Harry Redknapp - The Biography. Les Roopanarine
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