'arry Redknapp Article

From todays Telegraph. Tounge in cheek write-up from Spurs supporting columnist Matthew Norman . . . .

FA's jury is out over Fabio Capello's successor but Harry Redknapp's heart belongs at Spurs

By Matthew Norman

On Wednesday, at a Turkish baths in London’s louche Bayswater, I ran into a fellow Spurs fan looking awed. “It was like watching Barcelona,” said Martin, still shell-shocked from Monday night’s 2-0 home win over Aston Villa.
Albeit without Lionel Messi's explosive genius or the exquisite finishing of David Villa, so it was.

The sweetly scientific ball retention and tiki-taka taunting of the opposition offered an undeniable hint of Barca.

In rising to third place in the Premier League, Tottenham were superb.

“It’s not good, is it?” said Martin. No, I agreed, not good at all. In fact it could hardly be worse.

We Spurs fans, and not only the Jewish ones, lean towards a cultivated sense of resignation, but there was more to this doomy exchange than the usual self-protective pessimism.

The continued presence of Harry Redknapp, genesis of the club’s startling revival and sole potential guarantor of a golden future, is under threat.

And not once, madam ... no, missus, not even twice (in any Harry context, the voice in my head is flogging poorly wired toasters to the hairnet-clad housewives of 1960s Whitechapel and Bow), but on three distinct fronts.

The first is the least worrying.

Now that stents have been inserted to widen his coronary arteries, Harry should be fine.

An 83 year-old regular at the same baths, who drank a bottle of whisky a day for 40 years, had stents put in a few years back, and he’s as right as rain.

The second threat is less easily dismissed, partly because the sub judice rules preclude speculation about the tax-evasion charges he must answer in January.

Ordinarily, one would advise an eve-of-trial cardiac sickie.

But judges take a dim view of defendants too ill to sit in the dock one day, and featured on Sky Sports charging triumphantly from the dug-out the next.

They can, in their pompous judicial way, take umbrage.

With luck, the jury box will host a dozen residents of London, N17 wearing cockerel-clad white vests beneath their shirts.

As Bernard Manning put it after Ken Dodd’s acquittal on similar counts, “Convict Doddy in Liverpool? They were lucky to get a f––––––– jury together!”

The menace that really scares us is the likelihood that the FA will offer Harry the England job when Fabio Capello departs after next summer’s eagerly anticipated debacle in Poland and/or Ukraine.

Harry is much too smart not to understand that the England manager’s job is less a poisoned chalice than a chalice overflowing with hemlock, and wrought from weapons grade plutonium.

Don Fabio and Sven were far more revered than him before taking up the post.

He will appreciate that no man alive could tease two competent tournament games in a row from England.

Yet on the off chance that he is somehow marooned in the distant past when the job had cachet, the temptation is to ask the FA to back off ... possibly with reference to a geezer I know dahn the East End with a knack for handling those who stray into manors, such as White Hart Lane, in which blazered buffoons do not belong.

However, that seems uncivilised.

So all that need be pointed out to the FA is the identity of the former employee who strongly advanced Harry’s claims this week.

His name is Steve McClaren, and the last time he was certain that he knew the identity of “the right man for the job” was on handing John Terry the England captaincy in 2006. Now didn’t that work out spiffingly for the FA?

It would be wiser for the hirer of geriatric registrars to be guided by a testimonial from the late Harold Shipman than for any football entity to be steered by Steve McClaren.

The only way to use his advice, of course, is to listen attentively, thank him politely, and do the precise opposite.

There are already, as Jason Donovan taught us, too many broken hearts in the world.

Now that Harry’s has been fixed, the FA has no business breaking ours in the patently futile quest for international success.

Now leave well alone.