Redknapp's Autobiography

[Jurgen the German]

Have to say, back to the thread title, I think Harry's book is thoroughly entertaining.

It underscores a deep-roted feeling I've had about him for ages though...that if he could simply have had the focus to fix on one thing at a time, he'd have ended up winning something with us and probably having a statue built.

The last 6 months before he was ousted are a cartoon; that he denied any of it affected our season, when he repeats over and over how ****-scared he was during the court case (and I absolutely understand he would be - anyone would!) is just bizarre!

Deep down, you're left with the feeling that he enjoys great football, has some tremendous charm, but at heart lacks the deep-lying confidence to really believe in himself. It's also very very insightful when he discusses his anger at the treatment of Bobby Moore, and to a lesser extent Best, but most certainly Moore. He actually says that was the moment he realized that he had to look after number 1 regardless of anything...

Notice how fans don't begrudge players leaving clubs, even if they act unprofessionally to get their way because it's all "part of the game" but the same courtesy isn't extended to managers. If a manager leaves a club midseason to go to a bigger/club there is definitely more of an outrage compared to when players leave to better their careers.

 

[milo]

Notice how fans don't begrudge players leaving clubs, even if they act unprofessionally to get their way because it's all "part of the game" but the same courtesy isn't extended to managers. If a manager leaves a club midseason to go to a bigger/club there is definitely more of an outrage compared to when players leave to better their careers.

I'm not sure that is true. I think that fans are increasingly acting like teenage girls when their favourite member of a boy band quits the band when a player leave a club.

 

[Jurgen the German]

I'm not sure that is true. I think that fans are increasingly acting like teenage girls when their favourite member of a boy band quits the band when a player leave a club.

Ok I'll give you another example, Ekotto admits he plays his main motivation for playing is money and was praised and celebrated for his honesty, but Redknapp was routinely criticised for being a mercenary. The fact that he kept switching between Southampton and Portsmouth was picked up on quite a lot, but does anyone honestly think Ekotto or most other Spurs players wouldn't go to Chelsea or Arsenal? Modric openly stated his desire to play for Chelsea.

I believe the way a player goes about leaving a club does make the difference. I personally didn't appreciate the way Bale behaved this summer, some didn't have a problem with it, that's life. People would have been disappointed even if he left on good terms, but I reckon he would have had more feelings of goodwill towards him if he had gone about his business differently.

 

[milo]

Ok I'll give you another example, Ekotto admits he plays his main motivation for playing is money and was praised and celebrated for his honesty, but Redknapp was routinely criticised for being a mercenary. The fact that he kept switching between Southampton and Portsmouth was picked up on quite a lot, but does anyone honestly think Ekotto or most other Spurs players wouldn't go to Chelsea or Arsenal? Modric openly stated his desire to play for Chelsea.

I believe the way a player goes about leaving a club does make the difference. I personally didn't appreciate the way Bale behaved this summer, some didn't have a problem with it, that's life. People would have been disappointed even if he left on good terms, but I reckon he would have had more feelings of goodwill towards him if he had gone about his business differently.

I think that Ekotto was (unfairly) criticised by many for saying that it was a job and has always been a player who divided opinion, so maybe he isn't the best example.

 

[Superted]

The manager has a far greater responsibility to the club than any player

 

[milo]

The manager has a far greater responsibility to the club than any player

That is also true

 

[milo]

The other thing is that managers are either sacked for under performing or leave for a bigger job. The last Spurs manager to leave for a bigger job was Venables, so it is not something that we have been massively over troubled with in our recent history.

 

[Jurgen the German]

The manager has a far greater responsibility to the club than any player

True but there is more of a tolerance for players being disloyal as if it's all part of the business when players do it, there's a double standard in my eyes. You often see fans on this board say "I would have Bertatov/Modric back in a heartbeat", don't think anyone would say the same about any previous manager.

 

[Jurgen the German]

I think that Ekotto was (unfairly) criticised by many for saying that it was a job and has always been a player who divided opinion, so maybe he isn't the best example.

Most Spurs fans I know appreciated his honesty.

 

[milo]

True but there is more of a tolerance for players being disloyal as if it's all part of the business when players do it, there's a double standard in my eyes. You often see fans on this board say "I would have Bertatov/Modric back in a heartbeat", don't think anyone would say the same about any previous manager.

I think that is because the managers take more of the blame for a teams shortcomings and most managers are sacked because the team under performed. How many premier league managers at clubs challenging for Champions League qualification have left for a bigger job in the last ten years?

 

[stinkfoot]

Have to say, back to the thread title, I think Harry's book is thoroughly entertaining.

It underscores a deep-roted feeling I've had about him for ages though...that if he could simply have had the focus to fix on one thing at a time, he'd have ended up winning something with us and probably having a statue built.

The last 6 months before he was ousted are a cartoon; that he denied any of it affected our season, when he repeats over and over how ****-scared he was during the court case (and I absolutely understand he would be - anyone would!) is just bizarre!

Deep down, you're left with the feeling that he enjoys great football, has some tremendous charm, but at heart lacks the deep-lying confidence to really believe in himself. It's also very very insightful when he discusses his anger at the treatment of Bobby Moore, and to a lesser extent Best, but most certainly Moore. He actually says that was the moment he realized that he had to look after number 1 regardless of anything...

The wife told me today that my father in law is giving it to me for Xmas.

I'm looking forward to reading it.

 

[Jordinho]

Somehow he has come up with enough material for another it seems. Being serialized in the Daily Mail:

Praises Wenger for revolutionizing the game (though he can't quite agree with himself on ProZone):

successful very quickly, and suddenly all the talk was about his revolutionary new training methods.

He only trains for an hour… does everything on the stopwatch… the players are wearing heart monitors at training… he gives them supplements… Prozone is one of the biggest changes.

Last season, when QPR were due to play Blackpool, our most recent scout’s report had them operating with four at the back and two holding midfield players. In the old days, that would have been all that was available.

Now we’ve got machines that can call up game after game, personnel, the most detailed statistics, changes in the gameplan. So we knew that for most of the season they had played three centre-halves, and pushed the full-backs on and that would be how they intended to play if everyone was fit.

The aids for a manager are incredible now. When I began, we might have one report on the opposition. That aside, you just played - sorted your own team out and went from there.

If they had a player you fancied was good you might tell one of the lads to watch him, give him an idea of what to expect - but there was no detail. Don Revie at Leeds United was the only one who went into depth, and his dossiers were the talk of football.

Other managers were still not convinced they were a good idea. Play your own game, that was the mantra. No managers changed their team to accommodate the opposition. Nobody mirrored formations.

These days, if the England manager is caught out tactically he gets slaughtered; but, even a few years before the Premier League, if the same man came in and said the other team were using wing-backs so he would go with a back three too, and flood midfield, he would have been called a coward. Why are we worrying about them? We’re England - let them worry about us!

I must admit, I find the point of Prozone baffling at times. Yes, you’ve got it - but so has the team you are playing. So while you’re watching them, they’re watching you, and while you’re changing to deal with them, they’re doing the same. We all go along with it, but where’s the edge?

I remember Paolo di Canio brought his fitness coach to West Ham. The food at the training ground changed, too.

Lunches at Chadwell Heath had barely altered since my day - steak and kidney pie, loads of potatoes, anything you could get. By the end of that first season with Paolo’s man, everyone had their own tailored, balanced food intake and a special dietician supervised that regime.

Then slams the lack of opportunities for the English lads:

Louis van Gaal couldn’t have done a better job with Hull City than Steve Bruce did last year. Yet did his heroics in the League and FA Cup create even a ripple at Old Trafford? Was Steve, a great competitor and wonderful player for United, even considered for the Manchester United job?

OK, a few times in his career it hasn’t worked out but that would be true of Van Gaal, too, if he had spent his managerial life at clubs like Sheffield United, Huddersfield Town or Hull.

I don’t understand why owners suddenly lost faith in British managers. Unless Frank Lampard or John Terry gets the job, do you really see Roman Abramovich appointing an Englishman to Chelsea? Or even a British manager? Maybe Brendan Rodgers might come into the frame, but would he leave Liverpool for Stamford Bridge?

Foreign players, foreign coaches, foreign owners.

I’ve got a great relationship with the Queens Park Rangers owner Tony Fernandes — and I’m too old to be a creep, so believe me, I mean it — but not every manager is as lucky. Club chairmen talk to current players, they talk to ex-players, they talk to agents, to a ring of yes-men — and then they come away thinking they know more than the manager.

Sometimes a foreign coach gets the benefit of the doubt, but British managers are increasingly coming under particularly harsh scrutiny.

I don’t see the new breed of owner — with their ‘keep throwing money at it and eventually you’ll be all right’ approach — giving British coaches a chance. It was a real setback that David Moyes did not do better at Manchester United, although it was always going to be hard to be the man who followed Sir Alex Ferguson.

And where’s the next generation of English managers coming from? Will the current top tier of English players go through the leagues to prove themselves, as Bruce has done?

Lads who have had 10 seasons at Chelsea in the Abramovich years won’t get out of bed for what the manager of Exeter City gets paid. Take Lampard. Now he’s finished at Chelsea, would he really want to take a job at, say, Gillingham, the way I worked at Bournemouth? He probably earned three times as much in one week as the Gillingham manager does in one year.

Let’s face it, if you’ve been earning £200,000 a week, are you going to take a job for £80,000 a year that involves going out every night watching inferior games and inferior players on the off-chance of finding a gem?

I greatly admire anyone from the modern generation who fancies putting themselves through that.

I’ve been around plenty of Premier League dressing-rooms and I don’t hear many players talk about watching matches from the lower leagues. I don’t see guys like Sol Campbell rushing to take a post in the lower divisions, though I hear he is doing his coaching badges and I’d like to see him get into it.

Ryan Giggs has gone into coaching, but it was never even considered that he might follow the Bobby Charlton route and end up at Preston. It was always going to be at Manchester United or nothing. If Stockport County had phoned him I think it would have been the shortest conversation of all time.

So Giggs has not taken that risk. Why would he test himself against a guy like Steve Evans at Rotherham United? Evans will never get a Premier League job, but his record as a lower-division manager is outstanding.

He gets in a lot of trouble over his comments to referees and officials, but he has proven himself a promotion expert with both Crawley Town and Rotherham in recent seasons. Would Giggs know what he was doing in a lower division up against him? Evans knows where to look for players, he’s out grafting all the time and he knows how to put a League Two or League One team together. Giggs wouldn’t have a clue by comparison.

The modern players are as likely to want to be media men or agents as run a team, and I don’t blame them.

And moans about things not being like they were in the good old days:

It’s not just that players have agents, it’s that those agents sometimes have a better line of communication to the chairman than the manager. And it’s not just that the players know who the chairman is - it is that they are on first-name terms and think nothing of putting in a call if they are unhappy with anything from team selection to training.

What certainly altered was the way you tried to build team spirit. The old methods were very simple - bonding sessions, getting the lads to go out for a drink or have a day at the races.

Everybody laughs, falls about, gets into a few scrapes. A typical jolly boys’ outing, but the foreign players didn’t want to know about that.

I can remember during my time at Tottenham I took the lads to the Cheltenham races. I thought we’d have some fun, relax together, come back a bit tighter as a unit - but you would have thought I’d taken them on a prison visit.

About eight of them were looking at their watches after half an hour. What are we doing here? Why have you brought us here?

Roman Pavlyuchenko never moved out of his seat all day. Just sat there, waiting for the time to get on the coach and go home. Wouldn’t watch a race, wouldn’t have a bet, just not interested in joining in.

In the end, it has been the English footballers who have had to change because at most clubs now they are isolated. It is a different life for them now.

Roy Keane is working in the game at Aston Villa and Ireland, but it seems a real shame to have a man of his stature outside United. Would they have come seventh last season if Keane had been around to pull the players up?

He would have been after them as he always was in the peak years, when there were no short-cuts at United and those messages were passed from Sir Alex, through Keane.

There is a story of him laying into Mark Bosnich, the goalkeeper, for turning up late on his first day of training. Bosnich said he’d got lost. Keane’s point was that on his own first day at the club, he got up early, hired a taxi and followed it to the training ground in his car to ensure he arrived on time.

He had incredible professional standards and expected the same of everybody. It’s great to have a player like that in your team. Every manager wants a Tony Adams, a John Terry or a Roy Keane, a player who will have a go. I know Roy had a reputation for being high maintenance but I never found him that way. He was as good as gold as a manager and if you asked him about players you always got excellent, straight opinions.

Despite all that has happened in his career since, one of the biggest regrets of my life in management is not taking Luis Suarez to Tottenham when we had the chance.

‘You’ve got to take him, Harry,’ Ruud Gullit told me. ‘He’s fantastic.’

Yet all of our scouts’ reports said that at Ajax he played wide off a striker, whereas we were looking for a proper front man.

Just when I was on the verge of taking the plunge, the price went up. In the end he was sold for £22.8million to Liverpool. We wouldn’t have paid that.

Patrick Vieira was a different type of midfield player and one every club would like to take now. He almost came to me at Tottenham from Inter Milan.

I thought it was an incredible decision by him, after he’d been such a hero at Arsenal.

I met him at his house in Hampstead and he had no fear about what people would think or what reception he would get. He had enough confidence in his ability to just brush it away.

I remember talking to Daniel Levy, our chairman, about him. He said the crowd would be hostile. I knew that — but if he had enough bottle to want to put on our white shirt after all that had gone before, I thought it said something about the man.

In the end, his circumstances changed and he decided to stay in Italy. By the time he did become available — the following January — our needs had changed and Emirates Marketing Project snapped him up.

Patrick is the player Arsenal have never really replaced, but I still find it bizarre that he ended up in a blazer at Emirates Marketing Project. Shouldn’t he be at Arsenal?

It is ironic that so many associate Arsene Wenger with the beautiful game, yet his Arsenal teams, with Vieira — the ultimate box-to-box midfielder — did as much as anybody to introduce real physical power into the modern Premier League.

Teams got bigger to compete with Arsenal because they were so strong. They were up there with any of the great post-War teams — the Busby Babes, Tottenham’s Double-winners, Revie’s Leeds United, the great Liverpool teams, Manchester United under Sir Alex Ferguson — they deserve to be mentioned with any of them.

I had Ravel Morrison at QPR last season. Sir Alex Ferguson said he was the most naturally gifted player he had seen at Manchester United since Paul Scholes - and then sold him because he could do nothing with him.

He’d been at West Ham, scored one of the goals of the season against Tottenham but they, too, found it hard to control him. He’d already had one loan spell at Birmingham City, but ended up with me.

The kid can really play. He goes past people and makes them look silly. He’s like the strolling England player Alan Hudson in the 1970s. He doesn’t run, he glides.

By the time we came to the end of the season, though, he couldn’t get in our starting line-up.

There was one game last season when we’d lost confidence and were losing. I asked him to change his position, to play on the left. His face fell into a petulant pout.

‘I pulled him away from the rest, took him outside and explained as patiently as the time allowed. ‘Ravel, we are losing the f****** game,’ I said. ‘I just want you to play there and do a job for the team. We have to win the game. It’s not about you, OK? It’s about the team.

‘People look at your face in there when I’ve asked you to do something, and they will all go away and think you are a big-headed *******, because your attitude stinks. That’s what people say about you.’

Second half he was absolutely different class. He ran the game, everything good we did came from him and we were all watching it thinking, ‘‘What a talent’’. You looked at that performance and thought he could get us promoted on his own if he put his mind to it. It was like watching a player with Gareth Bale’s class in the Championship.

Lee Clark, the Birmingham City manager, said to Ravel that he was the best player since Gazza. His response: ‘Who’s Gazza?’

Should that surprise us? Admittedly that World Cup in Italy is 24 years ago now, and Ravel is 21, but however long ago it was I think he can be expected to know who Paul Gascoigne is. But it does show you that when you’ve gone, when you’ve had your day, nobody cares.

If Morrison had played consistently at his best, he might have gone to the World Cup; on his bad days you wouldn’t have put him in our reserve team

Terry is another influential player. He’s one of those that change a club. If we could take him to QPR from Chelsea I would feel very confident, just with that one signing alone, that we would stay up.

He gets people at it, he’s a talker, he takes charge of the dressing-room. It’s hard to find leaders, though I’m lucky enough to have Rio Ferdinand with me. It’s hard to find talkers, organisers. I don’t know why, but it is so hard to find a player prepared to speak his mind.

Everyone now is waiting to receive information; they all exist in their own little worlds. They don’t talk to each other off the pitch or on the coach.

Everyone sits there with headphones, looking at an iPad or playing a computer game. Is it any wonder modern players lack communication skills?

Terry is a throwback in the way he bosses a team. I’ve got a lot of time for John, even though I know his career has not been without controversy. The modern Tony Adams — I can’t pay him a higher compliment than that.

Some people may think John is a dubious role model, but I would have no hesitation in saying to any of the young academy defenders at QPR: ‘Go and watch Chelsea tonight, go and watch Terry, study him all game’.

If they pay attention they will learn more in that 90 minutes than in a month of training sessions.

If Chelsea ever lose faith in John, I’d take him like a shot.

I don’t see the new breed of owner — with their ‘keep throwing money at it and eventually you’ll be all right’ approach — giving British coaches a chance.

Harry Redknapp, complaining about clubs simply throwing money at something until it works? :ross:

 

[Lemonade Money]

Having a pop at foreigners, when his club is owned by one. Praising Terry, when Rio plays for him.

 

[clownfoot]

If anyone struggles with a definition of hypocrisy then point them towards 'Arry Redeknapp's literature

 

[clownfoot]

Also the scouts for Suarez were Sherwood and Ferdinand if I remember correctly. He's happy to hang a few people out to dry and name them, but not his heir to the bigmouth throne

 

[Jordinho]

Here's what he said a few years ago:

We kept looking at [Suárez] but people thought he couldn't play up as a striker.

They said he's like Rafa [van der Vaart] and you can't have him and Rafa or you'd have two players who want to drop deep, so that was the problem. We were looking for someone to play up front with Rafa. People said he couldn't do that, he drifts and comes deep. But he played up front on his own the other night [against Fulham on Monday] and he was fantastic.

Never once does he admit to simply getting something wrong.

 

[Jordinho]

Out Of Touch

Mediawatch will admit it was struggling this morning, with the papers full of Roy Keane, Kevin Pietersen and England v San Marino. Then, like finding a five-star hotel in the middle of the desert, the Daily Mail appeared to tell us that Harry Redknapp has a new book out. And it wasn't a mirage.

'This is a book about football,' Lee Clayton tells us. 'Not about the noise that screams from the modern game, but about the game itself.'

The Mail spend today interviewing 'Arry about just what we can expect. To save space, we'll simply list a few wonderful snippets.

- 'Pellegrini won the title, but he won the title because he has got good players and spends good money. How much coaching does Vincent Kompany need?'

Indeed. It takes a special talent to guide a squad with a higher wage bill than Atletico Madrid to promotion from the Championship and then have them bottom of the Premier League.

- 'Kompany, surprisingly, doesn't make Harry's Premier League XI, but John Terry and Rio Ferdinand do.'

Well, knock us over with a feather.

- 'There was no aggro, no abuse, no segregation, no bad chants. Imagine him [Bert Trautmann] playing now. A German, who fought for the Nazis, in goal in this league. People would spit on him, abuse him, terrorise him. There is so much hatred now.'

Ah yes, the good ol' days. Of course, it's utter rubbish. Trautmann was a target of deep hatred for the crowd when he joined Emirates Marketing Project, with abuse such as "kraut" and "Nazi" shouted at him. One newspaper's headline read 'If City sign a Nazi, what next?' The German admitted it deeply affected his confidence.

The whole thing just smacks of man out of touch and out of love with the game, despite still being the manager of a Premier League club.


As yesterday, it's going to be easier to do this in list form, because Harry really preferred the old days:

* 'What certainly altered was the way you tried to build team spirit. The old methods were very simple - bonding sessions, getting the lads to go out for a drink or have a day at the races. Everybody laughs, falls about, gets into a few scrapes. A typical jolly boys' outing, but the foreign players didn't want to know about that.'

Yeah, bloody foreigners, not wanting to get drunk, fall over and 'get into a few scrapes'. It's easy to forget that these are the words of an actual Premier League manager.

* 'Roman Pavlyuchenko never moved out of his seat all day [at Cheltenham races]. Just sat there, waiting for the time to get on the coach and go home. Wouldn't watch a race, wouldn't have a bet, just not interested in joining in. In the end, it has been the English footballers who have had to change because at most clubs now they are isolated. It is a different life for them now.'

All together now: It's [strikethrough]political correctness[/strikethrough] professionalism gone mad.

* 'I remember Paolo di Canio brought his fitness coach to West Ham. Lunches at Chadwell Heath had barely altered since my day - steak and kidney pie, loads of potatoes, anything you could get. By the end of that first season with Paolo's man, everyone had their own tailored, balanced food intake and a special dietician supervised that regime.'

The phenomenal thing is the continuous inference that Redknapp actually sees such things as a crying shame, rather than the necessary development of a game in which players need to be fitter and stronger.

* 'Louis van Gaal couldn't have done a better job with Hull City than Steve Bruce did last year. Yet did his heroics in the League and FA Cup create even a ripple at Old Trafford? Was Steve, a great competitor and wonderful player for United, even considered for the Manchester United job?'

This is the crux of Harry's argument, that foreigners get an easy ride whilst British managers suffer. Using the 'Bruce should have got the Manchester United gig' line is obvious twaddle but reveals an unpleasant bitterness.

* 'Foreign players, foreign coaches, foreign owners.'

As always with Redknapp, there is a weird dichotomy between words and actions. Whilst bemoaning the increase of foreign players, it's worth remembering that QPR's squad consists of players of 13 different nationalities, and that 51% of the players he has signed since joining QPR are non-British.

Do as I moan, not as I do.

:lol:

 

[glorygloryeze]

"Always the victim, it's never your fault"

Was that a chant some said about Scousers....or is that really about Harry Redknapp?:-k

 

[Jurgen the German]

Has his book just been re-released or something?

 

[Jordinho]

Has his book just been re-released or something?

No, he has released a new one.