Harry Redknapp Interview Does Much for the Conceptual Study of Harry Redknapp

You must read Sam Wallace’s interview with Harry Redknapp. Why? There’s this:

Yesterday he was urgently required in a meeting to discuss the plans for Spurs’ new training ground in Enfield but with Harry there is always a time for a chat about football, his dad, the West India Quay docker, or the squirrels in his garden in Poole.

The squirrels have been a bit neglected of late with his hectic schedule. “I feed anything. I feed foxes, I’m not supposed to but I love it. The squirrels get a lot – I bought the plastic containers, they chewed the bottom and the nuts fell out so I had to buy the steel ones. They work better.”

And this:

“My dad would watch Jamie every week at Liverpool no matter where he played. He would get the train,” Harry says. “My mum would make a cheese and pickle roll for Jamie to eat after the game. Now remember, Jamie’s playing for Liverpool.

“Jamie would meet my dad after the game and take him back to the station and once Steve McManaman was in the car with them. My dad said to me: ‘I felt bad I because I had a roll for Jamie but not Steve McManaman’. So I said to my dad: ‘A roll? He’s getting thirty grand a week!’ But every week after that he had to take two rolls, one for Jamie and one for Macca. That was his life, never missed a game.”

And, finally, this:

“I had that recently at Portsmouth with the fitness coach. I said that a certain player hadn’t worked hard enough that day. The coach said: ‘His heart monitor reading is OK’. I said: ‘I don’t care, my eyes tell me that he hasn’t run about and I don’t need a heart monitor to tell me that’.”

Harry also reveals that he’s looking for time to read Carra: My Autobiography by Jamie Carragher, and that he nearly stayed at Portsmouth when the Tottenham job opened up because he liked the worry-free commute. If the insubstantial essence of Harryness were to crystallize in a single newspaper article, it would look a lot like this interview.