Guest Post by Neil Clack
I doubt there are many subjects that divide West Ham fans opinions as much as the man who’ll be sitting in the opposition dugout this Sunday. For me, personally, the Redknapp years coincided with a happy time in my life and I thoroughly enjoyed going to West Ham during that period, so I accept that I could be looking back through rose-tinted specs here, but the main reason I rate Redknapp as a manager is simply that I liked the style of football we played under him.
It didn’t always come off, just as it didn’t always come off under Greenwood and Lyall, but I always thought the spirit was there and that Redknapp strove to play all-out attacking football, with an emphasis on skill and flair, dribbling and passing along the floor.
Of course, it never reaches our high ideals, and I am aware there is a certain ‘romanticism’ attached to the so-called ‘West Ham way’. Neither am I blind to it’s faults – with so many players pushed forward, an exposed defence produces some crazy results. We could be on the receving end of a right hammering one week, but then out-play opponents and score a few ourselves the next. As Ron Greenwood put it himself, “if the other team score three then we’ll try and score four!”. For me, personally, that is the kind of football I always want to see.
The Guardian got it spot on I thought when they took a trip down to Portsmouth’s training ground before their FA Cup win in 2008.
On a blustery day at Portsmouth’s borrowed training ground in Eastleigh this week he drilled his players with relish…..only intervening when a short pass was overlooked in favour of a hopeful long option. Schooled in the West Ham philosophy of Ron Greenwood and John Lyall, he has an abiding faith in a passing game but is astute enough to have incorporated the power and pace necessary in modern football in a squad containing several athletic giants
I have to disagree with those that say Redknapp simpy flung his sides together any-old-how. Di Canio just did as he wanted and was popping up all over the place they say….well, yes, that was the idea!
The skilful players, the creators who are your matchwinners, should be trusted to roam where they want and encouraged to play with freedom, in my opinion. I’m not going to compare the likes of Di Canio, Berkovic, or Trevor Sinclair to Cruyff and Maradona, Christian Ronaldo, or Messi, but one of the main reasons the greats became what they were/are was because their managers recognised they were intelligent enough to work things out for themselves on the pitch. They were given loosly-defined roles in the final third, as was Trevor Brooking by Ron Greenwood for both West Ham and England
I think it’s more difficult, and requires a lot more tactical awareness, to find a system that creates a platform from which flair players can operate than just setting up your team in a rigid formation where every player has a clearely defined role – negative tactics that were sadly in vogue with many British managers a decade or so ago, and took English football backwards, in my opinion.
John Hartson, in his prime, was a powerful header of the ball, but he also had good ability when balls were played into his feet, as they often were at West Ham, often from a central midfield partnership of Bishop and Moncur, a pairing that would flourish in today’s modern Premier league, in my opinion.
Hartson was a a bit of a nutter who sadly went off the rails with alcohol and gambling problems, culminating in an arrest for assaulting a plant-pot in his home town in Wales. I think it’s unfair to blame the manager for all that, as discipline was generally good under Redknapp. He banned alcohol from the players’ lounge, introduced the concept of a fitness triainer for the first time at West Ham and had a reputation for dishing out a rollocking when it was needed, but sometimes if you have a player with serious problems, who is a liability, then there’s not a lot a manager can do? Except perhaps get rid of their influence, as Alex Ferguson did several times with Keith Gillespie, Lee Sharpe, Norman Whiteside, Jaap Stamm and a few others, inspite of their popularity with the crowd (sadly, so far, it seems Ferguson knew what he was doing by letting Ravel Morrison go too).
We got excellent money for Hartson (7 million), ripped Wimbledon off really, and bought Di Canio and Marc Viven-Foe with the proceeds (oh, and Scott Minto – not quite as good, obviously!). Hartson did very little at Wimbledon before a renaissance at Celtic in the inferior Scottish league, but he never did much in the Prem again.
But style of play is so subjective, just personal taste really, noone is right and noone is wrong, so I’d like to take a closer, more factual look, at some of the other accusations often aimed at Harry’s time at West Ham.Let’s remember where the club was when Redknapp tookover. We were relegation material, and remained so for a couple of seasons. We had a relatively small ground and no outside investment, unlike some of our rivals at the time: Middlesboro, Fulham, Bradford, Blackburn.
Like a politician you can play with statistics and balance sheets to suit your arguments and Terence Brown certainly did in his first post-Redknapp chairman’s report. Brown is correct though, there was a point (Redknapp’s last season) when we had the 7th largest wage bill in the Premier league and were not too far behind Arsenal who were in 6th place in the highest wages list in that one season (although we were way behind the top 5 – Man U, Leeds, Chelsea, Newcastle and Liverpool).
But what rarely gets mentioned is that there were a whole host of clubs whose wage bills were not a lot lower than our own at that point – Middlesboro, Fulham, Sheff Wed, Aston Villa, Bradford, Tottenham, Nottm Forest and Everton. Infact our wage bill had been significantly lower than all of those clubs during most of the Redknapp years, and it was only in his last season that West Ham’s reached those levels.
All those clubs were getting themselves heavily into debt. It was not only us. You had to have a high wage bill, just to be able to compete at that level.
But this is the crucial bit that rarely gets mentioned either- during his whole time as maanger, Redknapp was never given money to fund transfers. Every transfer fee had to be financed by a sale.
At the time of his sacking, Hammers News ran a complete list of all the ins and outs during Redknapp’s time that revealed he had actually made a profit on transfer fees. The Observer newspaper also at that time published an article on Premier League spending that showed that overall, ins and outs, only two Premier league clubs, West Ham and Southampton, did not have a big minus figure in their total transfer balance during the previous five seasons.
All the other 15 clubs mentioned above had spent massively on trensfer fees during that period so, overall, taking into account wages aswell, they had all spent a lot more money than West Ham. By rights, we should have been struggling down the bottom of the table, 16th at best, season after season, but by finishing 8th, 5th, 9th in consecutive seasons we were over-achieving by a long way.
And I think therein lay the problem. Harry Redknapp was a victim of his own success and the goalposts got moved. A team that really should have been battling down the bottom was finishing consistently in the top half, including a 5th place. Of course, Redknapp was an ambitious manager and naturally wanted to keep the club moving forward, Brown himself was also ambitious, stating in one chairman’s report during Redknapp’s reign that his aim was to establish the club as a top 8 side and, of course, the fans are always going to expect more of the same. But, with no investment and a small ground that was unrealistic, ne impossible.
After years of successful wheelng and dealing eg. Matty Holmes, Cottee, Bilic, Rieper, Hartson, Lomas, Ian Pearce, Hislop on a free, Sinclair, Viven-Foe, Kanoute, Sinclair, Lazaridis, many of whom were sold on for big profits, nooone can dispute that Redknapp spent some of the Rio money badly.
Less than 7 of the £18 million received for Rio went on transfer fees, but, yes, there are wages to consider. (According to West Ham’s chief accountant Nick Igoe at a fan forum in Feb 2005, the decision to sell Rio was taken by the board as they feared an EU law was going to abolish transfer fees and that the defender might leave for free at a later date – he also said Redknapp was given a 300k bonus “for good service to the club and his good work in the negotiaitions during the Rio sale”).
Christain Dailly at £1.75 milliion was a good signing, in my opinion. A handy squad player for seven seasons, twice having his contract extended under Pardew in the Premier league, and, as Pardew often alluded to, Dailly was an excellent influence around the training ground.
Rigobert Song was sold for a small profit after a year so we didn’t lose too much money on him (Cologne were probably paying some of his wages when he went on loan there for a few months before being sold to Lens). He went on to have a decent career at a decent level, captaining Galataseray aswell as Cameroon.
Todorov, Foxe, Soma – all youngsters bought for their potential. Unfortunatey injuries blighted Todorov’s career so it’s difficult to judge him, but he did have a good goals to appearances ratio in the Premier League and Championship for Portsmouth and Wigan, before injury wrecked his career. It’s probably fair to say that both Todorov and Foxe (an ever present for Pompey when they won the Championship) found their correct level in the Championship, but neither Todorov, Foxe or Soma could have been earning that high wages at West Ham as we would not have been able to offload them so easily a year or so after they all joined.
Titi Camara was by far the worst of all Redknapp’s signings, the one that is refered to most, and the one on which hangs the most suspicion. It’s impossible to defend this signing, but at £2 million, he did cost less than the £3.5 million Liverpool paid for him 18 months earlier. Camara had actually made a good start to his career at Liverpool, finishing top scorer behind Owen in 99/2000 and the fans had taken to him up there, but something went wrong and he fell out with Houllier.
I’m not for one moment going to defend the signing of Camara, but all managers do make bad signings. Greats managers like Ferguson and Wenger made a few, wasting millions on the likes of Veron and Jeffers, but I can see the logic behind the Camara deal. Redknapp probably thought, wrongly, that he could get the striker back to what he was in France, where he had a very good scoring record. I believe Redknapp was acting in the best interests of the club when he made that signing. It was precisely that sort of gambling attitude that brought us Paulo Di Canio.
Not part of the Rio money, but another signing that often gets lumped in with it is Gary Charles, an ex England international. Again, classic Redknapp, believing he could get a player whose career had lost it’s way, back on track. Of course, Redknapp was badly wrong again here, and I am not pretending it was anything other than a bad buy, but I can see a logic to the signing. Fortunately, West Ham had sensibly taken out insurance on Charles’ dodgy knee. It may well have been serious alcoholism that finished Charles’ career, but officially it was the knee and the insurance company paid up the rest of his contract when it was terminated. To put that into perspective, Charles cost the club, in transfer fee and wages, less than Vladimir Labant (a Roeder signing), whose 4 year contract was also ripped up but paid up in full by the club.
It is the accusations and rumours that Redknapp took bungs that leaves a bad taste for all of us. Who really knows what went on? Maybe Terence Brown doesn’t actually know, though he suspects and has insinuated it, to a few people.
It’s so difficult to seperate rumours from facts, or to know who or what to believe? That Mark Redkanpp was involved in his father’s dealings is one of the most repeated rumours, but, as far as I’m aware, has no substance? I once spoke to West Ham’s former Chief executive Paul Aldridge about this, and he dismissed it out of hand. He said that on match days he used to chat openly in the players lounge with Mark Redknapp, who regularly attended games, and he thinks maybe that’s how the false rumours started (I am aware, of course, that Aldridge could well have been lying, but my gut feeling is that he was genuine).
Author Tom Bower investigated Redknapp’s transfers as thoroughly as anyone has, especially the Rio transfer and Song and Camara deals. Thanks to Terence Brown’s assistance, Bower had access to documents, but makes no reference to Mark Redknapp in his book ‘Broken Dreams’. I’m sure Bower would have said something if Redknapp’s son had been involved as it would add to the sense of scandal he was trying to create. He makes a very big deal of the relationship between Arsenal’s David Dein and his agent son in another chapter.
The BBC programme from ten years ago, ‘Fergie & Son’, mainly concentrated on Alex Ferguson’s transfer dealings, but also mentioned Allardyce & son, Mick MaCarthy & son and Howard Wilkinson & Son, as did several newspaper articles, which also revealed how Kevin Keegan and Stuart Pearce, manager and assistant at Man City, both had shares in an agency that City bought players from. Again, why no mention of Redknapp & son in these programmes and aticles? It would be such an obvious choice if it was true?
It’s often mentioned how Redknapp used ‘unscrupulous’ agents like Pini Zahavi, Willie Mckay and Rene Hauge, but the sad fact is Zahavi and Mckay are two of football’s most established fixers and you have to use people like them if you want to bring good players to your club, especially foreign players. By condemning deals involving Zahavi and McKay you are condemning pretty much every manager and Chief executive who’s ever worked in the Premier league.
Behind the sweeping statements, do we know exactly which players were signed through these agents? As far as I am aware, the only Zahavi player signed by Redknapp was Eyal Berkovic. However, after Redkanpp left, Zahavi continued as the agent involved in a number of West ham’s signings, such as Rebrov, Benayoun, Katan, Pantsill, Tevez and Mascherano.
As far as I am aware, there were only three Willie Mckay players signed by Redknapp – Marc Vivien-Foe, Song and Camara.
According to Bower’s ‘Broken Dreams’, it was actually O’Leary (George Graham’s prodigy) who insisted on Rene Hauge being involved in the Rio deal. Hauge’s ban was over so there was nothing ilegal about it and, as far as I’m aware, I don’t think Hauge was involved in any other West Ham deals does anyone know? Apart from Soma perhaps?
I am suspicious, and always have been ever since all the rumours first surfaced years ago, but I am also sceptical as I’ve met so many supposedly barstool ‘in-the-knows’, and even journos, over the years who claim they know something, but when it comes down to it they know no more than you and I, and sometimes I can’t help feeling that they are just rumours and gossip that go round like a big game of chinese whispers, getting more embelished as they’re passed on.
A few more points:
- The club’s accounts show the wage bill actually rose under Roeder.
- £25 million of the debt upon relegation in 2003 was money spent on the new stands.
- It’s a myth, in my opinion, that we were nearly relegated in Redknapp’s last season. We actually went 6th after beating Charlton 5-0 on Boxing day, but after the FA Cup run (with good wins at Old Trafford and Sunderland), key players were rested for two league games before the big quarter final with Tottenham. We lost, everyone was gutted, and the seson just petered out into nothing as there was nothing to play for. There were some poor games and we slipped down the table, not mathematically safe until three games to go, but I never felt we were ever in danger of going down?
But finally, and this is is the ultimate irony, In the end, the size of the wage bill and debt didn’t matter! (as long as we had remained in Premier League, which I believe we would have under Redknapp). Scudamore at the Premier League and the TV companies, with their professional financial forecasts of a never ending TV bounty, were right after all. Brown and Deloitte Touche’s fears of the TV money drying up were unfounded and wrong. (In his Chairman’s report after sacking Redknapp, Brown got it wrong about the TV money, and irony of ironies, as a result of those later masssive TV deals that he never saw coming, Brown was able to sell the club and make a cool 40 million pound profit for himself!).