Harry's Games (25 page)

For Redknapp, that one game was proof enough he had been right to maintain his original formation all along. And in a sense you couldn't argue with his logic. You could hardly expect the team to play at its best when the players knew they had been lined up in a formation that the manager thought was second best. But it was also asking a great deal of his two strikers, Defoe and Saha, to gel immediately when they had played so little together and they were so obviously not Redknapp's first choice.

This also rather raised the question of Saha – why had he been bought by the club in January if the manager had so little confidence in him? Saha had blown hot and cold – more often than not cold – for every other club he had played for, and no one should have been surprised when he began to look disinterested at Spurs, so it's unlikely that Redknapp was. So either he had been hoping to squeeze just a couple of match-winning performances out of Saha and had not got lucky, or the former Everton striker had always been the choice of Spurs chairman, Daniel Levy. Whatever the truth, the repercussions would be felt later.

There was also an old-school, wilful Englishness in Redknapp harking back to the days of Moore, Hurst and Peters ploughing through the mud. This always played well with a section of the
media and fans prone to periodic bouts of nostalgia for the old days when there was less money in the game, everything seemed simpler and England won the World Cup. It may even have been a subconscious plea to the FA to hurry up and give him the England job. Sod the European softies, make me the manager and I will win you trophies with old-fashioned English virtues.

But however attractive – or even preferable – that sense of Englishness may have been, turning back the clock to Old Albion wasn't an option. The reason why Moore, Hurst and Peters happily ran through the mud week after week was because they had no choice. No teams rotated their squads so every side was able to slow down at the same rate. In the 2012 Premiership, the big teams with big budgets did rotate their squads and those teams that either couldn't or chose not to almost always struggled toward the end of the season.

Squad rotation has further knock-on benefits to resting tired bodies. It also keeps players on their toes. It had become part of the White Hart Lane experience for those who didn't watch Spurs regularly to marvel at the brilliance of the Croatian midfielder, Luka Modric, but for those who followed the club rather more closely, it was evident that – just like van der Vaart – his late season performances, while still having flashes of genius, had little of the intensity of the early season ones. The same trend had also been apparent the season before, although in Modric's case the reason was less likely to have been tiredness than dissatisfaction. In both seasons, he had been eyeing up a transfer to a bigger club with a guarantee of more money and regular Champions League football, and both times he frequently gave the impression he had already left. Under a manager who rotated his squad, there might have been more inducement for Modric to maintain his focus. As it was, Redknapp's dogged adherence to his pre-ordained first team would end up costing him rather more than Modric.

The biggest advantage to squad rotation, though, is the way it helps teams cope with injury – not just by preventing players succumbing to those caused by overuse and fatigue, but by enabling others to slot in more easily to the side when a key player was out of action. One of the foundations on which Spurs' early season dominance had been built was the speed of their two wingers, Gareth Bale and Aaron Lennon, and their ability to terrorize defenders on each flank. In March, Lennon had been badly injured and was sidelined for about a month, forcing Redknapp to rethink his approach. Except he never came up with a workable solution. The team had grown used to playing with Lennon and struggled to adapt to his absence. Redknapp tried playing various others – including Bale – out of position to compensate, but nothing worked effectively and no one really plugged the gap.

There were players who might have done. Two seasons previously, another Croatian midfielder, Niko Kranjcar, had been one of the first-team regulars who had helped the team reach the Champions League, but he had now fallen out of favour with Redknapp and barely made the subs' bench. It wasn't immediately clear to anyone just what he had done wrong, although it was also fair to say he hadn't done himself too many favours in the interim, for when he was required he looked both unfit and bored – neither quality was the most professional of responses, but any Premiership manager should have had sufficient experience to deal with them before they became an issue. For whatever reason, Redknapp's man-management skills fell well short of being able to re-motivate a player he had signed twice – once at Portsmouth and again at Spurs. The distance between the two men had been allowed to become too wide.

As it happened, there was a player who could have fitted in easily as a replacement for Lennon, without Redknapp needing to have tinkered with the balance of the side by playing Bale and Modric out of position. Unfortunately, Steven Pienaar had
been sent out on loan to Everton in the January transfer window, having only been bought by Spurs from Everton the previous year. On his arrival, he had started a few games, made minimal impression and then been abruptly cast aside – yet another of the players whom Redknapp had decided early on that he didn't really rate and for whom there would be no second chances. If not as quick as Lennon, Pienaar had been a useful, competitive, right-sided midfielder at Everton before he had arrived at Spurs and had been looking even better than that since his return. David Moyes, the Everton manager, knew how to get the best out of Pienaar; Redknapp either didn't know that trick or didn't think it was worthwhile making the effort.

Player loyalty was also an issue among the defensive players. For some years, the club captain Ledley King had not only been a talismanic figure but a miracle. His knees were so ropey that he couldn't take part in midweek training sessions and he barely managed to play in half the team's fixtures. But when he did play, his timing and his talent invariably carried him through and the Spurs defence always looked more secure when he played than when he didn't. It was inevitable that something would eventually have to give and it had become painfully obvious since Christmas that King could no longer get by on a wing and a prayer. He had given away a silly last-minute penalty – a clumsy challenge the King of former seasons would never have made – to deny Spurs an away draw at Manchester City, been run ragged in the heavy away defeat at Arsenal and was cruelly exposed in the 5-1 FA Cup semi-final defeat against Chelsea in the middle of April.

There was at least a certain nobility and graciousness in Redknapp's loyalty to King. The Spurs defender had done the club proud on countless occasions in the past and he deserved the benefit of the doubt, a chance to prove that he could come good again after all. But Redknapp, a manager who can be utterly
ruthless on occasions with some players, didn't have it in him to say enough is enough to his captain and allowed him to continue for several games too many. Perhaps he couldn't quite believe the evidence of his own eyes and accept that King was no longer the player he once was. It would have been a tough call for any manager to have made, but one can think of several cold-eyed Premiership managers who would have made it. There's a time and a place for sentiment in football, but a tight end-of-season run-in with a jittery team isn't it.

Redknapp could – and did – argue that he had little choice. The team had been badly hit by injuries and, in the manager's own words, was down to ‘the bare bones' of the squad. ‘We are not in a position where we can pull one or two out,' he said. ‘Everyone says “look at the strong squad we have”, but there's every chance David Bentley could be back on the bench. He's not had a game. I'm struggling to find seven substitutes.' To which one answer might well have been, ‘Who's fault is that?'

A long second-half-of-the-season injury list had been a recurring feature of Redknapp's four campaigns at Spurs. That could be a coincidence but, then again, it might not be. ‘If a team is consistently picking up more injuries than expected,' says sports psychologist Martin Perry, ‘it could indicate there was something wrong with the training methods being employed. Perhaps some of the players weren't quite as fit as they should have been. It's certainly something a manager should consider seriously.'

Even if all the injuries had been unavoidable, the buck still stopped with Redknapp. Stephen Caulker and Kyle Naughton, both defenders who could have been trusted to do a decent job, had been sent out on season-long loans to Swansea and Norwich respectively and had been doing very well for their new clubs. Sebastien Bassong had been loaned out to Wolves and Redknapp appeared to have little faith in his replacement, Ryan Nelsen, the thirty-four-year-old defender who had been acquired from
Blackburn in the transfer window. So much for Redknapp's complaint that various members of his squad hadn't yet had a game.

Even Redknapp's lucky touch deserted him in the FA Cup semifinal. Spurs came out for the second half a goal down, having dominated much of the first, whereupon Chelsea were immediately awarded a second for a Juan Mata shot that didn't cross the line. Thereafter, Redknapp's Spurs never recovered their poise and were taken apart as they chased the game. Yet even a heavy semi-final defeat couldn't stop the ‘Harry for England' bandwagon from continuing to roll. ‘He looks like he is going to be the new England manager and I think he fully deserves the chance to lead his country,' said Roberto Di Matteo, the Chelsea interim first-team coach, after the game. ‘A lot of [our England contingent] know him very well and I think that the general view is that the players all like him.'

Better still for Redknapp was that the May edition – which came out in mid-April – of the influential football magazine
Four Four Two
featured Redknapp wearing a crown on the front cover under the strapline ‘All Hail King 'Arry', along with an inside feature in which former players such as Paolo Di Canio, Paul Merson and Shaka Hislop paid tribute to his managerial skills. No one lost any sleep working out the subtext of that article.

The final piece of the coronation jigsaw appeared to be complete when the Bolton Wanderers chairman and FA board member, Phil Gartside, declared in an interview with BBC World's
Extra Time
programme that Redknapp would be ‘an outstanding England manager' and described him as ‘a good motivator with a winning mentality'. Although Gartside wasn't one of the four FA members on the selection panel he was considered to be one of the most influential of the FA's committee members. This was the first time that anyone from the FA had spoken in public about the England job since Fabio Capello's resignation, so Gartside's
remarks were reported by every newspaper as a rubber-stamp of approval – a way of calming speculation – ahead of the formal announcement.

For his part, Redknapp continued to insist he was hardly even aware there was a job vacancy. ‘I never think about it . . . honestly,' he said. ‘I swear. I never think about anything other than Tottenham, trying to finish this season so that we get where we have been all year – in that top four. Other than that there is nothing to occupy my mind at all.' If true, he had a funny way of showing it. Not normally a man to turn down easy money, Redknapp had rejected an offer from a confectionery company to appear in a TV commercial to coincide with the Euro 2012 finals – possibly because it wasn't the sort of deal the FA would take kindly to an England manager making.

He also hadn't endeared himself to Spurs by saying that he hoped Chelsea beat Barcelona in the second leg of their semi-final Champions League tie, even though he had gone on to qualify this by adding that he couldn't see Chelsea winning the final against Bayern Munich. Chelsea were not just rivals for a top-four place in the Premiership; if the club won the Champions League, then it would guarantee itself a place in the competition at the expense of whoever finished fourth. As there was a good chance it would be Tottenham in that fourth spot, everyone at the club was praying for Chelsea to get knocked out of the competition as soon as possible, so that avenue of anxiety and uncertainty would be eliminated. Well, everyone except Redknapp. It was impossible to imagine Alex Ferguson or Arsène Wenger saying anything like that in a similar position. They might not have gone public with an ‘I hope Chelsea lose' statement, but they would certainly have kept a diplomatic silence. There was no need for Redknapp to say anything. Even a man prone to speak first and think later would have worked that one out. So saying what he did, when he did, was just another way of saying, ‘I'm already half out the door
at White Hart Lane and I'm trying to talk like an international manager.'

If Gartside's backing had been intended to reassure Redknapp that the job was his and allow him to refocus his concentration on Spurs' remaining five games, then it had no immediate effect as the team slumped to an away defeat at relegation-threatened Queens Park Rangers and down to sixth place in the league. After the game, Redknapp said that Spurs had dominated the game and had just been a bit unlucky in not scoring. That wasn't the way it had looked to anyone at the ground. For the most part, Spurs had looked hapless and aimless, barely managing one shot on target. Redknapp himself had looked much the same. In most games, he could be found pacing the technical area and shouting the odds; at QPR, he remained mostly rooted to the dugout, sucking in his cheeks and shaking his head. This was a pale imitation of the jocular, cajoling, dynamic Harry Redknapp the fans knew and loved.

There was some relief on the last weekend of the month as Spurs managed their first win in five games, a 2-0 victory against Blackburn, yet another side battling relegation. When Kyle Walker scored the second midway through the second half, from a thirty-five-yard free kick, no one assumed it was a victory planned out on the training ground. Least of all Redknapp, who after the game admitted he had said to Kevin Bond that he hoped Walker wasn't going to take the kick as it would end up in Row Z. If it had done, it would have been no more than anyone else at White Hart Lane expected, as that's precisely where every other free kick Spurs had taken throughout the season had gone. Whatever else Redknapp was doing with the first team on the training ground, it wasn't practising dead ball situations.