Harry's Games (15 page)

Not that it ever would entirely, not least because Redknapp handled the transition spectacularly badly with his players. ‘When he called us in to explain what was going on,' one ex-player remembered, ‘Harry told us that he'd been out for a drink with Billy the night before, that they were still good mates and that he was taking over with Billy's blessing. So we were all OK about it until Tony Gale talked on the phone to Billy a day or so later and discovered that was all nonsense. Billy and Harry
hadn't been out for a drink and Billy hadn't given Harry the OK. At that point a lot of the squad lost a bit of respect for Harry as we knew he hadn't been straight with us.'

This isn't the definitive proof – the smoking gun – that Redknapp did stab Bonds in the back, but it is indicative of the self-destructive side of his personality. If he'd simply told the players, ‘I haven't spoken to Billy about all this but I know he isn't very happy . . .' he'd have had the squad pretty much on his side. Most footballers understand the game can be brutal, with managers and players frequently expendable, and they would have quickly adjusted with little lingering resentment towards Redknapp. As it was, Redknapp's desire to be liked – even to the extent of telling an account that was almost bound to be found out within hours, if not days – made a bad situation worse.

With his legs under the manager's desk, one of Redknapp's first back-room moves was to get his brother-in-law and fellow ex-Hammer, Frank Lampard senior, in as his assistant. It was an appointment that raised a few eyebrows among the fans as Lampard had no track record in management or coaching since retiring as a player in 1986, but, as he was considered to be one of the West Ham family, most were prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.

As important to Redknapp, one might imagine, was that Lampard was a member of his own family; having seen how easily close friendships could go pear-shaped with Bonds no longer speaking to him, Redknapp might well have seen the virtues in an assistant with blood ties. If not a sign of the guilty conscience to which Pete Johnson referred, then it was certainly one of a good understanding of the nature of football
realpolitik
. Over the years, Redknapp has been careful to make sure his assistants' first loyalty has been to him rather than their own ambition; none has ever exploited a downturn in his fortunes and popularity to try and replace him.

Redknapp's most pressing on-field problem was Joey Beauchamp, a winger, whom West Ham had bought from Oxford United in the summer for £850,000, yet who showed a remarkable reluctance to play for his new club. After numerous set-tos with Beauchamp, who made no competitive appearances for West Ham, Redknapp sold him on to Swindon just fifty-eight days after buying him. ‘It was like a black cloud had been lifted,' Redknapp said when Beauchamp was finally shown the door.

In some ways, though, the Beauchamp saga was a miniature portrait of Redknapp's management style throughout his time at West Ham. While Redknapp had managed to contrive a solution to the Beauchamp problem, he was less willing to acknowledge that he had, in large part, been responsible for creating it. During the Bonds regime, Redknapp had taken the lead role in buying and selling players so, to all intents and purposes, Beauchamp had been signed on his watch and on his say so. For an outlay of £850,000, you might have expected a little more preliminary work before the deal was done; watching a player gives you an idea of his talent and fitness, while talking to him reveals his state of mind – his ambitions, anxieties and desires – which are every bit as important. Beauchamp's neuroses and homesickness didn't appear out of thin air the moment he moved fifty miles east of Oxford. They would have been there for all to see if only anyone had bothered to look for them. Redknapp only saw what was in front of him, part of which was a capable footballer, part of which was also the deal.

Much as Redknapp may now dislike his reputation for a knack in buying and selling, it appears to have been hard-wired into his blood as a manager. ‘Harry just loved the thrill of a deal,' says the former West Ham board director. ‘It was almost as if it was a drug. Almost every week he'd be going on at me about how “so and so is a brilliant player and we've got to buy him before anyone else does” and every week it would be about a different player.
With Stan Lazaridis it was that he'd seen him doing keepy-uppies on a tour of Australia. Harry doesn't stop. He wears you down.'

And he frequently got his own way as the West Ham team of the mid- and late-1990s often gave the appearance of operating on a revolving door policy: one player in, another out. If a player wasn't performing as well as Redknapp expected, he wouldn't waste too much time trying to understand why or tinker with the formation to help him improve. He'd get rid of him and bring in another player he thought could do a better job.

It was a policy that misfired as often as it worked and occasionally exasperated the West Ham fans. ‘We'd get some brilliant players in – John Hartson and Paolo Di Canio did fabulously for us,' says Sam Delaney. ‘But Harry also brought in some real shockers, most of them from the European mainland. For a while, it was quite exciting. There weren't so many foreign players in the Premiership back then, and those there were didn't want to come to West Ham. But under Harry they did and it made us all feel good to bask in the kudos as he would big them all up on their arrival as World Cup stars. And then we'd see them play . . . Some barely lasted a season, they were that bad, and it made us into a bit of a laughing stock.'

Even Redknapp couldn't gloss over just how disastrous some of his acquisitions had been. Marco Boogers had been bought from Sparta Rotterdam for £1 million before the 1995 season, with West Ham proudly announcing they had acquired the player who had been voted third best in the whole of the Dutch league the previous season. As Steve Blowers pointed out, this wasn't quite true. ‘It now transpired he had only been voted into third place in the Sparta Rotterdam player of the season poll,' he wrote.

With Boogers having been sent off after just eighteen minutes of his first game, Redknapp came under scrutiny. ‘Of course he's the kind of player I expected,' he said, back-pedalling in response to criticism. ‘I knew exactly what I was getting. People are saying
that I bought him off a video. I don't know who dreamt that one up!'

No one, as it happened, for it wasn't a dream. A while later – with Boogers having apparently gone AWOL in a caravan in between fitting in ninety-eight minutes' playing time in his four appearances, before being shifted on to Groningen along with a mental-health sick note – Redknapp came clean. ‘I could tell after three or four weeks that I had dropped a “rick” with him,' he said. ‘His attitude stank. Someone sent me a tape of Boogers in action and urged me to watch it. I was very impressed and, for the first time in my life, I signed a player purely on what I'd seen on video. The season was upon us and we didn't have time to check him out any further.'

The least that could be said was that it was a cavalier way of spending the club's money and one that cost the club £800,000 in transfer costs along with Boogers' wages.

The signings of the two Romanians – Ilie Dumitrescu and Florin Raducioiu – weren't quite as catastrophic as that of Boogers, but not far off. Dumitrescu had been bought from Spurs in 1995 for £1.5 million, but, as he had played fewer than a quarter of the games for the north London club for which he had been eligible, the British government was reluctant to issue him a work permit. So he also sat out a fair few games for West Ham and, when he did become available, was either injured or disappointing and was transferred for £1 million to the Mexican club, FC de America, at the end of the following season.

Raducioiu lasted even less time. Bought for £2.4 million from the Spanish club Espanyol at the beginning of the 1996 season, he was sold back to the same club for £1.5 million long before the end of it. ‘It was a toss-up between Raducioiu and Marco Boogers for my worst ever signing,' was Redknapp's philosophical take on West Ham's £900,000 loss.

Redknapp didn't lose on the signing of another foreigner as
Paulo Futre was acquired on a free transfer from AC Milan, but neither did he gain. The forward decided to retire in the same season as his arrival, leaving Redknapp to observe ruefully after an away game at Roker Park, ‘There was a howling wind and Sunderland were swarming in on our goal and Futre, Dumitrescu and Raducioiu were standing there on the halfway line looking on. I knew then it wasn't going to work . . .'

It was the overseas signings that attracted the most interest – and criticism – but Redknapp was as busy as ever in the home transfer market, equally as happy trading in low-value players from his old club Bournemouth as in high-value ones, such as John Hartson, Trevor Sinclair and Paul Kitson. But then as long as he was trading, Redknapp was usually happy. And for the most part, his signings all did a decent job for a season or two; Redknapp may have made the odd howler during his career, but he has a nose for a good footballer.

What he doesn't have a nose for is stability. When Redknapp invites his critics to judge him on his transfer track record, the only subject up for discussion is the profit and loss account – the amount each player cost set against the fee the club recouped on his eventual sale. This way he more often than not emerges in credit. The element that gets lost here is the hidden, invisible costs. Treating players as mere commodities – functioning objects who either do their job well or badly – is an inefficient and expensive way of doing business. Most players – people – want to feel loved and valued; they want a sense of belonging. They don't want to feel as if they are being judged on a game-by-game basis and, if found wanting, are going to be shipped out to the highest bidder at the first available opportunity.

But that's precisely the atmosphere that Redknapp tended to create in his West Ham teams as the players knew they could be in favour one week and on their bike the next. And that type of atmosphere can be extremely demotivating – not just for those
who are insecure about their status within the team but also for the players who have good reason to believe they are semipermanent fixtures. The most successful teams may now be the ones crammed with the best and most expensive players, but they weren't always in the 1990s. Back then, mutual understanding and cohesion were just as important and Redknapp seldom allowed his teams the time to develop those qualities. This, in turn, often made his teams less than the sum of their parts and goes some way to explaining why they stumbled along near the bottom of the Premiership in the first few years of his tenure at West Ham.

Giving Redknapp's managerial style a more positive spin, you can argue that he treated his players like adults. He told them what he expected and left them to get on with it, without any excessive interference or micro-management. That approach might have worked better if his players had also behaved like adults. In his autobiography, Redknapp wrote of his exasperation about a Christmas party that got out of hand in 1994. ‘There was a little group of players who couldn't behave themselves,' he said. ‘They were forever having booze-ups and causing aggravation. Dale Gordon was head of the club's entertainment committee and for Christmas he wanted to hire an open-top bus to trawl through London's West End. “Are you out of your mind?” I said to him. “We're struggling in the league and you want to go around looking like you've won the FA Cup!” Instead, they hired a minibus to take them to the Phoenix Apollo in Stratford. One or two of them had too much to drink and set alight to the seats on the bus at the end of the night.' Steve Blowers suggested the seats were also both slashed and slashed upon.

Redknapp might have given the team a bollocking afterwards, but what really matters is that the players got trashed in public anyway, even though he had given them a prior warning. Why? Because they thought they could get away with it. The bottom
line was that they just didn't respect Redknapp enough. He was too much one of the lads – ‘H' rather than ‘Gaffer' – and he wasn't someone they necessarily trusted.

‘There were times we felt we were being spied on,' said one former player, ‘that Harry was trying to listen in to dressing-room conversations rather than asking us for our opinions outright.'

It didn't help that his ‘win or lose – on the booze' mantra still followed Redknapp around. And Redknapp often didn't seem in much hurry to lose it. Several years later, when asked why his team wasn't playing particularly well, he suggested the problem lay with the foreign players who preferred to stay at home rather than go out drinking with the rest of the squad. At best this was inconsistent, at worst crass. It gave the drinkers licence to go on boozing and the overseas players a reason to think they were better off packing their bags and returning home.

‘If I'm honest,' says Trevor Morley, ‘there were a number of us that were the last of football's drinking culture. These days, players wouldn't dream of going out on a Thursday night but, back then, the only day we all stayed in was the night before the game. Looking back, that wasn't particularly professional of us, though we were by no means the only club behaving like this. Harry knew exactly what was going on but never interfered as long as our performances on the pitch weren't affected. Occasionally, though, he did get the strop. Every year he'd take us on a mid-week break down to Bournemouth. After one party got out of control, we found ourselves downgraded from a five-star to a two-star one the following year.'

‘Some of the fans used to quite like all these kinds of Harry shenanigans,' says Sam Delaney. ‘They thought it was funny and made us different from other clubs who took themselves far too seriously. And there was that feeling that Harry was a real person in comparison to the uptightness of a Sir Alex Ferguson. But it also began to wear me down, because there was often a feeling
of chaos about the club, as if no one was really in charge or knew what was going on.