jts1882
Dean Richards
Seems 'Arry might be losing some allies in the press:
Comment: Bitter attack by Harry Redknapp shows FA were right to overlook the then Tottenham manager
Ian Herbert
Tuesday 08 October 2013
Never can the words “The FA are clueless” be the headline to more emphatic proof that the English game’s governing body got it right. They encapsulate the judgement of Harry Redknapp, in his own mind a worthy England manager, who has revealed in the course of a new and bitter attack on the Football Association how he would have needed to enlist someone else, the then Swansea City manager Brendan Rodgers, to help him introduce a passing game, had he been asked to lead the nation at the 2012 European Championship.
Redknapp also discloses that the idea of spending time at St George’s Park, the centre of excellence established to develop that very passing game, does not appeal to him. “I’d rather go in every day and see a bunch of footballers than sit around drinking tea with a bloke in a suit,” Redknapp says, in the first serialised extracts of his autobiography, in which he characterises the governing body as full of institutional snobbery.
[...]
An intelligent conversation about what is wrong with England is under way, powerfully opened last year by Gary Neville and taken forward very shrewdly on these pages by Patrick Vieira last Saturday. Vieira, Emirates Marketing Project’s new development squad manager, was walking on egg shells while he talked; reluctant to offend by giving full voice to the notion that the same old people are coaching the same old version of the English game. Confines of space on Saturday prevented us publishing Vieira’s observation that “you need new, fresh faces; new, fresh voices” coaching the game “because the way of coaching and of talking about the game has changed. Our society has changed.” Vieira’s words certainly resonated when Redknapp popped up yesterday morning.
It is at St George’s Park, the place to which Redknapp seems so averse, that some of the “fresh faces” are to be found – because they certainly do exist. Nick Levett, the FA’s national development manager for youth football, is improving the quality of the coaching environment, to ensure young players begin thinking for themselves on the field and making their own decisions. It is a culture of less shouting and more thinking. Not a headline maker – but deeply significant.
There is still a dearth of the “new voices” Vieira talked of, because those who might provide them are desperately undervalued. A former England international related to me at the weekend that he is currently making a 200-mile round trip to coach at a leading Championship club, earning £17.50 an hour to do so. It might take him seven years to complete his coaching qualification, now that the fast-track route enjoyed by retired Spanish players – who can complete all their Uefa badges inside 18 months if they have played a minimum of five internationals or had eight seasons in the top division – has been taken away.
The England manager cannot solve all of these problems. He cannot even solve many of them. But the task ahead requires a figurehead with qualities of intelligence, modernity, flexibility, perhaps a modicum of diplomacy, as the FA seeks to wrench back the power it has lost to the Premier League. It requires the ability to take the same long-term perspective as the FA’s director of elite development, Dan Ashworth, who admits that England’s prospects of success are even further over the horizon than chairman Greg Dyke has suggested. It requires more than an occasional journey from a mansion at Sandbanks to Burton-upon-Trent.
The question of whether Hodgson was – and is – the right man belongs to another day. As Redknapp says, Hodgson’s face possibly did “fit” more with chairman David Bernstein, who appointed him. That much was clear on the night Hodgson casually dropped a novella – Chess, Austrian writer and journalist Stefan Zweig’s examination of Nazism – into Bernstein’s hands at a pre-Euros barbecue. Their inherent conservatism means both lack the personality for this media age exuded by Redknapp, born into the 1940s just like them.
Yet it was when reading the serialised sections of Redknapp’s autobiography that lay one double-page spread back from his annihilation of its organisation yesterday, that the FA must have given thanks for good, old-fashioned, buttoned-up Hodgson. It was the story of how Redknapp had been conned by a “jockey” called Lee Topliss who after three years and a scam which earned him thousands, turned out to be a potman from a pub in Newmarket. Clueless? Just imagine the fall-out from a story like that.
