With league fixtures into double figures, the autumn’s general-excuse-me overture has finished and the long winter slog is really underway. The eightsome reel at the top of the Premiership comprises natch the four usual suspects (Arsenal, Manchester United, Liverpool and Chelsea) and a fresh quartet of determined pretenders girding up to press on from highly promising starts: Manchester City, Portsmouth, Blackburn Rovers and Newcastle United. The eight are managed by a Frenchman, a Scot, a Spaniard, an Israeli, a Swede, a Welshman and two Englishmen. The last brace are contrasting guvnors: Newcastle’s plonking praesidium-pompous Sam Allardyce could have been created by Arnold Bennett, while Portsmouth’s perkily engaging and philosophic been-there-done-that Harry Redknapp might be straight out of Dickens. I know with which I’d prefer to share a few convivial Saturday night sherberts.
This weekend, Arsenal vs Manchester United will hoover up the blanket coverage, but I fancy Portsmouth’s Newcastle safari might be the more relevantly significant contest. Blithe ’arry-boy vs Alderman Sam.
In my years on the (even then) non-stop football beat, the Waterloo buffet-car meant either Fratton Park or the equally tumbledown Dell; usually the latter, for Southampton were then more regularly swanks of the Solent. There was, nevertheless, always a frisson of nostalgic edge about a trip to Portsmouth: uniformed matelots still turned up in hundreds to watch, the Pompey Chimes still chorussed — ‘Play up Pom-pee! Pom-pee play up!’ mimicking Big Ben’s bongs — and, of course, they were one of the crack teams of my boyhood. I think I can still recite, uncribbed, the XI which won two successive Championships in 1949 and 1950 — well almost: Butler, Whatsisname, Ferrier, Scoular, Thingamyjig, Dickinson, Harris, Reid, Clarke, Phillips, Froggatt. Not bad.
To the Premiership’s exotic league of nations, Redknapp brings the down-to-earth old-school English approach. This has him worrying that foreign players are far better because they are much more ‘hungry’ than the present home-grown generation: ‘Who sees working-class kickabouts in English parks any more? It’s now just the dazzling lights of bedroom windows from the glare of televisions and computers.’ As a player, Harry’s mentor and mate was the peerlessly unflappable Bobby Moore, his apprenticeship further blessed by the wise, native and uncluttered fundamentals of such as Ron Greenwood and the enthusiast Alec Stock. This Christmas marks Redknapp’s quarter-century as a manager. He began just along the coast at Bournemouth: day one and they lost 9-0 to Lincoln City, after which Harry, with chirpy insouciance, gave us his first post-match interview: ‘Diabolical! Their seventh was a mile offside!’ But Bournemouth won the Third Division title, which Harry still regards as more rewarding even than keeping West Ham in the top half of the Premiership three times in a row.
In spite of the utterly ludicrous lucre swirling around the Premiership — ‘In my day you’d be two minutes in the manager’s office and you’d be enchanted with a rise of a fiver’ — Redknapp’s overwhelming charm is that he is still besotted with football and those who play it: ‘People get carried away slagging off players because they drive around in big cars or whatever. So what, if they can afford big cars, jolly good luck, I say. There’s the odd exception, of course, but in the main all footballers are great lads wherever they’re from — 99 per cent are the same as they’ve always been, just boys who simply always wanted to be footballers, and I’ve got all the time in the world for them.’
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