Harry's Games by John Crace Page A

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    â€˜Some of it wasn’t rocket science,’ says Pete Johnson. ‘There’s a fairly standard formula for getting promotion from the lower divisions. Get two big centre-backs, a playmaker in midfield, a big strong centre-forward to knock in the goals and build the rest of the team around them. And Harry knew that better than anyone as he’d had lumps kicked out of him at Bournemouth as a player, which is why he often made a point of signing precisely the type of players who used to terrify him.
    â€˜But other managers in the division worked the same system and were looking for similar players and Harry was a bit of a genius at getting the players others had missed. If he fancied a player, he would go all out to get him. He would chat to him, charm him, do whatever was necessary to get the signature. One tactic that always worked well was to pounce early at the end of May when the rest of the football world was only thinking about going on holiday. He picked up both Efan Ekoku from Sutton and Ian Bishop from Carlisle ahead of the opposition in that way.’
    One of Redknapp’s first acquisitions, the striker Colin Clarke, who was signed from Tranmere for £20,000, was a typical example of Redknapp’s financial nous, and one he has always been happy to shout about from the rooftops. Curiously, perhaps, he remembers that deal as much for the money he personally lost as for the value he bought to the club. When he’d originally approached the chairman for Clarke’s £20,000 fee, he’d been told there was no money available. Whereupon, Redknapp suggested putting together a syndicate in which he and three others would personally put up £5,000 each and – in a forerunner to the Peter Crouch arrangement that would later be the subject of his court case – split any profits on Clarke’s subsequent sale. The chairman turned this suggestion down and finally came up with the money himself.
    â€˜So Clarkie played for a season,’ Redknapp said, ‘got 36 goals and then we sold him to Southampton for £500,000. My syndicate was gutted – that would have been a profit of almost half a million pounds – but at least it confirmed to me that I could spot a player and had a big future in the management game.’
    The Clarke deal is yet another of the great ‘loveable Harry’ stories, pitched artfully somewhere between bigging himself up for having been so clever and taking the piss out of himself for having missed out on a bumper payday. It diverts us from thinking about what was really going on in any depth. We’re meant to think, ‘That Harry . . . what a geezer. Gets a player the chairman doesn’t even really want for next to nothing and then flogs him for a fortune in next to no time.’
    This is really only half the story, though, because what gets left out is that, in the summer of 1986, Clarke was picked for the Northern Ireland World Cup squad in Mexico and was one of its few stars, scoring a consolation goal in the defeat to Spain during the group stages. Most pundits reckoned that showcase goal more than doubled his eventual transfer fee. So while Redknapp deserved credit for spotting and developing talent, the size of the profit owed a great deal to post-World Cup hysteria. Good as Clarke was, Redknapp can never have imagined he was a half-million-pound player.
    More significantly, though, the deal glosses over Redknapp’s failure sometimes to distinguish between the private and the public good. It’s as if his default position is that anything that benefits him automatically benefits those around him and, yet again, it raises questions about where his loyalties ultimately lie – to himself or the club? This is a recurring theme with Redknapp. The Clarke transfer might suggest that, on that occasion, Redknapp was rather more concerned about his own lost opportunity, as what he seems to remember most clearly is that