Harry Redknapp - The Biography. Les Roopanarine
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