http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/173724/Harry-Redknapp-and-Roy-Hodgson-keep-home-fire-burning/HARRY REDKNAPP AND ROY HODGSON KEEP HOME FIRE BURNINGJUST for a second, Harry Redknapp did not look too happy after being drenched with an ice bucket by Tottenham’s players in celebration of qualification for the Champions League.
That familiar grin soon spread across his face and now he is going to auction his soaked suit for a cancer charity. But you would have understood if he had got the hump.
It has been difficult for English managers to get football to take them seriously these past few years.
At the point of his finest achievement, having confirmed Spurs as something like the force they always should have been, did he really need to be standing at Eastlands dripping wet?
The Manager of the Year award seems destined for Roy Hodgson, who has fabulously led Fulham to the final of the Europa League. But Redknapp surely runs him a near second and that is even if Carlo Ancelotti secures a first league and FA Cup Double for Chelsea.
The difference is that both Hodgson and Redknapp have built and shaped their teams by their own hand, while Ancelotti – quite admirably and cleverly, it must be said – has simply made a few shrewd tweaks to a side he inherited at Stamford Bridge.
There has been a lot of soul-searching in England over perceived failure to produce top-drawer coaches. After Steve McClaren’s failure with the national team, we turned again to a foreigner, Fabio Capello, and watched agape as he made the transformation of the side look so simple. Perhaps we were just being impatient.
In Redknapp’s case, the leap towards a proper acknowledgment of his wisdom and instinct could not happen until he got to a club with significant resources like Tottenham. But it is a telling point that he and Hodgson are finally being hailed here now they are in their early sixties, when all their years of learning and experience are bearing a rich reward.
The key thing both have done is what managers are supposed to do – manage. They have bought wisely, balanced their teams well and given them an emphatic sense of themselves and what they are trying to do, tactically and mentally.
The timing of the current appreciation of this is important because it contrasts so starkly with the latest round of whingeing from Rafael Benitez, who is complaining yet again about apparent broken promises from the Liverpool boardroom.
He is demanding yet more money for yet more signings. But his team show no evidence that they have been constructed and run with any sort of cohesion or idea of development in mind, even if somewhere in Benitez’s fevered mind there was a grand scheme.
He has spent nearly £300million and traded 105 players during his six years in charge. Ian St John was on Five Live discussing the decline of his old club and was told Benitez had made 76 signings. “What?” replied ‘The Saint’. “Is he starting his own league?” Set this against Spurs’ composed and disciplined display at Manchester City as proof foreigners do not always know best.
For starters, there is the advancement of Michael Dawson into a potential England World Cup defender, confirming Redknapp’s ability to inspire and develop players.
Then there is his outstanding work in the transfer market which has given Spurs their strongest, most well-balanced and purposeful squad for years. And he simply will not deny a love of attacking football. Spurs play with style and daring.
Hodgson’s Fulham have been more careful at times during their European adventure. But the proper practice of management is about getting goalless draws at Hamburg as much as inspiring extraordinary wins over Juventus.
Like Redknapp, Hodgson has bought shrewdly and blended a team, not a collection of individuals. The players tell of how training is all about coaching team shape and patterns of play, drilling in both the framework and discipline which has enabled them to pull off so many shocks. Only now is Hodgson a hero in his own land. Even when he was bucking the trend abroad to ignore English coaches and leading Inter Milan to third place in Serie A and the 1997 UEFA Cup final, it passed largely unnoticed here.
Ironically, his elevation here has coincided with another Englishman making a rare mark in Europe.
McClaren won the Dutch title for Twente last weekend. This is a remarkable rehabilitation. It proves young English coaches can learn from their misfortunes and apply their own experiences. Suddenly, the English are showing they can shape the game they invented as cleverly as foreigners after all.
