Three and in – not just another football blog

Never a year goes by without the future of the current England manager and speculation over his potential replacements dominating at least one slow-sports-news week. It’s a go-to topic, like ‘Fabregas Wanted by Barcelona’, ‘Giggs is Really Quite Good, Have You Noticed?’ or ‘Terry Family Member Questioned by Police Over ——-‘

One of the recent speculators’ favourites, after getting Tottenham into the Champions League for the first time in their history, is the excitable Harry Redknapp.

On the one hand he seems to be a good man-manager, he’s tactically-competent, and has brought several teams from ‘lowly’ positions (as, in some cases, he’ll never tire of reminding us) to arguable over-achievement. And over-achievement is something the national side is yet to sample. You never know – they might like it – the media certainly would.

But for all his white-flag-waving at Manchester City, Harry also spends a lot of money to bring his teams success – not a luxury afforded to national managers – so would the quality at his disposal in the England set-up be enough to work his magic on? There’s certainly plenty there, with a decent crop of youth creeping in already, but would it be enough?

And would he be able to handle the ‘big personalities’? Harry’s got a bit of a history of falling out with players and though he’ll do his best to keep it internal, it’s pretty obvious when players like Bentley and Pavlyuchenko are only justifying big transfer fees by doing an extra-high-quality job of warming the bench. How would he react to being undermined by an ex-captain, or having a star-striker tell him to procreate off? And what if he, god forbid, froze-out a star player during a tournament? How would he handle the media-frenzy at every following draw or loss?

Perhaps the biggest loss he’d have to handle in moving to a high-profile team, would be his pressure-relieving tactic of telling everyone who’ll listen that his team don’t have a chance against their opponents but that they should just get credit for ‘having a go’. I’m not sure that kind of talk would be met with much sympathy when England lined-up against Denmark. Or Belgium. Or Liechtenstein.

It seems that Harry’s real talent really is, like many other lauded managers who suddenly lose all respect as soon as they fail to make the grade in a higher-expectation role (step forward Woy) getting the best out of average players. To take England to the next level we need someone who can get the best out of quality players. Someone the players ‘like’ purely out of fear of upsetting. And as far as I can see, there are only two working managers we’ve seen in the Premiership recently who fit that bill, and one’s far too Scottish to take the job.

I’m sorry to say it English-manager-demanders, it would be great if we had a home-grown manager capable of getting the results we’re all so desperate to finally achieve, but if we want to get anywhere with the current crop of Lamborghini-driving English talent, there’s only one man for the job. And he’s Portuguese.

For Spurs, breaking the top four monopoly in 2009/10 was a momentous achievement. And with it came a highly rewarding Champions League campaign, taking in a thrilling victory over the holders, Inter Milan, before bowing out to Jose Mourinho’s Real Madrid.

There was little disgrace in losing to the battle Real – a side that cost hundreds of millions to assemble. Harry Redknapp, never slow to justify his occasional failures, will doubtless make the same point about the tussle they’ve just lost to Man City over that invaluable Champions League spot.

A year ago, a Peter Crouch header ensured it was Spurs who embarked on that voyage in to the stellar climes of the Champions League. Last night, his own goal confirmed that City will replace them. The form of Kenny Dalglish’s Liverpool means that Spurs may now miss out on the Europa League too.

There is an air of inevitability about City’s ascension – it would require remarkable mismanagement to spend that much money without any discernible success, and despite his conservative tactics Mancini is clearly no fool.

However, I wonder if Spurs fans feel a tad uneasy about how easily they’ve relinquished a prize they fought so hard to obtain. Granted, City have spent money, but Spurs had something more valuable: poll position. For the last twelve months, they have been a Champions League club, and City haven’t. In the summer, that advantage enabled Spurs to pull in big names – the likes of Rafael van der Vaart and William Gallas, both of whom have been inspired signings.

And yet, in January, Spurs were strangely inactive, moving only to snare Stephen Pienaar from Everton – a good player, but not one who was not evidently needed. The weakness in the Tottenham squad has been clear all season: they have lacked goals from their strikers. Whilst the likes of Bale and Van der Vaart have chipped in, Crouch, Defoe and Pavlyuchenko have been erratic. Robbie Keane was shipped out to West Ham on loan, where his poor form has continued. And yet nobody came in.

Tottenham did make a few haphazard deadline day moves, throwing money at half the clubs in La Liga in attempt to bring in the likes of Guiseppe Rossi, Fernando Llorente and Alvaro Negredo. But it was unplanned and unproductive.

It was also unusual for Harry Redknapp, a manager known for his transfer market acumen. Perhaps he wanted to escape the shackles of his ‘wheeler-dealer’ reputation. Perhaps the Spurs board were more interested in raking in the Champions League money than investing it in the squad.

Or perhaps they felt it was pointless, and that City’s riches meant they would perennially be fighting a losing battle.

Spurs lost the fight on the pitch last night. But in many respects, it was lost off the pitch in January. With City now having both the money and the status they desired, it looks a long way back for Tottenham.

Every week Lawrence Gray-Hodson, a man who made his name in the upper reaches of Division 2 in the 1970s and 80s as well as being a former Scotland and England international, writes a column exclusively for Three and in.

This week he looks at Harry Redknapp’s obsession with small players

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Jermaine Defoe opined, having seen Everton’s Steven Pienaar turn down a move to Chelsea to join him at Tottenham, that it marked a shift in power. And he’s right, I suppose. No player in their right mind would have chosen Spurs over Chelsea 12 months ago.

Now it doesn’t seem so utterly mental. It speaks to the improvement that Spurs have made but also to the way Chelsea have imploded. I keep hearing stories about a serious rift between Drogba and John Terry and how they’ve had to be separated a number of times in training. It’s rumoured that when practicing set-pieces Drogba spat on Terry’s neck like Frank Rijkaard did to Rudi Voeller. Terry was having none of it and laid out the big African American with an elbow straight to the temple.

So things are not right at Chelsea and things are better than they were at White Hart Lane. However, I do wonder if Harry Redknapp might just be going down the wrong path. Since he took over from Christian Gross he’s got the players motivated, playing well and definitely in the fight for a Champions League spot. Personally I think ambitions of winning the league are akin to my ambitions of a threesome between Angelina Jolie and Fern Britton. It’d be great if it happened but you’d never get Fern to agree.

The signing of Pienaar is a curious one and it makes me think that Redknapp is looking at the best team in world football and trying to emulate that. We know how good Barcelona are, the football they play is unmatched and they do it all with the smallest team I’ve ever seen. Ok, they would be giants in China but Spain is not China. Their diminutive dynamos are small in stature but they wear the stilts of skills and the platforms of power.

Watching Messi, Xavi, Iniesta, Pedro and Villa do their stuff is breathtaking and who wouldn’t want their team to play like that? However, Barcelona’s manager Pep Guardiola, was brought up in the Barcelona way. This is how they are taught to play football, they are engulfed in the Barcelona way from an early age. Harry Redknapp is grifter, brought up on jellied-eels, who played for West Ham and Bournemouth and is yet to manage a really big club.

Spurs used to have imposing midfielders like Barmby

He simply doesn’t have the footballing know-how to Barcelona-ise this Spurs team. What he’s trying to do is obvious, fill his team with small players and hope they can click. Rafael van der Vaart, Modric, Defoe, Keane, Krancjar, Lennon, Palacios and now Pienaar. Sure, he’s got a couple of weirdly big lads like Crouch and Kabul to beef things up but they’re sideshow freaks and not at all integral to how Spurs play.

I remember when I was playing we signed a little fella from Dundee called Craig Dougan. He was 5’8, quite tall by today’s standards, but in the dressing room we called him ‘Titch’ and ‘Wee Tiny Boots’. He didn’t like it at all and when he got out on the pitch he gave as good as he got but the bottom line was he was small and got pushed around. Obviously this affected him for many years and after his retirement I read about him going to prison for killing a basketball player in a bar fight.

These are the pitfalls faced by a small player. Modric, for example, has wonderful skill on the ball but how many years can a footballer with progeria really expect to play at the highest level. All credit to him for getting this far but he’s hardly a good long-term investment. It’s yet to be proved if van der Vaart is having anything more than a bit of Premier League beginner’s luck while Aaron Lennon’s sole contribution to the football is being the only man in the game with go-faster stripes on his eyebrows.

The tongues will wag over the Pienaar signing, suggestions that it’s a way for Harry to funnel cash through a corrupt South African bank-run slush fund are probably wide of the mark, but I just can’t help thinking that in order to progress they could do with a bit more height and British height at that. Less Pienaar, more David Howells, less Modric more tough goalscoring bustle like Chris Armstrong.

I like Harry, he was very good to me when my third wife passed away and I’ll never forget him for that, but if we were having a pint I’d tell him ‘You’ve got this one more wrong than Jamie’s tight pants, H’ and he’d laugh and tell me to ‘Fack off!’.

That’s his problem, he always thinks he’s right, especially when he’s wrong.

I’m struggling to make a great deal of sense of the Beckham to Spurs story.

Ok, there’s no doubt he’d add some experience to a squad light on players who have gone the distance. Beckham has been there and done that with United and Real Madrid.

There’s the thing though. Been and Done. Past tense. For the last three years he’s played in the MLS and regardless of what anyone might say the standard is a long way below that of the Premier League. His loan spells at Milan were a relative success but Beckham’s impact was hardly sensational and he benefitted from the slower pace of the Italian game.

Harry Redknapp might bemoan his lack of right-sided options, and it says a lot that he’d take a punt on a 35 year old just back from a very serious achilles injury than play David Bentley. However, as professional and dedicated as he is you can’t help feeling Beckham is just too old for the Premier League.

It’s an incredibly fast league, physically intense and while his set-piece delivery would be a bonus to any team it’s hard to imagine him keeping pace with the Premier League flyers. If he was just there to take corners and free kicks, fine, but otherwise he’ll struggle.

You only have to look at Robert Pires at Aston Villa. After a start against his old club he’s yet to score and has barely played 60 minutes since. You can’t doubt the quality of Pires but it’s obvious the physical demands of the Premier League are too much for him.

Beckham is a couple of years younger than Pires and pace was never his strongpoint. Perhaps it’s a case of not missing what he never had, but if Redknapp is serious about a title challenge, or at least cementing a top four place, wouldn’t he be better off spending some real money on a player who would bring something to the squad in the long run, not just a tabloid-heaven short term loan?

You just can’t help feeling that this is a bit of a ego-trip on both sides. Beckham to strut his stuff in the Premier League again, Redknapp to showcase his wheeler-dealer (fack off!) savvy again.

Robert Pires might not have contributed much to Aston Villa yet, but he continues to make himself a hero to Arsenal fans:

Clearly a lot of animosity between the pair. Hard to explain, until you remember that it was Pires who dived to win a crucial penalty against Harry’s Pompey back at Highbury. Managers, like elephants and Martin Tyler, never forget.

There’s no doubt Nani’s goal on Saturday was farcical but as much as Harry Redknapp wants to complain about Mark Clattenburg he really ought to have a stern word with his goalkeeper.

It’s the 84th minute, Spurs are 1-0 down and Gomes has the ball in his hands while Nani is throwing a tantrum on the turf behind him. Why stop? Why delay? Get on with the game as quickly as possible. If he hasn’t heard the whistle for a free kick then chances are the referee hasn’t given a free kick.

Even then he let the ball sit there watching Clattenburg gesture that it was in play. Nani reacted quickest, played to the whistle (or lack of it) and wrapped up the game for United.

Harry Redknapp, in his ever more risible Sun column, claimed:

I don’t care what anybody says, it wasn’t right in the spirit of the law.

He seems to have rather mixed his metaphors there. There might be a spirit of the game, conventions such as giving the ball back when you’ve put it out for an injury break, but the laws of the game are not open to spirit. Clattenburg gave Spurs an advantage, a chance to continue play with one of United’s players out of action having a strop about not getting a penalty.

Gomes is an experienced player who should have made the most of it. Instead he blundered and handed the advantage to Nani instead. I’m no fan of Clatteburg in general but fingers should be pointed at the goalkeeper, not the ref.

It’s being reported this morning that Harry Redknapp has been so impressed with William Gallas that he is considering making him an official member of the Redknapp family.

Speaking exclusive to three and in Harry said:

I have been very impressed with him as a fellow. I am even considering making him captain on Saturday and if he does a good job then there’s a place at our Sunday dinner table for him. I’m thinking of adopting him.

I’m serious, deadly serious.

Redknapp feels Gallas will provide ‘decent competition’ for Jamie who is believed to have become ‘complacent’ in his role. A source close to the Spurs manager told us:

If he’s not swanning around on holiday doing ‘it’, he’s on TV with his tight pants and his bulging crotch. Harry feels he’s gotten a bit big for his boots. Making William his brother will certainly shake things up a bit!

The story comes in the same week that Alex Ferguson offered Wayne Rooney ‘sanctuary’ in his house to escape the constant news stories, Arsene Wenger defended 18 year old Jack Wilshere and Tony Pulis rocked a weeping Ryan Shawcross to sleep every night.

You’d think that after the embarrassment of hearing the BBC claim that not a single member of the German starting XI would be good enough for the Three Lions, only to then get thumped 4-1, that England would have learnt some humility.  Wishful thinking, I’m afraid.

The offender-in-chief on this occasion is Tottenham manager Harry Redknapp, who said of the Swiss in this morning’s Sun column about the game:

“I don’t feel any of their players could do a job in the Premier League.”

Wilfully uninformed, and just plain wrong.  What of Diego Benaglio, one of the World Cup’s outstanding goalkeepers and winner of a Bundesliga title with Wolfsburg?  Or Gokhan Inler, who not long ago was the subject of a £15m tug-of-war between Udinese and Arsenal?  And perhaps Redknapp has forgotten that one of the Swiss starters, the winger David Degen, played in Young Boys’ 3-2 first leg victory over his own Spurs team.

His description of Switzerland as “a second-rate team without any real passion” borders on the offensive, and seems to derive primarily from out-dated stereotypes of ‘neutrality’.  I grant you the Swiss were poor last night, but this is a nation that holds a record for defensive solidity on the International stage, and who triumphed over eventual winners Spain this summer.  They deserve greater respect.

Redknapp attempts to use his Sun column to play down the achievements of Capello in a bid to strengthen his own position as a potential England manager.  Amusingly, the more he sounds off the more he exposes his ignorance and unsuitability to the sophistication of international football.

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With thanks to Tor-Kristian Karlsen for flagging up the offending article.

You heard the man. He’s too busy handing out ‘sweeteners’ to Spurs fans for any of that.

Sky Sports Rob Palmer the man to get Harry’s goat.

Hat tip to James for the vid.

Harry speaking about the artificial pitch before Spurs 3-2 defeat to Young Boys:

I think it will suit us, the way we pass the ball. We’ve got players with great technique like Luka Modric. We won’t be making an excuse out of it.

Harry speaking about the artificial pitch after Spurs 3-2 defeat to Young Boys:

You have to get used to playing on it. If you play on it every week you get used to it. I don’t agree with Astroturf and I don’t think Astroturf should be used in a competition like this. I left four out because they weren’t comfortable on the pitch in training yesterday.

Sounds a bit excusey to me and UEFA have rightly dismissed his complaints. What his grumblings do, of course, is distract from Tottenham’s limp performance. Yes, they did well to drag themselves back into it but the tie could have been over and done with had the Swiss taken their chances. It had nothing to do with the pitch, it was because Spurs played so poorly in a game they should have been right up for. It’s all a bit convenient for Redknapp to blame to pitch when the finger should be pointed squarely and his players and him.

And even if we do talk about the pitch it’s a non-issue. Modern astro pitches are fantastic. It’s not like the old days of sand based surfaces that would tear the skin from your elbows and knees at the slightest contact. They cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and are meticulously maintained. Sure, they do lack something that grass pitches do, such as bumps, divots, hills, slopes, bare patches, holes, missing turf and waterlogged sections. It’s tough to cope with all right.

The pitch last night was better than the one at Wembley, for example, and it’s not as if all Premier League surfaces are the same. The ball will roll and bounce differently at the Emirates than it does at Old Trafford which is different to White Hart Lane which is different to Stamford Bridge and so on.

Spurs are still in the Champions League, and I expect them to qualify from the second leg, but Harry needs to work a little harder on his excuse making. Or, better yet, the training ground.