Читать книгу Harry Redknapp - The Biography - Les Roopanarine - Страница 7

Bill Nicholson fixed his gaze on the scrawny, slightly breathless eleven-year-old. The young trialist had been up early that morning, excited at the prospect of parading his skills before Nicholson, the recently appointed Tottenham manager. Now, having done so, he looked up at the stern, slightly intimidating Yorkshireman with a mixture of awe and unease. Nicholson, a one-club man, was well known for his view that any player coming to Spurs, whether a major signing or just a ground-staff lad, ‘must be dedicated to the game and to the club.’ The youngster qualified on the first front – how could he not? His father, Harry, was a football obsessive, and so it followed naturally that his own upbringing had been steeped in the game and its traditions. But Nicholson’s second stipulation left him on shakier ground. The boy shared his dad’s passion for Arsenal, idolised Gunners midfielder Jimmy Bloomfield and was a regular at Highbury, where he would arrive early to claim his favourite spot – on top of a raised manhole cover – on the North Bank. Hardly the ideal credentials for a career at White Hart Lane. As for other clubs, if any had a place in his affections it was West Ham, whose Upton Park ground was a stone’s throw from the East London council estate where he lived. Could he seriously look Nicholson in the eye and proclaim his undying devotion to Spurs?

‘What’s your name, son?’ asked Nicholson.

‘Harry, Mr Nicholson.’

‘OK, Harry. I see you’re a winger. Score a lot of goals, do you?’

‘Not really, sir.’

‘Well, the only winger who doesn’t score goals is Stanley Matthews. And I don’t think you’re another Stanley Matthews, are you Harry?’

Fifty years have elapsed since that conversation took place and, as with most things football, Nicholson was proved right. Harry Redknapp didn’t become another Stanley Matthews. He was never dubbed ‘the wizard of the dribble’ or voted European Footballer of the Year. Yet Dickie Walker, Tottenham’s chief scout, showed sound judgement when he approached Redknapp’s father after watching young Harry star for East London Schoolboys against Wandsworth Boys at the Old Den. Five years later, when Redknapp became old enough to put pen to paper on schoolboy forms, every top club in London was after his signature. Nicholson, who invited Redknapp to train with the Spurs youth team following his trial, was among those suitors, as were the Arsenal boss George Swindin and Tommy Docherty, the Chelsea manager. Docherty, who had been alerted to young Harry’s potential by Chelsea scout Jimmy Thompson, even made a personal visit to the Redknapps’ home in Poplar in an effort to persuade them that their son’s future lay at Stamford Bridge. ‘I wanted Harry to sign for Chelsea,’ recalls Docherty, whose unexpected appearance on the doorstep left the teenage Redknapp agog. ‘In those days you used to speak to the parents. You wouldn’t speak to the boy because, in fairness, he was just overawed by big clubs wanting to sign him. Harry’s parents were very pleasant and hospitable. At the end they said: “The decision will be Harry’s.” We had a few Eastenders at Chelsea already, people like Jimmy Greaves and Terry Venables, and we were hoping to tap into that link because they had great character. But we also had Peter Brabrook at Chelsea at the time, who was a good player, a winger, and Harry probably thought “I’m going to have to wait a bit of time before I get my opportunity in the first team”.’

The decisive factor in Redknapp’s eventual decision to join West Ham was his mother, Violet. While she did not share her husband’s passion for the game, Violet instinctively perceived that the Hammers, under the shrewd stewardship of Ron Greenwood, embodied principles that would benefit her son’s development not just as a footballer but also as a man. West Ham was a family club, an East End institution forged on the anvil of a local businessman’s conviction that the borough, though poverty-stricken, was ‘rich in its population’. Arnold Hills, the businessman in question, had once owned the Thames Ironworks, a nearby shipbuilding firm that provided numerous locals with employment at the Victoria and Albert Docks where Redknapp’s father worked. Hills died in 1927, but Thames Ironworks Football Club – formed in 1895 at the suggestion of Dave Taylor, a shipyard foreman, and reconstituted five years later as West Ham United Football Club – lived on. A pivotal factor in Hills’ support for the project was his belief that sport was conducive to good morals and good morale. As a modern ambassador for those typically Victorian ideals, Greenwood – dubbed ‘Reverend Ron’ by his players – was perfect. To Violet Redknapp, though, such details were secondary; to her, the club simply had a family feel that inspired comfort and confidence in equal measure.

Greenwood invited the Redknapps to attend West Ham youth games, and by the time a decision needed to be taken about Harry’s footballing future, there was little doubt where the teenager was headed. ‘They were Hammers through and through,’ remembers Docherty, who had little reason to suspect the Redknapps’ Arsenal affiliation. ‘Harry was an East End lad and he was a Hammers lad. He was a terrific kid and an outstanding player, an out-and-out outside right or attacking winger. I always said that, when Harry finished playing football, he would become a manager, because he loves the game and he loves his players to love the game. He loves his players to go out and entertain the people that pay his salary, the supporters. And that’s why Harry has always produced good players and good teams. To this day, when I see Harry looking for a player, I know he’s looking for a player with a lot of flair and imagination. It’s always been a characteristic of his and he’s never lost that.’

It is a characteristic of which the late Bill Nicholson doubtless approved. ‘No matter how football changes,’ Nicholson once said, ‘the fundamentals will always apply. Nothing can be achieved without individual ability.’ As the architect of the dazzling Spurs side that in 1961 became the first modern Double winners, Nicholson was the ultimate football purist. ‘It’s no use winning,’ he would tell his bemused players, ‘we’ve got to win well.’ Today, in an era when football is ruled by money, few managers outside the elite can afford such high-minded principles. Redknapp comes closer than most. His reign as West Ham manager was notable for its embodiment of the belief that losing with style is better than winning without it. Had Nicholson lived to see Redknapp’s ascent to the White Hart Lane throne, he might have recognised in the former trialist, if not exactly a kindred spirit, then at least a man noteworthy for his determination to marry attacking football with the more pragmatic aspects of the modern game.

Then again, Nicholson could no more have imagined that the young boy he first met that winter’s morning in 1958 would one day be his successor than Redknapp could have envisaged that, half a century on, he would make the best start to a managerial reign at White Hart Lane for one hundred and ten years. ‘I’m certainly not the best boss in a hundred and ten years for Tottenham,’ said Redknapp on achieving that milestone. ‘I couldn’t lace Bill Nicholson’s boots.’ Maybe not, but Redknapp’s initial impact at White Hart Lane was hardly less dramatic that that of the man who marked his first match as manager by leading a team flirting with relegation to a celebrated 10-4 win against Everton. The Bolton win was followed by a 4-4 draw at Arsenal, Redknapp’s first official game in charge, which had the Guardian’s David Lacey recalling ‘the unfettered football Spurs produced in Nicholson’s first season as manager.’ The same cavalier spirit was evident throughout the six-game unbeaten run that got Redknapp’s tenure underway; with five wins, and eighteen goals scored, few doubted that Nicholson’s legacy was in good hands.

It will do little harm to Redknapp’s standing among Tottenham fans that he also possesses certain other qualities redolent of Nicholson. Most notably, he has something of the great man’s celebrated ability to build teams amounting to more than the sum of their individual parts. Like his illustrious predecessor, Redknapp is universally recognised – within the game, if not always outside it – as a shrewd judge of players and their abilities. ‘Harry has a wonderful eye for talent and a wonderful eye for seeing how that talent would fit into his existing squad of players,’ says Bobby Howe, who signed professional forms at Upton Park a few months before Redknapp’s arrival in 1963 and subsequently worked alongside him, as a player and coach, for over fifteen years. The powers of appraisal identified by Howe are partly the legacy of the countless hours Redknapp spent watching football as a child. If he was not kicking a ball around with friends outside the family’s Barchester Street home, he was usually on the touchline cheering on his dad, a talented local-league player, as he demonstrated his skills at inside forward.

Redknapp also witnessed at first hand the value of hard graft. Harry Snr’s dockyard income was supplemented by his mother’s work in a cake factory and as a daybreak office cleaner. Their zeal instilled in Redknapp a work ethic that provides another point of contact with Nicholson, whose early starts and burning of the midnight oil are the stuff of White Hart Lane legend. Redknapp, who resides on the exclusive Sandbanks peninsula in Dorset, regularly leaves home for Tottenham’s Chigwell-based training ground at half past five in the morning, prefacing the day’s toil with a tedious trawl around the M25. ‘Beneath that laid back, cheeky exterior there’s a man that works very, very hard,’ says Howe. ‘For me, that’s the most important aspect of Harry’s success, because he’s always looking for the next step, always looking ahead and trying to gain an advantage. And he was like that from day one.’

In other respects, Redknapp, with his sharp wit and natural exuberance, could hardly be more dissimilar to his relatively strait-laced predecessor. Nicholson, who grew up during the Great Depression as the second youngest of nine children, was an inherently austere character. Conversely, Redknapp is an only child and a congenital gambler. The latter quality has served him well throughout his football career. As John Williams, the imposing centre-half who later became a mainstay of Redknapp’s Bournemouth side, explains: ‘If you’re getting beaten or it’s nil-nil and they’re having a right go at you and you can’t get out defensively, Harry’s more likely to turn it the other way round and put a forward or a winger on and try and get out of it that way. He won’t put a sweeper on and try to defend. That’s not the way he is. He’s a very offensive manager, and that’s why I think, if you look at his record, he tends to win or lose rather than draw.’

Harry Redknapp was born in Poplar, East London, on March 2, 1947, when post-war Britain was in the grip of a snow-swept, bitterly cold winter and a national power crisis. Neither of his parents were betting people and it was Maggie Brown, his maternal grandmother, who implanted the gambling gene in the young Harry’s DNA. A bookies’ runner, she would welcome her grandson home from school – both Harry Snr and Violet were out working – with a hot meal and a copy of the lunchtime paper. Never mind that Redknapp was too young to read: he would make his random selections with a pin, and they would later be collected by Cyril, the septuagenarian paper boy who doubled as an illegal bookmaker. It was the ideal preparation for the West Ham dressing room, where gambling – be it on dogs, cards or horses – was a way of life.

Trevor Hartley, who played alongside Redknapp in his early days at West Ham, soon came to recognise the depth of his team-mate’s love for the turf. ‘We played in a Metropolitan League match at Chadwell Heath one afternoon in 1965,’ recalls Hartley. ‘It was the day of the Grand National. I was playing up front, and I was waiting for Harry to come down flying down the right wing. After fifteen minutes, I hadn’t even seen him. “What’s Harry doing?” I asked someone. I looked round, and he was hanging about by the halfway line listening to someone’s radio, trying to find out where his horse was placed. In the dressing room at half-time, he was up. One of the lads said to him: “How’d your horse get on?” Harry said: “It won, it won!” He bombed on for the rest of the game.’ Billy Bonds, the overlapping full-back whose right-wing partnership with Redknapp became an important weapon in West Ham’s armoury, remembers his former team-mate as the wiliest member of the club’s card school. ‘Harry was always a slippery customer – so much so, in fact, that we called him The Fox,’ wrote Bonds in his 1988 autobiography, Bonzo. In the same volume Bonds also recalls Redknapp’s dismay at the implementation of a spot-check system designed to weed out the school’s more inventive players. ‘If you won’t take my word for it I’m not cheating,’ stormed Redknapp on the train journey back from an away match, ‘I’ll sling the cards out of the window.’ Pressed by fellow youth product Peter Bennett, Redknapp soon proved that he was in earnest. ‘That was Harry in those days,’ muses Hartley.

Despite such antics, Redknapp soon established himself as a real prospect. The West Ham youth set-up he joined at sixteen was among the best in the country. It had been established a little over a decade earlier by former manager Ted Fenton, who recognised that the club’s inability to compete with the major players in the transfer market necessitated a greater emphasis on homegrown talent. Within months of Redknapp’s arrival, the youngsters gave further lustre to West Ham’s reputation as one of the game’s foremost talent factories by winning the FA Youth Cup. It looked an unlikely outcome when, having suffered a 3-1 defeat to Liverpool in the first leg of the final, the Hammers found themselves 2-1 down by half-time in the second. But a four-goal salvo from Martin Britt, who reaped the benefits of a skilled supply line led by Redknapp and fellow winger Johnny Sissons, left Greenwood ‘over the moon’ and the young Harry in possession of his first medal. Two days later he collected a second as West Ham’s youngsters claimed Chelsea’s scalp in the final of the London Minor Cup. ‘We had a fantastic first year, and to win the FA Youth Cup at the end of it was great,’ recalls Howe. ‘We had an excellent youth team with good balance and some really good players, including Harry. For me, Harry was a typical right winger. He wasn’t a wide right midfield player by any stretch of the imagination, he was an out and out winger, with much more attacking flair than defensive prowess. One of his greatest assets was his ability to cross the ball. I would say that, in his prime, he was one of the best crossers of the ball in England, from the right side. His left foot needed a bit of work, but with a right foot like that he didn’t really need to use his left too much. I would say that you’d have to compare Harry to [David] Beckham when it came to crossing.’

It was around that time that Rodney Marsh, then of Queens Park Rangers, first met Redknapp at The Two Puddings, a pub in Stratford. He remembers his new pal as ‘a skinny right-winger, a bit of a flying machine. If you threw someone a live hand grenade and asked them to run with it, that’s the way Harry played. He went on the outside a lot and he was very fast. But it was all so quick and scatterbrainish. That was his way of playing – it wasn’t about control and getting the ball down, it was a case of running with it, all scurry, scurry.’

Redknapp’s dynamism may sometimes have erred on the side of over-enthusiasm, but Wilf McGuinness, who managed Redknapp and his England team-mates to victory in the 1964 Junior World Cup in Holland, paints an alternative picture of the seventeen-year-old. ‘He was gifted, the lad,’ says McGuinness. ‘Harry was our tricky winger. He’s still tricky, but he’s not a winger! He was very talented, tremendous on the ball, and he was a good outlet. You could say that he was one of the star players. We won the competition – which they used to call the Little World Cup, because the South Americans hadn’t really joined in then – and he played every game. I was fortunate to be around Harry when he was growing up, because I saw the fun side of him. He’s still like that now, of course, but he’s got more serious because the job calls for him to be serious at times.’

While the teenage Redknapp was embellishing his CV in Amsterdam, his senior counterparts were dining out on the most significant result in West Ham’s history. A 3-2 win over Preston North End in the FA Cup final gave Greenwood’s men the club’s first major trophy and a place in Upton Park folklore. The roll of honour included Peter Brabrook, the very player whose presence at Stamford Bridge had, in Tommy Docherty’s view, contributed to Redknapp’s decision to turn down Chelsea. The England winger was a significant obstacle. Having lost out to Chelsea in the race for Brabrook’s signature nearly a decade earlier, West Ham lavished £35,000 to bring the East Ender home in 1962. Consequently, while Johnny Sissons, who played on the opposite flank to Redknapp in the Youth Cup triumph of 1963, progressed so rapidly that twelve months later he became the youngest-ever scorer in a senior final, Redknapp – who was eighteen months younger – had to bide his time. Another season passed – during which West Ham claimed more silverware, beating TSV Munich to lift the European Cup-Winners’ Cup – before Redknapp made his long-awaited senior debut. In the interim, he won the best player award at the Augsberg International Youth Tournament in West Germany, where the Hammers kept the trophy after winning the event for the third successive season. Now eighteen, Redknapp was closing on a first-team call up.

His chance finally came on August 23, 1965. With Sunderland the visitors to the Boleyn Ground and the forward trio of Brian Dear, Johnny Byrne and Alan Sealey all ruled out by injury, Greenwood handed Redknapp his first league start. He took the opportunity with trademark alacrity. With just four minutes gone, Redknapp floated a corner onto the forehead of Martin Peters, who nodded home to draw first blood in a 1-1 draw. Five days later, Redknapp hit the woodwork as title contenders Leeds were beaten 2-1 at Upton Park. Appearances against Sunderland, Leicester and Nottingham Forest followed before Redknapp was again demoted to the sidelines.

History repeated itself the following April, an injury crisis again handing Redknapp a crack at the first team. He once more made the most of his chance, setting up West Ham’s only goal in another 1-1 draw, this time against Burnley, before cementing his growing popularity with the West Ham support by scoring his first goal for the club in a 4-1 away win at White Hart Lane. Redknapp returned to the bench for the remainder of the campaign, but Greenwood knew he had a player on his hands. Indeed, he had several. West Ham were beaten in the League Cup final by West Bromwich Albion, but four first-team regulars – Byrne, Peters, Geoff Hurst and Bobby Moore – were selected for Alf Ramsey’s England World Cup squad. All but Byrne played in the final against West Germany on July 30. Hurst famously became the first player ever to score a hat-trick in a World Cup final, with two of his goals set up by Moore, the captain. Peters also made the score-sheet, rattling home the second in a historic 4-2 victory. England were world champions, and some of the key figures in the win were men with whom Redknapp brushed shoulders daily.

As Moore raised the Jules Rimet trophy skywards, he completed an extraordinary Wembley treble. In successive seasons, the twin towers had stood sentinel as he lifted the FA Cup, Cup-Winners’ Cup and World Cup. Back in Stepney, Redknapp, who did not have a ticket for the final, was watching on television alongside his parents, a rapt observer bursting with pride. It wasn’t just that West Ham had won the World Cup, as Alf Garnett never tired of reminding us afterwards. Moore was a close friend of Redknapp’s, and would later have a defining influence on his career. Redknapp still regards the iconic image of Moore holding the Word Cup while being borne aloft by Hurst, Peters and Ray Wilson as sport’s greatest image. Even then, long before he began routinely referring to the boy from Barking as ‘God’, Redknapp regarded Moore as football royalty. Their friendship began the day Redknapp set foot in Upton Park and lasted until Moore’s death in 1993. As was his way, Moore took the new recruit under his wing and – despite their obvious disparity in status – did everything possible to make him feel welcome at the club. That included inviting him to his house parties, where Redknapp’s inherent vibrancy struck a natural chord with the gregarious company favoured by Moore.

A regular at such gatherings was Rodney Marsh, who witnessed the camaraderie between Moore and Redknapp at first hand. ‘They were very close,’ recalls Marsh. ‘Harry had all the time in the world for Bobby and thought that he was the greatest defender, if not the greatest player, of all time. I would concur with that. I always had the utmost admiration for Bobby Moore. Bobby was a gentleman in football and a gentleman in life. He was what I call inclusive. If Bobby was in the company of a dozen people, and one of them was the president of the United States and another was a cleaner at Upton Park, Bobby would treat them equally. We were round at his house many times, and there were always people there from all walks of life, some very colourful characters. It was a good time: we drunk a lot and we ate a lot and we laughed a lot, and Harry was at the forefront of all that.’ The last detail is telling. Redknapp has long maintained that self-confidence is a prerequisite for success; that he was able to hold court in such distinguished company while still a teenager points to an intrinsic self-assurance.

‘He’s always had great belief in his ability, whatever he’s done,’ says Marsh. ‘The best compliment I could pay Harry Redknapp is that he was one of the chaps. He was always up for having a drink and a laugh, and he’d talk football non-stop.’ The impression of a chirpy, larger-than-life character is confirmed by McGuinness. ‘He was very chatty,’ says McGuinness. ‘Coming from the north of England, I would call him a likable cockney. He was buzzy and we always encouraged that, because we felt it helped to create good team spirit.’

Bobby Howe, who likewise remembers Redknapp as the life and soul of the dressing room, believes that his former team-mate’s natural charisma – allied with an innate football intelligence – has been central to his success as a manager. ‘Harry was a real product of the East End,’ says Howe. ‘His wit and his story-telling were fantastic. He was also a prankster and incredibly street smart. He’s maintained all those characteristics throughout his playing and managerial career, and undoubtedly the smarts that he brought to the game and has applied to his management career have really served him well.’

Of more immediate use to Redknapp were his on-field skills. He returned to the first eleven on December 3, 1966 and immediately picked up where he had left off, scoring the opening goal as West Bromwich Albion were beaten 3-0 at the Boleyn Ground. He did not feature again until the following February, but his return marked the beginning of an extended run in the side. A regular at number seven for most of the 1967/68 season, Redknapp notched up twenty-eight appearances, almost trebling his previous year’s tally. The only hiccup came in late October, when Greenwood, exasperated by his side’s defensive deficiencies, ditched Redknapp and Sissons and switched to a 4-3-3 system. ‘They were both good attacking players,’ recalls McGuinness, whose England youth team also included Sissons, ‘but the pair of them weren’t known as great defenders.’ Nevertheless, by mid-November both Redknapp and Sissons were back in West Ham’s starting line-up, and it wasn’t long before Greenwood was estimating the combined worth of his two wide boys at £150,000.

Whatever Redknapp’s transfer value, he had certainly earned a special place in the fans’ affections. ‘Redknapp has been the idol of the Upton Park terraces since he was a boy,’ wrote Dennis Irving in The West Ham United Football Book in 1968. ‘Maybe it is because he is a local and can shift, maybe it is because his Dad works in the docks – anyway Harry Redknapp has that certain something for the West Ham crowd.’ Marsh has no doubt about the reason for Redknapp’s popularity. ‘He was one of their own,’ he observes, ‘an East End boy playing in the East End.’ That helped, but only up to a point. Later in Redknapp’s West Ham career, when his form and confidence dipped, the fans’ affections likewise waned. Ability, not background, was what counted most at the Boleyn Ground – not least in the eyes of Greenwood, who longed to see the Hammers’ cup form translated into an improvement in their mid-table league status.

Redknapp’s place in the team rested above all on his crossing expertise. Greenwood, a devoted admirer of the great Hungary team coached by Gusztav Sebes and captained by Ferenc Puskas, was a fascinated spectator at Wembley in November 1953 when the Mighty Magyars infamously inflicted a humiliating 6-3 defeat on England. He absorbed various lessons that day, not least the art of the near-post cross, a tactic he worked tirelessly to perfect at West Ham’s Chadwell Heath training ground. Two posts were placed in large, concrete-filled paint tins and positioned out on the flanks. Time and again, Redknapp and his team-mates would be encouraged to bend the ball around these artificial markers and into the near-post area of the six yard box. ‘Harry could hit it great near post,’ recalls Howe. ‘It was a less used tactic then. Everybody knows now the danger of playing balls in at the near post. Players know they’ve got to gamble and get in there, but we were doing it a little bit before our time. We did it a lot in training and we scored a great many goals from it. You had people like Geoff Hurst going in at the near post, and I think we were probably as good as – if not better than – any team in the country at hitting those balls. Harry was one of the best exponents of it.’

Redknapp’s attacking brio and pinpoint delivery from the right wing placed him among the early upholders of what would become a proud playing tradition. ‘In the fifties and early sixties West Ham developed a way of playing that has been their trademark ever since,’ says Marsh, who had a brief spell at the club as a fifteen-year-old before the recruitment of a young rival named Hurst led to his departure for Fulham. ‘Malcolm Musgrove, Phil Woosnam, Malcolm Allison, Ken Brown and others developed a certain way of playing; they wanted to play football. When Ron Greenwood took over that was carried through, and Harry was part of that. When you’re involved in something like that, along with three World Cup winners in Bobby Moore, Martin Peters and Geoff Hurst, it rubs off. Being part of that system is a major part of what Harry Redknapp is today.’

Whether it is obscured by his natural ebullience – or by the popular perception of him as ’onest ’Arry, the East End wheeler-dealer making his way in a world of foreign sophisticates – Redknapp is too rarely given credit for this technical and tactical pedigree. When Greenwood died in February 2006, he was widely and rightly lauded as one of the game’s great thinkers, a coaching visionary who brought flair and imagination to the game. Those qualities did not die with him. Redknapp is merely the most high-profile beneficiary of a legacy that has kept many of Greenwood’s former charges in gainful employment. ‘We all inherited certain qualities from Ron,’ says Howe, who went on to become director of coaching for the United States Soccer Federation. ‘He used to have an expression: simplicity is genius. Anybody who played for Ron would understand what that means: play the game simply and efficiently, play to your strengths. While he encouraged us to try to improve our performance in training and to expand our repertoire, he wouldn’t encourage us to do that in games, he’d just want us to play to our strengths. I think that’s the basis on which West Ham grew at that time. A lot of clubs back then concentrated on running. The ball was kept away from the players, with the theory being that it would make them hungry for the ball at the weekend. But Ron got us to do a lot of work with the ball, and so practices were always interesting. We did a tremendous amount of technical stuff in training, and I think that anybody who played through that era and went on to coach believed in that philosophy as well.’

Equally, Redknapp learned from Greenwood what not to do. The memory of how Moore once complained to him of Greenwood’s reluctance to offer praise or encouragement has become one of Redknapp’s most frequently-recounted vignettes. ‘The most important thing anyone ever said to me in football was what Bobby Moore said one day,’ recalls Redknapp. ‘He said he had sixteen years at West Ham under Ron Greenwood, the best coach I have seen without a doubt, but never in sixteen years did he give him a pat on the back and say well done. Mooro said to me: “Harry, we all need that.” And that is a lesson I learned.’ Small wonder, then, that an ability to lift players, to instil confidence and belief, has been so central to Redknapp’s success. Results don’t lie. Redknapp has masterminded Cup shocks against Manchester United with three different teams. He transformed Portsmouth from Championship strugglers to Premiership stayers. He wrought an instant upturn in the fortunes of a Tottenham side that had gone eight games without victory. It is a CV of genuine substance.

John Williams believes that Redknapp’s empathetic handling of players has been central to these achievements. ‘Harry was never one for the big Churchillian speech,’ says Williams. ‘He might speak collectively about how the team would play, but he was very keen after that to get stuck in to individuals. He would go round the changing room and have a quiet word with everyone individually. Once he’d spoken to you, you were concentrating and you didn’t look up. But I’d imagine that after he’d gone from myself, he was whispering words of wisdom in somebody else’s ear. So it was more a one-to-one thing than massive speeches, and I’ve heard that he still does that to this day.’

While Redknapp’s ability to inspire is an aspect of his coaching acumen that owes little to Greenwood, it would be an injustice to suggest that he learned nothing about pastoral care from his mentor. Redknapp recalls an episode early in his West Ham career when a club official, eager to lock the gates, called time on an impromptu kickaround in the club car park involving himself, Bobby Moore and Frank Lampard Snr. Greenwood was not amused when he learned that his players had been turfed out. ‘He told me that from then on, if we wanted to kick a ball around until midnight in that car park, that was fine,’ recounted Redknapp in the Mirror. ‘He said even if we finished playing in the middle of the night, he’d make sure there was someone there to lock the gates. He didn’t want to do anything to stop us playing football. He loved the game and he loved seeing people who wanted to learn.’

Greenwood was similarly keen to see that the knowledge he imparted to his protégés was passed on to the next generation. To that end, he actively encouraged his players to obtain their coaching badges and to work at local schools. ‘I went to West Ham in 1964, and in 1965 I took my preliminary badge with Bobby Howe,’ recalls Trevor Hartley, who had acquired his full badge by the age of twenty-one and later became the Football League’s youngest manager when he took over at Bournemouth. ‘Ron used to encourage Bobby and I, instead of going to play golf in the afternoons, to coach at local schools. We ended up at the Holloway School in Islington with Bob Wilson from Arsenal and Mike England from Spurs. Ron thought that Bobby and myself would be the type to become coaches, and that helped us out because we grew in confidence while teaching the kids.’ Redknapp benefited in similar fashion from the culture of learning established by Greenwood. ‘Harry was one of the players that we took on the preliminary badge when John Lyall was coaching at West Ham under the auspices of Ron,’ recounts Bobby Howe. ‘I would have to say that Harry was one of the better coaches, even then – and it was a very long time ago.’

Having taken the first step along his future career path, Redknapp wasted no time in putting his newfound skills to use. Along with Frank Lampard Snr and John Bond, his future manager at Bournemouth, he spent four afternoons a week taking coaching sessions at a nearby school. ‘When we had finished training,’ recalls Redknapp, ‘me and Frank Lampard [Snr] used to go to a place in Canning Town called Pretoria School. It was a tough place but it was Frank’s old school and they had a lovely sports master called Dave Jones. We used to teach the kids and play a game of football in the gym. We loved it and as we were only on six pounds a week, two pounds fifty for the afternoon didn’t half come in handy.’ The experience instilled in Redknapp a commitment to youth development that has never left him. The legacy bore its richest fruit at West Ham, where Joe Cole, Rio Ferdinand, Frank Lampard and Michael Carrick all reaped the benefits of Redknapp’s experience, progressing through West Ham’s youth ranks en route to achieving international recognition and league titles. Lampard describes in his autobiography, Totally Frank, how Redknapp, together with Lampard Snr, ‘nurtured young talent, encouraged it and then gave players a platform on which to develop’, in the process ensuring that ‘parents whose kids were coming through trusted the club to help their sons make the grade.’

While Greenwood no doubt applauded the efforts made by his former charge to restore West Ham’s reputation as the Academy of Football, he was rather less appreciative of Redknapp’s contribution to the cause on October 12, 1968. Half an hour into a league clash at Elland Road, Redknapp became involved in a contretemps with Billy Bremner, Leeds United’s fearsomely competitive captain. Bremner turned up the temperature on a heated exchange by skimming Redknapp’s shins with his studs, Redknapp retaliated, and Bremner went down as if shot by the proverbial sniper. ‘It was a joke,’ remembers Bonds in his autobiography. ‘H never stuck one on anyone in his life – and if he tried his hardest could not have flattened Bremner the way the Leeds star dropped.’ As the referee scribbled down his name, an incensed Redknapp could not hold his tongue. The result was a second yellow card, this time for dissent, and with it the dubious distinction of becoming only the second player dismissed during Greenwood’s tenure. ‘Obviously the club are upset about it,’ said Greenwood after a 2-0 defeat. ‘We have a proud record for behaviour on the field. You cannot go seven years without a player being sent off unless discipline is of a high standard. I am not forgiving Redknapp, but a young player does not kick out like that unless something has happened to him.’

The following week Redknapp bounced back in style, supplying the ammunition for Hurst to complete a double hat-trick as West Ham trounced Sunderland 8-0 to equal the biggest league win in their history. Hurst’s third of the afternoon came from a Redknapp cross off Billy Bonds’ short corner, while the England forward later swept home his sixth from a typically inviting Redknapp centre. A fortnight later, Redknapp completed his redemption in emphatic fashion. ‘We played against QPR at Upton Park and Harry won it for us, 4-3, with a tremendous volley,’ recalls Hartley. Redknapp reverted to his more customary role of provider either side of the New Year, winning a penalty at Southampton on Boxing Day before setting up Peters for a blistering half-volley as Newcastle were beaten 3-1 at the Boleyn Ground. By the season’s end, he had racked up thirty-six performances in a side that finished eighth in the First Division.

Nonetheless, Redknapp’s best result of the campaign – as his son, Jamie, has never been slow to remind him – came in pre-season. On June 30, 1968 Redknapp married Sandra Harris, an eighteen-year-old hairdresser from Essex, at St Margaret’s Church, Barking. A staunch ally throughout the numerous highs and lows of her husband’s career, Sandra is the unsung hero of the Harry Redknapp story. ‘I think Sandra is the fortress behind Harry, to be honest,’ says Milan Mandaric, the business tycoon whose takeover of Portsmouth would later have such significant implications for Redknapp. ‘Sandra is tremendous for him, she’s a pillar.’

Best man at the Redknapps’ wedding was Frank Lampard Snr, who presided over the occasion on crutches after breaking his right leg against Sheffield Wednesday toward the season’s end. Lampard proved an apt choice, for he later married Sandra’s sister, the late Pat Harris. The couple had met four years earlier, shortly after Harry and Sandra began dating, and their marriage completed the foundation of a distinguished football dynasty. A serious ankle injury prematurely curtailed the development of Mark, the older of the two Redknapp boys. But Jamie, a cultured midfielder who signed for Tottenham as a teenager before deciding that he would be better off playing under his dad at Bournemouth, went on to reach the highest level. Jamie’s Dean Court career was just thirteen league appearances old when Kenny Dalglish took him to Liverpool, where he would spend eleven years and become captain – as well as winning seventeen England caps – before seeing out his playing days at Spurs and Southampton. Jamie’s cousin, Frank Lampard Jnr, boasts a still more impressive CV. After a difficult start to his career at West Ham, where a management team consisting of Uncle Harry and his father led to scurrilous accusations of nepotism, Lampard joined Chelsea, where he has amassed league and Cup silverware as well as a substantial increase on the two England caps won by his father.

That football runs in the family blood is something Redknapp never doubted. Convinced that his son would learn more valuable life lessons in the dressing room than the classroom, he regularly drove young Jamie to the Bournemouth training ground rather than dropping him off at school. The fourteen-year-old’s skills made an abiding impression on John Williams, who could see even then that the youngster was destined for the top. ‘I can remember Jamie joining in five-a-sides, and he was like third pick,’ says Williams. ‘The rest of us were just left on the side. It was an absolute cert that he was going to go on. He was a great kid. Mark’s a lovely lad, too, although he doesn’t get mentioned a lot. They’re just a great family. They make you ever so welcome when you’re in their home or in their company and it was an absolute pleasure to work with them. Just being around someone like Harry, who’s been a manager in the game for over twenty-five years, has been really inspiring. Everything I’ve done in the game is down to him.’