Harry's Games Read Free

can’t pull the wool over their eyes. People sometimes try to make out football is a tremendously complicated game. It’s not. If it was that complicated, most of the players wouldn’t be able to make a living out of it.’
    Traditional methods of biography hadn’t really come close to pinning Redknapp down. He had remained everyman and no man, an elusive character in whom everyone saw the reflection that suited them. So maybe a less orthodox approach might just work. It might not reach the whole truth of Redknapp, but it would hopefully capture a truth – a recognizable, if different, truth. And if it didn’t, then I’d be no worse off than anyone else who’d looked for the meaning of Harry Redknapp. At the very least, the journey couldn’t fail to be fun and interesting. Just like Redknapp.
    Some of the material I obtained in this way was eye-opening. Another chairman of a football club Redknapp had managed – he, too, would only speak anonymously – said, ‘Harry is a nice enough guy. You can have a lot of fun with him and he’s certainly no worse or better than any other manager. What you’ve got to remember, though, is this: football isn’t as bad as people say it is. It’s ten times worse. The manager and the players are all in it just for themselves. The game should be called “selfish” not “football”. The only way to survive is to trust no one. That was my mistake. I did trust and it just about bankrupted me.’
    Other stories and observations were just too potentially libellous to use. They may or may not have been true. But no one would put their name to them and, as Redknapp generates at least as many fictional stories as factual, I couldn’t take a chance.
    One remark did stand out, though, because it just about summed up everyone’s feelings about Redknapp. It came from a former player who had been managed by Redknapp: ‘He’s the best manager I ever played for and I can’t help loving him. If I had a chance to sign for him again tomorrow, I would. But he can also be a complete arsehole.’

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Harry Kicks Off
    â€˜A true Cockney’ . . . ‘Times were hard but we never went without’ . . . ‘Always had a smile on his face’ . . . ‘There was always a lot of love around’ . . . These are just some of the standard, catchall phrases that everyone – Redknapp included – tends to trot out to describe his childhood, an easy shorthand for the typical working-class East End, post-Second World War upbringing that has become lodged in the national consciousness of those who didn’t have to live it. Remember those feel-good Pathé newsreels of cheeky ten-year-old boys in shorts playing on old bomb sites without a care in the world? One of them could have been our Harry.
    That isn’t to say that Redknapp didn’t have a reasonably happy childhood, or that his was any better or worse than many others growing up in the East End at the same time. Rather, that to sugar-coat it in a familiar sentimental gloss is to miss an important part of the picture. Redknapp was born on 2 March 1947, the only child of Harry (senior) and Violet. His father was a docker and decent amateur footballer and his mother worked for the Co-op. His grandmother, Violet, who made Harry his dinner when he came home from school, was a bookie’s runner and often in trouble with the law. ‘Quite often my nan would begetting carted away in a police car,’ Redknapp once said. ‘ “Your dinner’s in the oven,” she’d shout to me. “These bastards won’t keep me for long. I’ll be home in an hour, boy.” The police would have her down the station for a couple of hours, warn her off, and then she’d be back and do exactly the same again. They never put her off. She loved it.’
    You couldn’t have come up with a more stereotypical East End version