Harry Redknapp - The Biography. Les Roopanarine
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