Harry's Games (21 page)

Not only did Portsmouth get promoted; against all expectations, they stayed up. There was even a brief moment at the beginning of the season when they topped the table. ‘The last time we had been in the top division we had gone straight back down,' Guyer continues, ‘and most of us thought the same thing
was bound to happen again. We weren't that unhappy about it, just resigned to it. There was a feeling we had played above ourselves to get promotion and that we should just enjoy a season in the bright lights while we could. But it was so much better than that. We beat Manchester United at home for the first time in nearly fifty years, a result I certainly never thought I'd ever see. The mood in the city was just brilliant. The club's performances lifted everyone and, even when we were thrashed at home by Arsenal, we were still cheering because it was so wonderful to be watching such fantastic football.'

Success had been predicated on the usual Redknapp strategy of hyperactivity in the transfer and loan market. At times, it seemed as if the club was almost operating a revolving-door policy and the players must have sometimes wondered who was going to show up for training as nineteen squad members were signed over the course of the season. The fans didn't mind; their team was doing well and they assumed Mandaric was good for the money. Besides which, when was the last time you heard a terrace chant of ‘
We
'
ve got the best balance sheet in the world
'?

Despite Redknapp's assertions that he wasn't costing the club a lot of money – he was unquestionably getting some players, such as Alexey Smertin, at knock-down prices – the club's wage bill was beginning to rocket and the first sign of a crack in the hitherto good relations between Mandaric and his manager came towards the end of the 2003/04 season when the chairman suggested a new infrastructure needed to be put in place the following season to make the club less reliant on new signings. The fallout initially centred on the future of the assistant manager Jim Smith.

Mandaric had told the BBC it was Redknapp who had suggested Smith should leave. ‘I tried to protect Harry and not go public,' he told Radio 4, ‘but he said this in an official meeting in the boardroom in front of others, including the chief executive.
Harry said he could do without Jim and really didn't need him. He said he would like to keep him for the rest of the season because he was doing this favour for Jim. That is not a good reason to keep somebody.' Mandaric went on to say Redknapp had said Smith should really go in December because he was useless, but ‘pleaded with me not to make the changes there and then because he was concerned about what Sir Alex Ferguson or some of his friends might say.'

Redknapp was outraged when Mandaric went public with this, accusing his chairman of telling ‘filthy lies', and saying it had been the chairman's idea to get rid of Smith and that he would leave Portsmouth if his assistant was fired. ‘Milan's record in bringing in coaches is not good. Tony Pulis and Graham Rix were good coaches but not good enough. If Milan wants to bring in a coach to work under me, I've got no problem,' he said. ‘I'm all for coaches – that's why I brought in Luther Blissett to help the strikers – but I don't see why there's any reason to break up the current staff.'

This was slightly disingenuous on Redknapp's part. There is no way he wouldn't have had a problem with Mandaric bringing in a new coach under him. Redknapp has always been careful to appoint staff who aren't going to challenge him directly or – possibly with one eye on his own guilty conscience – replace him. Smith and coach Kevin Bond were men who could be relied on to do what Redknapp wanted. Redknapp didn't like threats to his hegemony, and he didn't like not getting his dues. Blissett had been brought in to teach the strikers to score more goals and, when they had done so, Redknapp had not been all that happy about Luther being given the credit in the local press. Anyone Mandaric appointed under him without consultation would have been cause for suspicion. In the end, Smith and Bond stayed as Redknapp and Mandaric patched up their differences, but the spat was to be the first of several in which chairman and manager
would show themselves to have memories diametrically at odds with one another.

Portsmouth's good form continued into the new season with the team comfortably positioned in mid-table, but by early November 2004 the relationship between Mandaric and Redknapp was again at breaking point. This time the disagreement centred on Mandaric's decision to bring in the Croatian Velimir Zajec, from the Greek club Panathinaikos, to be director of football over Redknapp's head, and it was to prove fatal. Redknapp took this to be a direct challenge to his authority and wasn't shy about making his feelings known – an entirely predictable reaction that Mandaric, a man who is nobody's fool, must have seen coming. This suggests that he can only have intended to provoke the inevitable response from Redknapp. So why did he want to have a head-on confrontation with a popular manager who had lifted the club from one that bumped along the lower reaches of the First Division to one that looked entirely at home in the Premiership and who had just been voted Premiership manager of the month for October?

Some supporters reckoned it was little more than a clash of egos. Before Redknapp had come along, Mandaric picked up all the plaudits for having rescued the club from going under. Normally, the only time a chairman's name is sung on the terraces is when the fans want him out, but Mandaric had been used to hearing his chanted with something approaching devotion. But when Redknapp arrived and the team started playing well, it was the manager's name, not the chairman's, being heard at Fratton Park. That may have stung, but a businessman as shrewd as Mandaric wasn't in the habit of making important decisions based on a fit of pique, so there had to have been more to it than that. And that was the amount of money Redknapp's transfer activity was costing the club in fees, wages and – in particular – agents' fees. During Redknapp's two and a half years in charge, he had
bought in thirty-eight players – either as transfers or loans – in deals that had cost the club £11.5 million, of which more than a third had been raked off by agents.

Zajec's arrival was a clear if clumsy signal to Redknapp that this level of expenditure was no longer going to be tolerated. It's less evident, though, why it was necessary. Redknapp's spend, spend, spend approach can't have come as a surprise to Mandaric – it's what he had done at both Bournemouth and West Ham – and the chairman and managing director, Peter Storrie, would have had the final say on every deal as they were the ones who legally signed them off. Redknapp could have wanted anything he liked, but Mandaric had the power to say no. Why couldn't Mandaric, then, have just told Redknapp enough was enough? Or had he said exactly that, and Redknapp hadn't take him seriously?

It's impossible to tell if Mandaric was using Zajec merely to limit Redknapp's powers or as a means of forcing him out. Redknapp, though, would have been alert to the latter possibility. He had been parachuted into Portsmouth above Graham Rix and had replaced him within a year, so there was a precedent. It was a modus operandi with which both Redknapp and Mandaric were familiar; added to this were Redknapp's own feelings that the position of director of football was a total waste of space. If Redknapp felt that way, then he probably reckoned others did, too, and therefore the only reason Zajec would have taken it was if he had had his eye on the bigger prize of the manager's job.

For a short while after Zajec's arrival, an uneasy truce was reached with the Croatian being appointed executive director, with responsibility for developing a youth academy and European scouting, rather than director of football – a semantic quickstep to try and save everyone's pride in front of the media. Portsmouth released a statement saying, ‘Any issues that the manager had with a new appointment were pure speculation. Harry Redknapp remains manager of the club which was never in doubt. The board
will continue the expansion of the club with the appointment of a new executive director who will be Velimir Zajec. Speculation that he was joining as a director of football was ill-founded and he will become a main board member.'

Redknapp responded rather more bullishly. ‘I'm the manager and I'm in total control of the club,' he said. ‘He [Zajec] has other specific duties and if he does those jobs it will be for the benefit of Portsmouth and that's what matters. I've spent two days chatting with the chairman and he's assured me that I'm completely in charge of my own job. No one will interfere and my responsibility will be exactly the same. It's fine by me.'

Not so fine, though, that Redknapp ever planned to talk to Zajec face to face. After losing to local rivals Southampton in mid-November, Redknapp was asked how he felt about the Croatian. ‘I will never meet him,' he said. Hardly a peace offering and, within a week on 24 November 2004, Redknapp had resigned after Mandaric once more voiced his concerns about Redknapp's transfer dealings and the amount of money that was finding its way into agents' pockets, leading many to conclude that the chairman thought his manager was personally benefiting from these transactions. Redknapp's resignation announcement made no mention of this; rather, he asked everyone to believe that his departure was ‘something I have been thinking about for a while. I made it without any pressure from the chairman or the board.'

Mandaric pushed the charade still further by declaring, ‘Harry and I remain good friends. People will obviously make their own minds up and say Harry has stepped down for reasons that have been intensely speculated over in the media. That could not be further from the truth. The truth is Harry sees this as a perfect opportunity to bow out.'

The fans did make up their own minds and came to the same conclusion as everyone but Redknapp and Mandaric. Within minutes of Redknapp's resignation, the supporters' websites were
condemning the chairman with messages such as ‘Harry Redknapp has been a revelation at Pompey – regardless of the money MM has put in, without Redknapp's football wheeling and dealing nous, Pompey would still probably be a decent Championship team . . .' and ‘I'm really at a loss to understand MM's motives. He says he wants to improve the football structure, but unsettling the one man who has proved to be so pivotal is a contradiction in terms.'

If Portsmouth hoped these statements would draw a line under the bad blood between its chairman and manager, it was mistaken. A week after Redknapp's departure, Mandaric issued another public statement – one that had all the hallmarks of having been forced upon him by Redknapp's lawyers – saying that when he had complained about Redknapp's transfer dealings and the large sums paid out to agents, he had never intended to imply that the manager had been involved in taking bungs. ‘At no time did I imply there was any wrongdoing,' Mandaric said. ‘I was simply saying that agents take too much money from the game. All transactions and fees have been registered with the Football Association.'

Mandaric also held out a further olive branch – the possibility of Redknapp reconsidering his decision to resign and returning to the club. Redknapp responded by accepting the chairman's public apology, saying, ‘This needed to be done. I don't deserve the innuendoes and we needed to clear the air. Milan's done that. I've done nothing but good for the club.' He did, though, reject any return out of hand. ‘There's a future for Milan [at Portsmouth],' he said, ‘but not for me. I decided to quit because it was time to move on and it was one million per cent my decision.' Redknapp went on to say he was planning to take a break from football. ‘Have I spoken to other clubs? None at all. I haven't gone down that road.'

Redknapp not having spoken to anyone was hard enough for
anyone to imagine. But it was to whom he was about to speak that would really get jaws dropping.

Just 27 miles of the M27 separates Portsmouth from Southampton, but culturally they couldn't be more divided. Portsmouth is a working-class town, dominated by the Navy and not much else; Southampton is more genteel and upwardly mobile, a port more used to ocean-going liners than destroyers. Their physical proximity and class differences have generated a fierce rivalry that has been played out between their football teams for more than a century. When Portsmouth fans travel to away derby games at St Mary's, they are often greeted by a banner hanging from one of the motorway bridges that says, ‘Welcome to Civilization'; seldom has civilization been made to seem more threatening.

You can't work at either of the clubs without being aware there is no love lost between them, and Redknapp had given a public assurance that he understood this when he resigned from Portsmouth. ‘I will not be going down the road. No chance,' he had promised.

Within two weeks he had been appointed manager of Southampton. This drew an immediate response from Portsmouth, accusing Southampton chairman, Rupert Lowe, of having made an illegal approach to Redknapp and agreeing the outline of a deal before Redknapp had resigned from Portsmouth. ‘It would give the impression,' Peter Storrie told the BBC, ‘that he has been in negotiations for some time and has used the appointment of Velimir Zajec as an excuse to leave the club.' Both Lowe and Redknapp denied these allegations but the sense of betrayal still cut deep throughout the city.

Teasing out exactly who did what and when in any football transaction is always difficult as selective memory is one of the key qualifications for any manager and chairman, but there is no evidence that the move was in any way pre-planned.
Southampton had been in freefall for some time. Gordon Strachan had resigned as manager in February 2004 amid rumours he was to be replaced by Glenn Hoddle. Hoddle never appeared and Strachan's assistant coach, Steve Wigley, was brought in as caretaker before Paul Sturrock was given the job. Sturrock lasted just four months, before being fired to make way for Wigley to take over full time in August. Wigley had been no more successful than Sturrock and the club had won just two games all season and were facing relegation. So another change had been on the cards for some time and Redknapp's sudden availability was Southampton's apparent good fortune.