Harry Redknapp - The Biography. Les Roopanarine
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.’
In the summer of 1972, £31,000 would have bought you four houses, a small fleet of cars or a flying winger named Harry Redknapp. The preference of John Bond, the Bournemouth manager, was never in doubt. With his E-type Jaguar, penchant for bling and preposterously large cigars, Bond had a flamboyance which made you suspect that houses and cars were to him mere trinkets. Of greater value to the man who seemingly had everything was a winger capable of providing Ted MacDougall, the club’s talismanic goal poacher, with the precise service on which he would thrive. So it was that Redknapp was lured two tiers down the football pyramid, to the Third Division club recently renamed AFC Bournemouth because Bond felt that the club’s original moniker, Bournemouth and Boscombe Athletic, was ‘too old-fashioned.’
Rarely had the club spent so lavishly on one player, but the sense that Bournemouth were going places was strong. Bond had taken over at Dean Court two years earlier after a disastrous relegation campaign under his predecessor, Freddie Cox. It was the first time in history that the club had gone down, and the jaunty new boss was not a Division Four kind of guy. Bond had an instant impact, leading the Cherries out of the Football League’s lowest tier at the first time of asking before narrowly failing to mastermind a second successive promotion. ‘The idea was to try and turn us into a continental football club,’ says Bond, ‘so we changed the shirts [to red-and-black stripes reminiscent of Milan] and lots of other things. The players responded tremendously and the fans loved it as well. The crowds went from three thousand up to twenty thousand. It was unheard of.’
A key element in Bournemouth’s success was the lethal marksmanship of MacDougall, a future Scotland international. The November before Redknapp’s arrival, MacDougall earned himself a place in the record books by scoring nine goals against Margate in a first round FA Cup game. At a time when the difference in standard between the lower divisions and the top-flight was nowhere near as great as it is today, Bond knew that providing MacDougall with an effective supply-line could take Bournemouth far. Bond’s last appearance for West Ham had preceded Redknapp’s debut by four months, but he had trained alongside him often enough to recognise that the Redknapp-MacDougall axis had the potential to reap dividends.
‘John Bond knew Harry and knew what a quality winger he was, so he brought him into the team to provide service to Ted from the right side of the field,’ recalls Bobby Howe, whom Bond had recruited from West Ham the previous January. ‘Harry was a wonderful crosser of the ball – he could take people on, make little angles for himself and get great little balls in, and I think that’s what John wanted at that time. Anytime players like Harry were available, he did his best to get them. Bournemouth at that time was a pretty competitive team.’
In the event, Redknapp supplied the ammunition for MacDougall all too briefly. With seventy-seven goals in his previous two seasons, MacDougall was a wanted man long before a spectacular diving header against Aston Villa in February 1972 earned him rave reviews on Match of the Day. Bournemouth had rebuffed interest from a number of top-flight suitors by the time Manchester United came calling seven months later, but an offer of £200,000, a Third Division record, was too good to decline. With Redknapp’s Dean Court career less than two months old, MacDougall left for Old Trafford.
If the loss of such a prolific goal-scorer was a blow, the fact that Bournemouth were capable of smoothing the edges on a player of Manchester United calibre only reinforced the club’s status as an emergent power. Consequently, Bond’s ability to attract players of pedigree – not least from his old Upton Park stamping ground – remained undiminished. In MacDougall’s absence, Redknapp’s fortunes would be influenced by another Scot. Bond’s summer recruits included Jimmy Gabriel, a defensive midfielder signed from Southampton whose career had taken in league and Cup triumphs with Harry Catterick’s Everton. ‘Jimmy was a tremendous force in the game, a wonderful player,’ recalls Howe, who was part of a claret-and-blue coterie that also included Keith Miller, the adaptable midfielder whom Bond made club captain, and Trevor Hartley, Howe’s brother-in-law. ‘John brought Jimmy in because of his tremendous experience. Jimmy was very aggressive, a great motivator on the field and someone who really made you feel good. He was a driving spirit.’
As Gabriel’s leadership qualities impressed Howe, so the technical excellence of the cadre of Greenwood graduates stirred respect in Gabriel. From his central midfield station, the former Scotland international was well placed to appreciate Redknapp’s marauding right-wing runs. ‘Harry could dance down that wing, he really had the skills,’ recalls Gabriel. ‘He was the best crosser of a ball I’ve seen. He could drop it on a sixpence and he could do it all the different ways: bending it, high in the air, driving it across – he was always very, very accurate. I’m sure that’s why West Ham hired him in the first place. He was very fast, too, he could cut behind the defender and whip the ball in. It was hard for a defender to play against Harry, because he could whip it in in front of you and if you went to make a tackle he could get behind you.’
Professional respect aside, Redknapp and Gabriel also hit it off on a personal level, their friendship cemented by a combination of coincidence and shared aspiration. ‘Amazingly enough, the day I went up to sign for Bournemouth Harry was there too,’ recalls Gabriel. ‘He was signing from West Ham and I was signing from Southampton. Frank Lampard [Snr] was there, because Frank’s related to Harry through their wives. They took a photograph and it had the three of us in it, even though Frank wasn’t signing, so it was funny.’ Funny in a different sense was Redknapp’s decision to purchase a house in Mudeford, a small fishing village just outside Christchurch. By chance, he suddenly found himself living within a hundred yards of both Gabriel and Howe. ‘Harry bought a house across the road from me, so we were obviously destined to become friends,’ muses Gabriel. ‘Bobby lived just around the corner, and we all used to share a car into training. We were always talking about soccer, and we made a pact that whoever got a job first as a head coach or manager would bring the other two with them.’
That pact was to have a shaping influence on the future of Bournemouth’s three wise men. United by their passion for the game and by a shared desire to become coaches, their exchange of tactical and technical insights harked back to the days when Bond, Noel Cantwell and Malcolm Allison held court before West Ham’s younger players at Cassettari’s, an Italian café close to the Boleyn Ground. In his book 1966 And All That, Geoff Hurst, frequently a rapt attendee at such gatherings, recalled how salt and pepper pots became the ‘essential props in long discussions on tactics and strategies.’ A similar process was now enacted on the south coast, albeit in more colourful surroundings.
‘We would talk to each other about football on the way to training as well