Harry's Games (24 page)

Once the initial disappointment had passed, most fans were philosophical about Redknapp's departure; they hadn't expected him to stay for ever, he'd been offered a better job and they had no reason to think the good times wouldn't continue to roll under a different manager. Four years on, the feelings were more mixed; in another piece of Redknapp timing, the club went into administration during Redknapp's trial at Southwark Crown Court. The ten-point automatic deduction just about guaranteed that Portsmouth would be playing in the First Division – two leagues lower than the Premiership – at the start of the 2012/13 season. That's if the club existed at all.

‘I feel ambivalent,' says Julian Guyer, ‘because I wouldn't have missed the excitement for all the world. But in hindsight, it was like a mirror image of the banking crisis; we had had a manager who had maxed out all the credit cards at Harrods and it was only a matter of time before the bailiffs came in. Harry spent money the club just didn't have and, though the chairman was ultimately responsible for our financial situation, he was to some extent complicit. There were always doubts about Gaydamak's solvency and Harry should have been more careful about putting the club at risk.

‘A manager has long-term as well as short-term responsibilities to the club. Harry might have long gone, but the fans and the club have to live with his legacy. And it's not just a question of being sore because we've gone down two divisions since he left; that sort of thing happens and you can accept it. But going into administration is not a victimless crime. There are many local firms that are reliant on the football club; some have gone out of business and others are still owed a lot of money by the club. These are the ones who have really suffered.'

Right next to Fratton Park there is a mobile kebab stall. Match days used to offer up the best pickings of the week, but now the owner, Andy Wells, says it's hardly worth opening on a Saturday
afternoon. ‘It's unbelievable, really,' he says. ‘We do far better now on a midweek evening when there's no game. The business has been hit hard. I know it's partly the recession, but it's also down to the way the club has been run. Do I blame Harry? Yes, I do a bit. Though I blame the board for not reining him in more.'

That, though, is often easier said than done, as one former club chairman who worked with Redknapp in the past explained. ‘It sounds perfectly straightforward,' he said. ‘Harry tells you he wants to buy this player and pay him so much, and you go away and work out whether you can afford it. But it doesn't work like that. Harry has a way of talking to the media and getting them on his side. If you try to say no to him, he will go behind your back and get a story in the local paper about how the chairman has no ambition for the club.

‘This is the story that the fans take on board. They don't care if you can afford it or not. To them, every football club chairman is a millionaire with bottomless pockets and if you don't keep signing blank cheques then you don't have the team's best interests at heart. Before you know it, the fans are chanting, “
Chairman Out!
” at every match. You try to ignore it, but you can't. It does hurt. So you give in a bit. You tell yourself you'll let Harry get away with it just this once and stand up to him the next time. Only you don't.

‘Harry understands all this perfectly and has tried to play the system to great effect at every club he's been at. I lost millions and millions of pounds trying to keep the club afloat and it just about bankrupted me. The stupid thing is that I cared more about the club than he did, which is why I kept on handing over money I couldn't really afford. I just sort of closed my eyes and hoped we'd have a cup run or a promotion that would help pay for it. I'm not looking for sympathy here. Just a chance to put my point of view across. In my opinion, the judge of a good manager isn't only the results on the pitch; it's the state of the finances when he leaves.'

A bankrupt club and some bitter-sweet memories aren't Redknapp's only legacy to the city. In 2007, through one of his companies, Redknapp bought Savoy Buildings, a row of shops and nightclubs along the seafront in Southsea, intending to redevelop the site as ninety-two luxury apartments. When the recession hit and the council insisted that more affordable housing be included in the planning, the development was put on hold indefinitely. In August 2011, the site burned down, forcing many nearby residents to be temporarily moved out of their homes. Three months later, the council had to order Redknapp to clean up the burnt-out buildings amid concerns that the site was an eyesore and potentially unsafe. The rubble has now been moved but the site is still empty. As a metaphor for the city's football club, it could hardly be bettered.

April 2012

A hard-won home victory against Swansea at the beginning of the month proved to be a false dawn. There was no glorious revival, the slick machine did not slip effortlessly back into gear; rather, it continued to misfire as Spurs laboured to a goalless draw against Sunderland at the Stadium of Light the following week. The point did take Tottenham temporarily back into third place in the table ahead of Arsenal, but the ten-point cushion had been well and truly blown and it was clear the team was a shadow of the one that had taken Newcastle apart only two months earlier.

The simplest explanation – and the one most analysts instinctively reached for – was that the delay over the appointment of the new England manager had affected Redknapp and that the uncertainty was transmitting itself to the team. There was a satisfyingly linear cause-and-effect logic to this, albeit one that Redknapp had little choice but to deny, as to have done anything else would only have made a bad situation worse. Yet the more Redknapp insisted that the England job was not distracting him, the less he was believed. It got to the point where Spurs banned any questions about his England future at Redknapp's weekly press conferences. Or, to be more accurate, the club said the manager
would not be answering any more questions on the subject. The questions still came; the ensuing silences were uncomfortable for all concerned.

Yet there was a growing feeling among some keen-eyed Harry-watchers that there was more to the club's decline than just the ongoing England drama. The feeling was one of
déjà vu
; that they were watching a repeat of familiar failings, that the very qualities that Redknapp brought to the team and could help make it perform like possible champions were also those that could all too easily expose its limitations and cause it to implode. It was the fear that within Redknapp's unquestionable touches of football genius lay the seeds of his own and his team's self-destruction and that, with Redknapp, the line between triumph and tragedy was finer than most. It was just that in previous seasons the stakes hadn't been quite so high, nor his limitations quite so exposed. The speculation over the England job had merely created the perfect storm from which Redknapp had no hiding place.

The warning signs had been in place for a while, with Redknapp having given a press conference before the Bolton FA Cup tie in which he said, ‘If we finish in the top four I think we over-punched our weight really, to be perfectly truthful with you.' This was a classic Redknapp diversionary tactic of getting his excuses in early, and one that had worked quite well for him in the past; tell everyone the team has exceeded all expectations and protect yourself from the fallout when things begin to unravel. Except this time it made him look a bit foolish and panicky. Spurs may have played better than anyone had predicted in the first half of the season but, having got themselves into a commanding position, there was no escaping the fact that the team was now crumbling. Rather than just acknowledging the situation and dealing with it, Redknapp appeared to be in denial about it. He seemed to be expecting everyone to respond with, ‘You know what, Harry, you're absolutely right . . . We should never have let ourselves get into such a great
position as it was bound to end in tears . . . We'd have been far better off if we had known our place and then we could have been happy with fourth . . .' But that was never going to happen.

Apart from anything else, the idea that Spurs had somehow overachieved just wasn't true. It would have been of many previous Spurs teams, but it wasn't of this one. The midfield of Bale, Modric, Parker and Lennon was the equal of any in the Premiership, and a combination of van der Vaart, Adebayor and Defoe up front was the envy of many. For overachievers in the division, you could point to Swansea, Norwich . . . and Manchester United. Almost everyone who claimed to be in the know had been arguing that this United side was the poorest for many seasons and yet it was still well ahead of every other team, except its local rival, Manchester City. And in so doing, that success exposed the difference in managerial styles between Sir Alex Ferguson, the United manager, and Redknapp. Whether by terrorizing his players or instilling a culture where failure was unacceptable, Ferguson had turned good – though not necessarily great – footballers into a team that could find ways to win the unwinnable games; Redknapp had assembled a team of mostly great players but was seemingly unable to make them play with any consistency.

To understand why this was so is to get to the heart of the Redknapp paradox. Throughout his career, Redknapp has acquired the reputation for having a talent for man-management, and it's not hard to rack up a list of players who have openly given him the credit for either reviving or prolonging their careers. What you don't hear so often are the stories of those who have fallen out with him. Players who moan about their manager quickly acquire the ‘awkward customer' tag, and in a head-to-head popularity contest with Redknapp in the media, there is only ever going to be one winner. But Redknapp does have favourites. If you're in with him, he'll put his arm round you, tell you jokes and make you feel loved; if you're out, he can ignore you to death.

It's not that hard for an outsider to tell who is in favour and who is not with Redknapp's teams. The in-crowd are in the first team; the frozen-out are not. You can't blame a manager for preferring some players to others, it's only human; some people are naturally much more approachable and friendly, others have strops and sulks as their default setting. But a manager has to be professional enough to work with different personality types and tease out the best qualities in a group of often quite dysfunctional players; it's not exactly therapy, just a matter of getting everyone working well enough to put aside any differences and play as a team for ninety minutes. Part of that is making every player feel as if he has an equal chance of getting into the side and that if he is performing better in training than a first-team regular, it will not go unnoticed.

That level of fluidity and opportunity is not generally a feature of Redknapp's teams. Once Redknapp has decided a player is or isn't worth a first-team place, it takes a great deal for him to change his mind. This kind of loyalty to his players paid dividends in the first half of the season; the first team responded to the way Redknapp treated them by playing with freedom and confidence. They weren't scared that one off game or a couple of miss-hit passes would cost them their place in the starting eleven for the following match. The trouble came in the second half of the season.

Towards the end of March, Vedran Corluka, the Spurs right-back and very obviously not one of Redknapp's in-crowd, who had been loaned out to German club Bayer Leverkusen in January, gave an interview in which he argued that the reason the team's performances had fallen away was because the players were all tired due to Redknapp's reluctance to rotate the squad. His manager rejected this out of hand, implying Corluka was merely getting his own back for not being given the opportunities he thought he deserved. ‘When you lose a few, everyone suddenly
has something to say,' Redknapp observed. ‘I didn't hear anyone complaining a month ago when we were beating everyone and flying. Most of the players have probably played thirty games. I didn't play any of them in the UEFA Cup or FA Cup, and no player has said to me, “Gaffer, I'm tired.” Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst or Martin Peters were never rotated, playing ankle-deep in mud every week. Frank Lampard plays how many games a season? Ashley Cole, Wayne Rooney and Patrice Evra are not rotated, so it's a load of nonsense. It's an excuse.'

As ever with Redknapp, there was more than a germ of truth in what he had said. Nobody had complained a month previously; though, equally, the levels of tiredness had yet to kick in. It's true, no player had complained of being tired, but there's no way of knowing whether that was because no one actually was tired or because the rules of the squad – you're either in or out – were implicitly understood by everyone and to have done so would have been tantamount to career suicide. It was also true that some players have remarkable levels of fitness and quick recovery times and don't need rotating. But some do, and one of those in the Spurs team who clearly did was Rafa van der Vaart. In the previous season, van der Vaart had played brilliantly before Christmas, creating havoc in opposition defences and seemingly scoring at will, but in February, March and April he had noticeably faded and had become far less effective. It's something all the fans had noticed, so it can't have escaped the eyes of Redknapp and his coaching team.

Exactly the same thing had happened to van der Vaart in this season, and yet, if Redknapp had noticed, he did nothing about it as the Dutchman was virtually ever-present in the first team. More than that, the whole team was set up for van der Vaart to play a roving role between the midfield and the lone striker, Adebayor, and when van der Vaart was unable to fulfil that role effectively the formation came unstuck. Just as Redknapp had
one Team A, so he had no Plan B. It was as if he had a single, idealized view – a platonic form – of how he wanted the team to play and was unable to react pragmatically when circumstances prevented him. Just once did he alter the team's shape by leaving out van der Vaart and playing a standard 4-4-2 formation with Defoe and Saha up front, and that was for the home defeat against Norwich. After that game, Redknapp shrugged, seemingly implying the defeat was as much the fans' fault as anyone else's, because it was the fans who had been calling out for a switch to 4-4-2 to accommodate Defoe – he had merely given them what they had wanted.