We're not mugs

Harry Redknapp, made in England: We're not mugs, we're not thick. There's no shame in being a coach...
By MARTIN SAMUEL Last updated at 1:42 AM on 29th September 2010

There is a fixture at White Hart Lane tonight that defies popular logic and expectation. Tottenham Hotspur will play their first home game in club football's foremost competition since April 5, 1962. Their opponents will be Twente Enschede, who will appear as the reigning Dutch champions for the first time in history. And both clubs are in the competition by virtue of an English coach.
Tottenham Hotspur were bottom of the Premier League when Harry Redknapp took over on October 26, 2008. It took him little over 18 months to turn them into a Champions League club, a status that was confirmed with a win against Manchester City on May 5, 2010.
Redknapp bought several key players, including Jermain Defoe, Peter Crouch and Wilson Palacios, but he also turned some around. Heurelho Gomes went from being a figure of fun to a respected goalkeeper, and Gareth Bale became one of the Premier League's biggest threats from the left. Nurtured by Redknapp, Ledley King regained his place in the England team.

Steve McClaren arrived at Twente on June 20, 2008, replacing coach Fred Rutten, who had departed for Schalke 04 in Germany. Twente had qualified for the Champions League, but only by virtue of Holland's play-off system, unique among Europe's major football nations. In real terms, Twente finished fourth, 10 points adrift of champions PSV Eindhoven.
In his first season, McClaren missed out on the Double, finishing second to AZ Alkmaar and losing to Heerenveen in the KNVB Cup final, but the next year he won the title. McClaren then followed Rutten in moving on to the Bundesliga with Wolfsburg, meaning Twente will be coached by a Belgian, Michel Preud'homme, tonight. They are unbeaten in the league this season, but have drawn four of their seven games and lie fourth.
So, English managers: not rubbish after all, then. Some of them are actually quite good. Who would have thought it? Not us.
There is a horrid inverse snobbery about English coaches in this country. Yes it is easy to sneer when Sam Allardyce overplays his hand by announcing he would win the league every year at Manchester United - although Roberto Mancini made a similar observation about managing Barcelona and Real Madrid - but his hyperbole is born from the bitter frustration of limited opportunity. Nothing comes easy to Englishmen.

Redknapp made Tottenham a Champions League club but would never have been handed one, unlike Rafael Benitez, Carlo Ancelotti, Guus Hiddink, Luiz Felipe Scolari, Avram Grant or Jose Mourinho. Neil Warnock will have to win promotion with Queens Park Rangers or abandon his ambition to revisit the Premier League. Liverpool's engagement of an Englishman, Roy Hodgson, coincided with their tumble over the precipice and out of the top four.
Yet Grant, for instance, has been awarded Chelsea, then Portsmouth and now West Ham United: a Champions League club and two Premier League jobs. Based on what exactly? Do we seriously believe that English managers would not be capable of equivalent success to Grant in Israel?
'We're not mugs,' said Redknapp yesterday, as we sat in a quiet corner of White Hart Lane, soon to become a louder, animated one as he warmed to his subject. 'We're not thick. We think about the game, we understand the game, we've been involved in it all our lives.
'Look at what McClaren did after losing the England job. He came back unbelievably well. When he went to Holland, I thought, "That's the end of him. Where's he going? Twente? They're not going to win the championship". For him to turn them round was an incredible feat.
'Allardyce gets slaughtered but people don't realise how progressive and clever he is with the science he uses. He's blood-testing players, using Prozone during matches - if a foreign manager did it we'd say he was brilliant and technical. The first time I met Sam we were in Ireland watching the same player. The lad turned out to be useless, so we left early and went to the best restaurant in Dublin. I thought he was fantastic company. I couldn't believe he was such a bright guy.
'Ancelotti has done a great job at Chelsea, but you've got half a chance there, haven't you? If you can't handle that one there is something wrong. Put a foreign manager in charge of Blackpool and would he do as well as Ian Holloway, though? I don't think so. We've had foreign managers come over and they've been disastrous. We've had some of them at Tottenham.
'For all the foreign coaches England have employed, what's been the legacy? Was there anything left from Sven Goran Eriksson's time? Do we look back and think, "Right that's the way forward, that's the way we play". None of it was new, no progress at all, if any-thing we changed the system every week.
'When Glenn Hoddle was in charge, for all his faults and how it ended up, he had a dream of playing with a sweeper like the Germans. He wanted to take a midfield player and use him at the back like Lothar Matthaus or Matthias Sammer and that was fantastic. He always had ideas. He went to Swindon Town and got them passing like you wouldn't believe.

'He took a big centre half from Exeter City, Shaun Taylor, who everybody thought couldn't play to save his life. Next thing he was knocking it about like Franz Beckenbauer.
'Holloway's the same. Blackpool have had a couple of beltings, out of their league at Arsenal and Chelsea, but they play good football and they'll win some, too. The centre halves split, the full backs push on, it isn't the usual stuff. But would he be a Premier League manager unless he got there himself? Not a chance. It's about getting the opportunity and the right circumstances.
'Our guys do all the coaching badges. Go to Lilleshall and they are working hard but nobody is brave enough to give them a chance. Foreign owners see foreign managers as sexy. They might have been great players or coached at a great club, so they get the chances. If you do your work but at the end of it there is no opportunity, it is soul-destroying.
'I'll tell you what it can be like managing a top club. When I was at Bournemouth I went to watch Liverpool play when Joe Fagan was the manager. Wherever we were, Joe didn't like the view from the dugout because after 10 minutes he was up with us in the main stand.
'He sits down and this bloke comes over to him. "Hello, Joe, I haven't seen you in years". Joe looks up and says, "Bloody hell, Charlie, I can't believe it's you". He stands and gives him a big hug. Turns out they were in the army together. Next thing Joe's asking about old George and Charlie thinks he's died, and they're both saying what a funny lad he was, and this goes on for the entire first half.
'And by half-time Liverpool are 2-0 up so Joe goes off to the dressing room and I'm there with Stuart Morgan, who is my chief scout now, and he said, "What's he going to do? He hasn't even been watching the game". And I said, "Do? He's not going to do anything. He's going to look at Kenny Dalglish, Ian Rush, Steve Nicol and Ronnie Whelan and have a cup of tea".
'The biggest problem is that the English coaches never get to work with players like that these days. I'd love to see Sir Alex Ferguson's successor be an Englishman like Steve Bruce, but will it happen? I don't think so.
'Jamie Carragher should be the next manager of Liverpool. If you want to know anything about a player there, just ask him. He's brilliant. He'll give you an opinion, he's fantastic on the game, studies it, loves it, why look any further?
'That's what West Ham United should have done with Bobby Moore. He never got a chance, ended up at Southend United and when it didn't go well, people said, "Well, he's not a manager". Alvin Martin too, one failure at Southend and it was all over. I ask you: what are you supposed to do at Southend? What can anyone do at Southend?
'If Bobby had taken over at West Ham he could've been a great manager, maybe the England manager, but suddenly he doesn't know football? Do me a favour. He played the game, read the game better than any player I know, but he can't understand it? He ends up at Oxford City. I went there with him. I used to think, "What is this guy doing here? This is crazy. What a waste".
'You get one chance at a lower division club. Had it gone wrong for me at Bournemouth that would have been the end. One crack, it doesn't work and you're no good. One bad season and you never hear of these guys again.'
Speech over, work to do, yet plainly Redknapp's words have credibility. The snobs - the ones who talk about foreign coaches but English managers as if the graduates of our system are incapable of thinking about the game in a technical way - will no doubt continue to ridicule, but increasingly they fly in the face of the evidence.
Redknapp's predecessor at Tottenham, Juande Ramos - perhaps one of the disasters to whom he referred - struggled to direct certain players that have thrived under the present regime.
Bale, who Redknapp yesterday predicted would one day be regarded as the best left back in the world, is a good example. The Welshman's record with Tottenham was something of a joke - he went more than two years, and 24 matches, before appearing on the winning side in a league game - yet in the last 12 months he has flourished.
'We worked hard with Gareth,' Redknapp added. 'That is what coaches are paid to do. You can't just write players off, you cannot just say, he can't do this, he can't do that. You have to tell them what you want, help them, instruct them. You're a coach.'
For the first time, he looks almost bemused that the problem would have any other solution. And that is what is often overlooked about men like McClaren and Redknapp. They are coaches. Not wheeler-dealers, not kick, bollock and biters, not managers in some quaint old-fashioned, part-trainer, part-chairman, part-chaplain way.
Redknapp will coach Tottenham tonight in a game that would not be taking place without two Englishmen who actually know a bit about football. And, believe it or not, there are many more where they came from.




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