Always Managing: My Autobiography (45 page)

Jamie was an influence there, too. ‘You’re a Premier League manager,’ he said. ‘That’s where you want to be. This is your chance.’ I sometimes wonder if I will one day regret not trying international football, but it was hard to resist working in the Premier League again. I did fancy having a last go at beating the likes of Manchester United and Liverpool – and with Rangers bottom of the league, I felt certain I could make a difference. Rangers arranged to meet me through Paul Stretford, and I went with him to the house of Phil Beard, the chief executive. Paul did the deal and I took over on 24 November 2012, with Rangers six points adrift of 17th place and safety, having taken four points from thirteen games. At that rate they were heading for 11 points all season – tying with Derby County for the lowest total in the history of the Premier League.

At Tottenham Hotspur I had found a good squad, and at Southampton a good club, but Rangers, unfortunately, had neither of those things. The training facilities at Tottenham were outstanding, but at Rangers they were nowhere near, and the squad was poorly balanced and short of confidence. The minute I saw that group together I knew it would be hard. The directors and owners were nice people, but they were naïve in football terms, and I think certain people they had trusted – agents and advisers – had let them
down quite badly. They had probably never been around players, or indeed football before, did not know the market, and had spent unwisely on some very average foreign imports – some stars from bigger clubs, who did not have the attitude or the appetite for a relegation fight. They were getting some rude awakenings. They had players on astronomical wages, being watched by crowds of 18,000 at Loftus Road. It wasn’t sustainable; it wasn’t right. Still, once involved, I was as committed as I always have been. I shelved our trips to Vegas and South Africa and threw myself into the job at QPR. Every day on the training ground, every night at a match or on the telephone trying to sort out some new players. We certainly needed them.

George Graham’s first rule of management was: never buy a player who is taking a step down to join you, because he will think he is doing you a favour. That is easy to say when you are manager of Arsenal and only a handful of clubs can be considered superior. Further down the league it isn’t the same. To get Portsmouth out of trouble I had to take players like Paul Merson or Teddy Sheringham, who were most certainly taking a demotion. The trick was to correctly judge the good characters. Rangers had players like José Bosingwa, who just six months earlier had won the Champions League final with Chelsea but, unlike Teddy – who had scored in a winning Champions League final team – he wasn’t going to give his all for the group. I soon found out the extent of the problems. We drew my first three games in charge and then won at home to Fulham on 15 December, but the day was marred by Bosingwa refusing to sit on the substitute’s bench. I have had problem players in the past, but I thought his attitude was disgraceful. I decided to fine him two weeks’ wages – and that was when I got the shock
of my life when I found out how much he was on. Bosingwa’s salary was ridiculous – certainly for the effort he was showing. The trouble that Rangers were in, anyone good was certain to get a start – I wasn’t in a position to be picky. If Bosingwa was upset about being on the bench, he should have looked at his level of performance, not thrown a hissy fit. The problem was he wasn’t the only one.

It was scary. Of course there were some good guys. Within weeks I had worked out that my best player was Ryan Nelsen, a 35-year-old New Zealand international central defender, whom I had taken on loan at Tottenham as cover during the previous January transfer window. Ryan, for one, was a terrific guy, but he had started only FA Cup matches against Stevenage Borough and Bolton Wanderers at Tottenham – now here he was, the captain and mainstay of my team. Even worse, I knew I didn’t have him for much longer. He had an offer to coach at Toronto FC in Major League Soccer and was going to take it up a few weeks into the New Year. We really needed him but Ryan clearly couldn’t wait to get out of QPR. ‘You’ve got no chance,’ he told me. ‘Not a prayer. This is the worst dressing room I’ve ever been in in my life. You haven’t got a hope with this lot. I don’t know how you solve it – they are just so bad.’

‘What do you think is wrong?’ I asked him. ‘Is it the team, the spirit …?’

‘It’s everything,’ he said. ‘Everything is wrong. I wouldn’t have one of this lot anywhere near my football club. It’s not just that they’ve got a bad attitude – they’re bad players.’

And then he started going through the group, individually, telling me their faults. He slaughtered them. I’ve never heard a
battering like it. Maybe he was already thinking like a manager, wondering how he would handle such a group. He certainly wasn’t going to be an arm-around-the-shoulder type, I can tell you that!

I can’t vouch for Ryan’s views because a manager isn’t in the dressing room all the time, but a lot of what he said rang true, particularly when he told me about the players he thought simply didn’t care. ‘Those boys have ruined the spirit at this club,’ he said. ‘They’re a disgrace and I have no time for any of them.’ Ryan was a fantastic professional. I wouldn’t say he was 100 per cent right about all of the group, but he wasn’t far wrong about quite a few. If that was the captain’s view, I knew I had a tough job on my hands.

Rob Hulse returned from loan at Charlton Athletic and said much the same thing. He was another player I could relate to, and his take was very similar to Ryan’s. Charlton was Rob’s seventh club. ‘I’ve been around a lot,’ he said, ‘and this is the worst dressing room I’ve ever known.’ He was right. The attitude stank. Attitude towards the game, attitude towards training. I can’t remember a worse one – and behaviour like that cannot be altered overnight.

Bottom of the league, a new manager, the transfer window more than month away, you can’t walk in and just start smashing people. You have to coax them along, try to take them with you. I tried to bring discipline in, with fines for lateness and poor behaviour, but the culture of decay was too ingrained. Part of the problem was that the owners hadn’t actually spent serious money on transfers. They didn’t buy players at the top of the tree, but they did pay big wages. So what they had was a squad full of very average footballers earning more money than they deserved. It made them very arrogant and contemptuous. They would rather come in late every day and just pay the fine than behave in a professional
manner. When they were there they ran around and did what was necessary – but getting them in was daily aggravation. There were players who were late three, sometimes four, times each week – and the most we ever trained was five days. There was always an excuse. ‘The traffic was bad.’ Well, leave earlier, then. Whatever you said, whatever you did, it didn’t seem to bother them. Not every lad – but the bad outweighed the good, and that made it very difficult.

One day I heard that one of our players had been out until 4.30 a.m. at a casino in London, when we were playing Manchester United at 3 p.m. the next day. When I called him into my office and confronted him with this information he seemed genuinely puzzled. ‘Friday?’ he said. ‘I don’t think it was Friday. Maybe it was Thursday.’ That annoyed me even more. I was expecting him to be angry at the mere suggestion of it. A professional player out until the small hours, the night before a game? It is unheard of now. I was expecting a real row and to go back to my source with a load more questions. Instead, this idiot genuinely couldn’t remember if he was out until dawn on the Thursday or the Friday – so clearly there was a chance he was out both nights. I thought he would go off his head, but instead of shouting and screaming at me for even daring to ask him, he sat there wondering. Not even an apology. Not even a thought that he had let the team down. I suppose that is what shocked me most, the lack of consideration for the rest of the group. I was brought up at a time when footballers were not the athletic specimens of today. Yes, we knew how to have a party – but we worked hard for each other, too. Yet some of these guys never seemed to give the team a thought. They would train all week, then have a mystery injury and cry off for the match on Saturday. Rarely would anyone play through a knock or a tweak. I don’t know how
they had the front to pick up their wages some weeks. I felt truly sorry for the guys like Clint Hill. Clint was not the greatest player, but he would run through a brick wall for QPR. You could tell he was disgusted with some of the attitudes he encountered. He didn’t have the technical ability of those players, but if we had more like him we might have stayed up. It doesn’t matter how good a player is technically – without heart, he is nothing.

The transfer window was looming but we had too much work to do. What was my plan? Ditch fifteen of them? No chance. I was probably being too open about my feelings, as well. After we lost at Everton, for instance, I said we were sloppy and undisciplined and had turned into Raggy Arse Rovers after half-time. It was the truth. We had been playing very well for the first forty-five minutes, easily a match for Everton, but their goal had taken a massive deflection off Clint Hill. We started feeling sorry for ourselves and had just faded from the game. I was fed up with it. You can’t do that. We were meant to be fighting to the last breath, not chucking it in at the first sign of bad luck. Jamie was on the phone almost every week telling me stop having a go at the players. Really, by then, I didn’t even know I was doing it. I’d get asked a straight question, and give a straight answer; I was too frustrated with too many of them to cover their backsides any more. If I could I would have booted half the team out in the January transfer window, but we couldn’t have found that many replacements, and we just needed the bodies. Also, the players a manager gets offered in January are often a jump from the frying pan into the fire. I thought the agents and advisers that had dragged QPR into this mess had a duty to get them out of it – but the deals they came up with were rubbish, really. An agent would find a European club who would take Bosingwa – but only
if we took a particular player of theirs on loan in return. I would search him out, and he would turn out to be another waster – just their equivalent of Bosingwa. You were just swapping one guy with a rotten attitude for another. What would be the point in that?

I looked around the dressing room wondering how many I could get out and in, but it was a doomed mission, really. There were too many who simply wouldn’t get that sort of money elsewhere, and they knew it. Their agents knew it, too, and made life very hard. Any attempt to instil discipline was resisted. All we could do, in the January window, was try to buy our way out of trouble – adding to the squad in the hope of making a difference. I already had one name in mind.

Loïc Rémy, a striker with Olympique Marseille, had been a target during my time at Tottenham, and I was told he was still interested in coming to England. How interested he was in coming to QPR was another matter entirely. I flew to France to watch him play and had arranged to meet him after the game – but he wouldn’t even see me. He sent a message saying he had met Mr Redknapp when he was manager of Tottenham and he was a nice man, but he didn’t want to meet him now, because his team was bottom of the league and he didn’t want to be rude by turning him down. Newcastle United were also in for him and had offered £9 million. I didn’t think we had a hope of doing the deal. But Tony Fernandes, our owner, was fantastic. He took over the negotiations, and just when it looked as if Rémy was going to Newcastle he changed his mind and signed for us. People said I was frittering away the board’s money again – but it was completely in Tony’s hands. Despite only joining us in mid-January, and suffering rotten luck with injuries, Rémy was Rangers’ top scorer during the season with six goals.

Christopher Samba was our other big signing in January, although he proved a terrible disappointment. With Nelsen leaving we needed a centre-half. I know Rangers had been interested in Michael Dawson at Tottenham, but that had come to nothing. I was talking to Tony Fernandes, who asked me who I thought were the best central defenders in the country. I told him there was no point in discussing the best – guys like Rio Ferdinand and John Terry were not about to come to Rangers. I said that I had always held Samba in high regard when he was at Blackburn, and he was meant to be unhappy at his new Russian club, Anzhi Makhachkala. I said an agent had called a few weeks back and had asked if I wanted Samba on loan. I was definitely interested but sceptical the deal could be done. ‘He’s here with me now,’ Chris’s man had said. ‘You speak to him.’

Chris came on the line and we started talking. ‘And you’re available on loan, I hear?’ I said.

‘I don’t know where’s he’s getting that from,’ said Chris. ‘It’s rubbish – they’ll never loan me.’

It wasn’t the brightest start. I threw Christopher’s hat in the ring with Tony, but I didn’t think we stood a chance. A few days later, the owner came back. ‘You’ll never guess who I’ve got for you,’ he said. ‘It’s a great signing, a brilliant player.’ Tony had done the deal for Samba – and it wasn’t a loan.

It was a shame that it didn’t work out with Chris. I still think that when he is right and fit he is up there with any central defender in the Premier League, but he was unfit when he came to us and, after one very poor performance, his confidence completely fell apart. It was very strange. Chris had taken a few games to get up to Premier League speed again but against Southampton on
2 March he was outstanding in our 2–1 away win. That was a big result for the club, but also for me, personally. On the day of the game a newspaper report came out alleging all sorts about our winter training break in Dubai. It made it sound like a holiday camp, with players out drinking and no work being done. I knew that wasn’t the case. I also had my suspicions about the source of the story – an agent looking to cause trouble.. There were players quoted, anonymously, too. The article stank. It seemed as if it had been planted deliberately to undermine me. Had we lost at Southampton, I could imagine the fallout on the back pages – but we won, Rémy scored, and Samba was magnificent. I really thought that night we might rise above all the negativity and turn it around. Yet just two games later we lost Samba for the rest of the season.