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Inside the mind of Harry Redknapp
by John Crace
Constable Books, £18.99
Reviewed by Jonathan O’Brien
From WSC 318 August 2013
A little over a year ago, Harry Redknapp had it all. Spurs were well on course for a Champions League place, Redknapp himself had won his courtroom battle with the taxman and he was in pole position for the England job. And if he didn’t get the latter, he had a contingency plan for the summer: a lucrative and cushy slot analysing Euro 2012 for the BBC.
Other than the tax case, none of it worked out. Spurs tumbled into the Europa League for another year, Roy Hodgson took England to Ukraine and Redknapp is out of the top flight entirely, facing a season in the Championship with a dreadful QPR team. Even the Euro 2012 gig turned sour when Redknapp sheepishly stood down from the BBC panel after Daniel Levy called his bluff over a pay rise.
Harry’s Games, a generally positive (and occasionally adoring) biography, would have seemed well timed at another moment, but parts of it read a little strangely in the summer of 2013. Redknapp sharply divides opinion among the public: some lap up his man-of-the-people clubbability, while others see him as shady and having too many fingers in pies. John Crace writes here that the aim is to find an accurate midpoint between the two extremes, though it’s obvious the author cleaves more to the former than the latter.
A Guardian journalist and Spurs fan, Crace has been dealt a slightly awkward hand, with none of Redknapp’s friends or confidantes willing to speak to him on the record. So a lot – though not all – of the book is a cuttings job, albeit a thorough and solidly written one. The problem is that he lays his cards on the table early on and keeps them there, announcing that he’s “not ashamed to love” Redknapp and talking at length about the man’s charisma and common touch. The words “national treasure” are used, and not sarcastically. You wonder exactly how much you can trust a biographer who openly admits to being in lust with his subject.
Crace’s strengths are his thoroughness and prosecraft, and Harry’s Game is an easy, diverting read if nothing else. Redknapp’s first couple of decades in football were resolutely unglamorous: his time as an injury-plagued winger for West Ham is analysed through the prism of the fear he would have felt whenever another caveman full-back was lunging in to clatter him. Retiring early, he fetched up at Bournemouth, where his first match in charge ended in a 9-0 defeat.
The West Ham years, where Redknapp seemed to be signing four players a week at one stage, were chaotic. “Harry just loved a deal,” an anonymous former West Ham board member tells Crace. “It was almost as if it were a drug.” Crace notes later that while Redknapp has a tendency to “stay in the black” when trading players, it has a bad effect on the players themselves, who don’t like being passed around like pieces of meat.
With QPR down, few expect Redknapp to hang around for long. Crace finished the book just before the relegation and rounds it off by speculating on Redknapp’s chances of pulling off another Houdini act, to cement his reputation as “one of football’s greatest ever survivors”. Perhaps, but mere survival isn’t the kind of thing that a man like Redknapp settles for.
by Giancarlo Rinaldi
Kindle via Amazon, £1.53
Reviewed by Matthew Barker
From WSC 318 August 2013
Giancarlo Rinaldi has been writing about Italian football since the late 1980s, initially in the Rigore! fanzine. This ebook is akin to a best-of; a simple enough framework, compiling reports on 20 games that the author has previously written about in various formats, the earliest dating back to 1961 (though not as an eye-witness) and the most recent from 2005, with an accent on the 1980s and 1990s. Some have a particular relevance for the outcome of a championship, though others have been chosen on more personal grounds.
Rinaldi has a nice and breezy, economic style, which keeps things moving along and works best when he’s explaining the contexts of club rivalries, or the back stories of an individual player or coach at a crucial moment in their careers. For anyone looking for a decent primer on the history of post-war Italian football, there’s much to enjoy here.
However, despite its slight size (less than 100 pages) this is definitely a book best dipped into. Those match reports soon start to blur a little and you could miss out on some nice details, especially when it comes to the quotes, the majority sourced from contemporary press cuttings. Inter’s Sandro Mazzola remembering when, as an 18-year-old, a club car was sent around to pick him up after he sat his accountancy exams and drive him straight to the stadium for a game against Juventus; the claims that jars of “Berlsuconi’s Tears” were sold on the streets of Naples after Napoli won the 1990 scudetto; Claudio Ranieri snapping at journalists after his Fiorentina team were on the receiving end of an 8-2 tonking from Zdenek Zeman’s Lazio.
If I have any gripes, and with a £1.53 asking price it seems pretty churlish to have any at all, it would be the lack of match summaries – a couple of lines of which could sit underneath the chapter headings. There’s no mention of the final score, let alone other stats (scorers, times, actual dates as opposed to simply the month, attendance figures), which can make things confusing when trying to follow the narrative of a report, especially if you are just dipping in. Some images would be nice too, though I appreciate we’re still in the relatively early stages of ebook technology. Hopefully, along with a sympathetic editing job, we can get to enjoy a more fully rounded reading experience one fine day when a print edition appears.