when you keep your job in football. If you can’t get Saturday right, it doesn’t matter whether Monday to Friday was fantastic – you are going to be out
of work. A manager has to know his players. It is about getting the best out of them in matches – and the different methods you use to achieve that are really immaterial. Kanu was probably the greatest example of a player that needed to be nurtured in a unique way. He would mope around all week, and then have a day when he blew the opposition away on his own. And for a player who was finished in 2003 according to Arsenal, he was still turning out for Portsmouth in the 2011–12 season. Kanu was another who was instrumental in our FA Cup win, scoring the only goal of the game in the semi-final and the final.

So we got good value, at first, for very little expenditure. I remember Sacha even joking with me about it. ‘Everyone tells me you like to spend money,’ he said, ‘but you don’t. Why? What is the matter? Are you not well?’ I think he was impatient for some big-name arrivals, but I wanted value. Glen Johnson eventually cost us £4 million – but we did have him for the first year on loan. And we sold him to Liverpool for £17.5 million.

That is what I truly do not understand about Portsmouth’s financial plight. Yes, we did invest in the team – but the money we made on those players by comparison was enormous. Lassana Diarra cost us £5.5 million in January 2008 and we sold him to Real Madrid less than a year later for £18.8 million. I’ve heard we paid big wages. Well, I’ve got my doubts about that, too, but even if we did, we didn’t pay £13.3 million in one year. Diarra would need to be earning in the region of £300,000 per week for him to have cost us a penny. It doesn’t make sense. Sulley Muntari was £7.1 million, a club record, when we took him in 2007, but he was sold to Inter Milan for £13.6 million two years on. I bought Jermain Defoe for £6 million from Tottenham and then took him back
there later for £15.75 million. From Portsmouth’s point of view that was brilliant business. I cannot comprehend how they ended up in so much debt. The wages were decent, yes, but not crazy. I think Glen Johnson earned three times as much at Liverpool as he ever did with us. The only deal I recall losing money on was John Utaka. I went to Rennes a few times to watch him and he cost £7 million – but he never really hit the same form for us. I think he went to Montpellier for roughly £3.5 million after I left – but it still wasn’t the sort of loss to bankrupt a club. Every manager makes the odd mistake – buying players isn’t an exact science.

One of my best deals was getting Sylvain Distin out of Manchester City on a free transfer – although how that did not end up in the newspapers, I will never know. He was going to be out of contract in the summer of 2007, but I rated him very highly and wanted to get the deal done before the others got a sniff. It was the dead of winter and Peter Storrie and I arranged to meet him at a hotel in Manchester. We were paranoid about the news leaking out, so I sneaked in the back way, slipped up to a room we had booked under another name and began talking to him about coming to Portsmouth. At which point, all the fire alarms went off. ‘Don’t worry about that, Sylvain,’ I told him. ‘It’s probably a drill, or some kids messing about.’ But it wouldn’t stop. The next thing we knew, there were hotel staff banging on the doors. ‘Everybody out, everybody out – this isn’t a drill!’ Now we had to go. I wanted to keep our meeting secret, but it wasn’t worth having to jump from a blazing building to do so. So that’s where we had our hush-hush talks – in the hotel car park surrounded by about eight hundred people, some of whom at least must have been wondering what Portsmouth’s manager was doing with Manchester City’s
centre-half. We stole a march on everybody that day, though – we took Sylvain on a free and later sold him to Everton for £5 million. He’s still a great player, as quick as lightning, and his partnership with Sol Campbell was exceptional for us.

And the owners were right behind all of it, all the way. Sacha even helped with one of our biggest transfers. We got Diarra from Arsenal because Sacha’s sister was going out with his agent. ‘Mr Redknapp, we can get Diarra,’ he said. ‘Do you like him?’ ‘He’s a fantastic player, Mr Gaydamak,’ I said, ‘but we’ll never get him. Why would he come to Portsmouth from Arsenal? No chance.’ The next I knew, there he was. Sacha just went out and did the deal.

People might think I was in his ear all day asking for players, but it was quite the opposite. Sacha wanted to be successful and build a team every bit as much as I did. As far as I knew, we were going to have a new stadium, a new team and the best training ground in the country. I remember attending a big launch in London, a huge presentation, all very secret, about the future of the club. The architects unveiled their model and there were gasps in the room. It was a floating island stadium in the docklands area, all lit up like a spaceship – and that was where Portsmouth were going to play. We were buying two hundred acres of land near Fareham for the new training facility – I had to attend that meeting, too. Sacha even selected a committee of six – players and coaches – to advise on what would be best for us. Of course, all this meant was that David James would turn up in a car made of wheat and you had to listen to him banging on for an hour about wind turbines and carbon footprints. By the end of it, we just agreed to whatever he said just to shut him up. He could have wanted to put the turbines in front of goal to blow the ball away
for all I know. But everything was going to be the best – a better stadium than Arsenal, a better training ground than Tottenham. He bought all the land around Fratton Park, too. When people at the club told us about Gaydamak’s background there was never any suggestion he would not carry forward this investment. It was a family business, and back in Israel the Gaydamaks owned the basketball team, the hockey team, and Ossie Ardiles managed their football club. They had property, they had oil interests, companies on several continents, we heard. I really don’t know, as a silly old football manager, what I was supposed to do about clarifying these promises.

The critics say I should have been more cautious, seen through it all. But how would that have worked? If your owner comes to you and says he can get an outstanding player out of Arsenal, and then he gets that player, what are you supposed to do? Deny it has happened? Not play him, just in case? If you work for a company and they send you to do a job abroad, you don’t ask to check the books to make sure they can cover the airfare. You take them at their word. I had absolutely no reason to believe Mr Gaydamak could not make good on his promises and ambitions, just as Arsène Wenger places his faith in the truthfulness of the board at Arsenal, and José Mourinho believes Roman Abramovich can afford to pay the wages. The manager does what the owner wishes. If he is asked to work within a limited budget, he does so; if he is required to spend more to achieve success, he does that, too. I did not spend a single penny at Portsmouth that I wasn’t confident was covered. The crisis set in after I left when, as I understand it, the Gaydamaks’ circumstances changed during the financial crisis and the banks started to call in their loans.

I believed in their project, though. And when I was offered a job at Newcastle United in January 2008, I turned it down. This was before we won the FA Cup, before we played in Europe, or made some of our biggest signings. I can’t say I wasn’t tempted – but in the end what we had going at Portsmouth seemed bigger than anything Newcastle could offer, and I decided it wasn’t for me.

It was after Sam Allardyce had left, and I was contacted by Paul Kemsley, a former director of Tottenham who is a friend of Mike Ashley, the Newcastle owner. He asked to meet me about the vacancy, and I went to his office, where he spoke to me along with Tony Jimenez, another of Mike’s friends. Mike thought if he contacted me directly he would contravene Football Association rules, but I told Portsmouth about the Newcastle offer anyway. I asked for a couple of days to think about it. Don’t get me wrong, I think Newcastle is a great club – but I couldn’t see myself moving the entire family up there, and I thought Portsmouth were matching them step for step in terms of ambition. I had a good team, a good life – all I would benefit from was an improved contract. I didn’t think it was worth it. We had played Newcastle away two months earlier and demolished them, 4–1. I didn’t see them as a big club, the way I could see the potential in Tottenham some years later (although I nearly turned that move down, too). I spoke to Peter Storrie at the training ground on the Saturday morning and told him I was staying.

Would it have made a difference had I talked to Mike directly? Maybe. The owner of a club can sell you his ambitions more passionately. Paul and Tony did their best, but although the money was good it wasn’t life-changing – not like living in Newcastle would have been for me. I appreciated it was a big challenge,
reviving one of England’s great clubs, and when I called Paul on the same Saturday I could tell by his voice that he had several thousand reasons to want me to be Newcastle manager. He likes a bet, Paul, and I got the impression he was very confident I would be taking the job. ‘Fucking hell, Harry,’ he said. ‘Don’t do this to me.’ ‘Sorry, Paul,’ I insisted. ‘I just don’t want to go.’ ‘But, Harry, I’ve done my bollocks here …’ I couldn’t help that. And I don’t regret my decision for one instant.

That was the season we won the FA Cup, beating Cardiff City 1–0. I know on my CV this stands as the highlight of my career but, believe me, I’m as proud, if not prouder, of other achievements: keeping Portsmouth in the Premier League, winning promotion with Bournemouth, getting Tottenham into the Champions League. I think these are every bit as special as my big day at Wembley, and success in the lottery of a cup competition.

Not that it wasn’t wonderful. The elite clubs are so powerful now that very few managers get a chance to win one of the big prizes, so to do that was obviously very special. Beating Manchester United away in the quarter-finals was a memorable day, too. They had a good team out – Cristiano Ronaldo, Paul Scholes, Wayne Rooney, Carlos Tevez – but we deserved our win, from a penalty by Sulley Muntari. It meant I had knocked Manchester United out of the FA Cup with three clubs – Bournemouth, West Ham United and Portsmouth. I’m proud of that, too.

We beat West Brom in the semi-final on 5 April, and then it was back to Wembley the following month to play Cardiff, the first Welsh team to reach the final since they were last there, in 1927. The players were nervous. We had some big-match experience in the side – Kanu had won the Champions League, UEFA Cup,
Premier League and FA Cup – but for many of the others this was the game of their lives. On the night before, to ease the tension, I took the players to a little Italian restaurant in Henley. I booked it out and ordered in a karaoke machine for later. I’ll never forget Hermann Hreidarsson, our Icelandic left-back, turning up in a full Elvis Presley outfit and bringing the house down. He did the greatest impression. I’d asked Kenny Lynch, an old mate, to do a few gags for the boys later and, after watching Hermann, he turned to me and said, ‘How am I meant to follow that?’ Hermann had the lot – the Elvis wig, the white suit, the gold chains, the glasses, the moves – the only trouble was his voice was horrendous, but that just made it even funnier. Hermann used to live near me in Poole and, when him and his wife had their friends over from Iceland, they would always start a sing-song in our local restaurant. They were great fun.

Sometimes preparation is about more than just a tactics board. That karaoke night completely relaxed us and, despite the slender scoreline, we were well worth our victory the next day.

So, even without my friend Milan, I had a wonderful run at Portsmouth the second time around. In fact, the only sour note concerned events happening off the field. By 2007 I was the subject of a criminal investigation, but a year earlier, the BBC news programme
Panorama
had linked my name to an investigation into corruption in football. What a load of rubbish it was. I was accused of tapping up Andy Todd of Blackburn Rovers, and they suggested that Kevin Bond was taking backhanders to make certain transfers happen. It was an absolute farce. I wanted to sue the BBC when the programme was broadcast, but those things only end up dragging on and becoming a lot of time, money and
hassle, so eventually I let it go. I know Sir Alex Ferguson didn’t speak to the BBC for years when they made damaging accusations about his son, but that’s not my style. I couldn’t blame the sports guys for something
Panorama
did – but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t upset by it.