Free Always Managing: My Autobiography by Harry Redknapp

we wouldn’t leave until we could barely walk home. Ron put up with it, but he didn’t like it. I imagine it drove him mad to see the boys get well beat somewhere like Newcastle and then pile on the train and drink all the way home. A lot of clubs had similar sets – even the successful ones, including Liverpool – but we were a real handful at West Ham, and I don’t think Ron forgot that. I remember one night away at Stoke City when we were absolutely useless. We were staying up there after the match and Ron was so angry he wouldn’t let us out of the hotel. We weren’t having that, so a few of us climbed out of the window and went into town to a nightclub. We got back at about 4 a.m. and found the gates around the hotel locked. There was nothing to do but climb. By now, however, we were rather the worse for wear and Bob slipped and caught his foot on a spike. It took ages to get him free. The next day, we made sure he stayed well clear of Ron on the train home, and he came in the next afternoon and claimed he’d had an accident in the garden. He didn’t play for two weeks.
    Another night, we had played up at Wolverhampton, got back early and ended up in the Blind Beggar, where Ronnie Kray shotGeorge Cornell. Frank and I were going off to meet our girlfriends and Bobby was going out with Tina, but we thought we’d have a few before we went. We stayed for a while, but it was close to empty, and we were just about to leave when a huge bloke followed me into the toilet. He had a big black overcoat, short black hair and a scar running the length of his face. He might as well have had ‘gangster’ tattooed on his forehead, you couldn’t have drawn one better. ‘Tell your mate Bobby Moore that I’m going to cut him from here to here,’ he said, indicating a scar like his own.
    ‘What for?’ I asked. ‘What’s he ever done to you?’
    ‘I don’t like him,’ he said. ‘He thinks he’s a film star.’
    I got out of there as quickly as I could. ‘Come on, Bob,’ I said, ‘I think we’d better leave.’ I was looking across to the other little bar, and I could see this bloke waiting in there.
    ‘I’m coming,’ said Bob. ‘I’ve just got to go to the toilet.’
    ‘No, don’t go to the toilet, Bob,’ I said. ‘Let’s get a move on.’ I didn’t want to worry him by telling him what I had just heard. ‘I’ll see you in the morning,’ I said, as we left. I hoped that would be true and this bloke was not going to follow us home.
    The next day Bob arrived, face intact, and I told him about the threat. ‘The bloke looked like a nutter,’ I said. ‘That’s the last time I go there.’ But Jimmy Quill, who owned the Blind Beggar with his brother Patsy, was a big pal of Bob’s. He was a lovely bloke, Jimmy, but as hard as they come. I’ve seen a fight start between two giant fellas, and Jimmy come over the bar and knock out the pair of them. He was an ex-boxer, like Patsy, and when he heard about the warning to Bobby he was furious. Jimmy wasn’t having it that his mate couldn’t use his pub. He said he knew the bloke and would sort it out. I wasn’t there when their little pow-wow happened, butI’m told the next time Scarface came in, Jimmy took him to one side, said they needed to go round the back to have a chat about Bobby Moore – and smashed him to pieces. ‘He’s a mug,’ he told us. ‘He won’t talk to you like that again.’ And he didn’t – because we never saw him after that.
    Jimmy also had another pub called the Globe that Bobby would use. I remember we were all in there after training one Christmas Eve, and the girls from the local factory were having their holiday drink-up. There was music going and it was quite lively, but the phone rang and it was Tina, Bobby’s wife, who had finally tracked him down. He was supposed to be home to take her out and she had been ringing around his favourite pubs. We could all hear Bobby promising Tina that he was about to leave and then