Former West Ham and Tottenham Hotspur manager Harry Redknapp has spoken of how every time his side suffered a defeat, it had a powerful impact on him and his family
In Harry Redknapp’s long career – managing the likes of West Ham, QPR and Spurs – he experienced huge highs and terrible lows.
He won the FA Cup with Portsmouth and guided the Tottenham side that qualified for the Champions League in 2010. But he also saw QPR relegated in 2013, eventually leaving the club because he “no longer knew who was on my side,” and eventually retired in 2017 after a grim final season at Birmingham.
Those tough times left Harry in a ‘scary’ place, as he told The Times: “The bad days are horrendous. I look back and it’s scary how low I used to get, now I think about it.”
He explained that although he didn’t take his frustrations out on his wife Sandra, he simply “wasn’t any use to her” after a loss.
Harry recalled: “I didn’t have a go at Sandra, I just wasn’t any use to her. I would never go out with anybody on a Saturday if we lost. I’d go to bed. And that was before all of the outside pressures.”
Harry recalled: “I would be so low, my god, it was frightening. I’d go back to my flat on my own when I was at West Ham, just lay on the settee and look at the ceiling. I wouldn’t eat, my mind was all over the place.”
He says that the long drive home after an away defeat could be “horrific.” His unruffled exterior led people to assume that he wasn’t bothered by losing a match, but, in fact, every loss hit him very hard.
“You care about everything,” he said. “You feel you’ve let everybody down, the fans, it’s their life. You’re driving and you pull up beside a car. They look over and you put your head down.”
Harry says that while some of his contemporaries, such as “Big Ron” Atkinson, seemed able to shrug off a bad result, he could never achieve that level of professional detachment: “I took it all home with me,” he says.
Harry’s son Jamie Redknapp says he was sometimes wary of calling his dad after a game had gone badly: “There is no doubt in my mind that I’ve watched Dad get so low because of managing at times and thought ‘Why would I put myself through that?’
“If he’d lost you’d take a deep breath before you called him. I’d ask Mum how he was first and she’d say ‘he was on the floor.’ Then people ask why I didn’t go into management.”
Former professional footballer and Sky Sports pundit Jamie recalled that, as a boy, he’d know there would be a celebration meal if Harry’s team won, but if the game went the other way, there would be “absolutely no chance of that.”
The lesson Jamie took away from those years, he says, is that every result was of paramount importance: “That’s what football did to you,” he says.
Harry Redknapp is appearing on James Martin’s Saturday Morning on ITV from 10.30am.