Free Harry's Games by John Crace Page B

going to leave [Spurs] and be England manager.’ As it happened, I wasn’t that gutted since it didn’t feel as if very much had actually changed. Capello’s departure may have been brought forward but it had been an open secret for about a year that neither Capello nor the FA had any desire to renew his contracts after the Euros and, like most other fans, I had always assumed Redknapp would walk into the England job during the summer. Just as it had never occurred to me that he would still be Tottenham manager the following season, so I also didn’t believe Redknapp would walk out on the club mid-season. So while the Capello–Redknapp story made both the front and back pages of the following day’s papers, it felt pretty much like business as normal at White Hart Lane.
    But it did make me think. How, when and why had the ‘Harry for England’ bandwagon become so loud and insistent thateveryone had come to accept it as a sacred truth? There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that Redknapp would get the job; not because he was so obviously a brilliant manager and the right man for the job – although, at the time, I didn’t think he was the right man, as I thought he could do better than wasting his time managing a second-rate international side – but because it seemed to be as much of an historic inevitability as a royal succession.
    A Redknapp sceptic later claimed that a Jamie Redknapp column in the
Sun
several years earlier, following another disappointing England performance under Capello, was the original source of the ‘Harry for England’ campaign. Even if this claim was true – it couldn’t really be verified one way or the other – it didn’t feel right. This was partly because Jamie has written a lot of stuff in his
Sun
columns over the years to which no one has paid any attention, so there was no reason why the collective subconscious of England’s footerati should have latched on to this one in particular. But it was also because ‘Harry for England’ had overtones of a Shakespearean rallying cry that had been lying dormant for centuries, awaiting the man who would rise up and lead us to the promised land of football glory – in the Ukraine or Brazil, if not at Agincourt.
    So why Redknapp? His Englishness was certainly part of it. The country – and, in particular, its football writers – had become fed up with a foreign manager being in charge of the national side. Sven-Göran Eriksson had been good for a few off-pitch stories but had been fairly dull on it, and Fabio Capello had never even bothered to learn the language, which wasn’t necessarily a problem for the players but was a major no-no for reporters expecting good quotes and the inside track. So Sven and Fabio had both been judged useless and had to go. In football terms alone, the calls for their removal had been quite harsh; both managers had steered England to the finals of every major competition they had played, and their failure to progress beyond thequarter-finals of any tournament had more to do with the ability of their raw material than with managerial lapses. Any sensible FIFA list would have put England somewhere between sixth and tenth in the world rankings, so the team had merely been playing to its potential.
    But fairness has sod all to do with football, especially the England team, where all perspective is forgotten the moment any tournament starts, as many pundits invariably talk up the squad to make us favourites to win. Or, if they are being exceptionally impartial, second favourites. So when the team is knocked out early – as it almost always is – the inquests are invariably bloody. And Sven and Fabio had both long since run out of white knights to champion them.
    What was needed, according to the general will – or what approximated to it – was an English manager to lead the England side. Poncy foreigners in smart