Tweet
Rory Smith in the Times yesterday, on Redknapp, Wenger and media narratives. Might be an interesting read for those of you with more faith in TF and HR than I:
Arsène Wenger and Harry Redknapp make unlikely bedfellows. One is ascetic, professorial, the other a bubbling vat of bonhomie. One is a slave to dogma, a philosopher-king who refuses to compromise his principles, the other a devout pragmatist. One thinks, the other gives the impression he abhors thinking. And, in a much more immediate, much less intellectual sense, one spends money like Viv Nicholson, with little or no regard to the consequences, and the other does not. It is hard to imagine Wenger, for example, giving an interview out of a car window on transfer deadline day. He has never even used the word “t’riffic.”
There is, though, one trait the Arsenal and Queens Park Rangers managers share, a characteristic that unites this disparate pair. Both have an unerring ability to give the people – or, more accurately, the media – what they want.
It is not something every manager can do. Many – Roberto Martinez, Brendan Rodgers, Rafael Benítez, Andre Villas-Boas, even Roy Hodgson, among others – are fine talkers, interesting and engaging, but they do not possess that ability to divine what makes a good headline, to shape a news agenda. Villas-Boas offers insights and information aplenty, but none of it is catchy; none of it sells.
Wenger is a specialist at spotting lines. He knows how the game works. Standing in a soundproofed room deep in the bowels of the Emirates Stadium after Arsenal edged past Stoke on Saturday, a gleam came into his eye when he worked out what his gaggle of questioners wanted. The inquiries kept coming: are Arsenal more physical now? Was this result proof that his side can cope with the rough and tumble, the spit and sawdust rather better than in days gone by?
Villas-Boas – for example, and it is only an example – might have shied away from such an issue, knowing that there is a criticism inherent in affirming it, because it indicates that his previous sides were flawed. Not Wenger. Wenger gives the people what they want. Yes, Arsenal are more physical. Yes, they can cope with the brute force and the sheer strength better. There’s your headline, there’s your spin. See you again, same time next week.
Redknapp has a rather different style. He might have known, on Friday morning, that he was in for a tough time. After all, when he faced the media at 10am, it was barely less than 12 hours after Peter Odemwingie’s impromptu road trip to West London (if only you’d gone to Westfield, Peter, if only), after Christopher Samba arrived at a club with a stadium which holds 18,000 people, to play for a team lying bottom of the Barclays Premier League, without nearly enough points and running out of games, for a fee of £12.5 million and on wages which amount, according to some, to about £20 million over the duration of his contract.
Yes, Redknapp is canny enough to know that the questions might be rather more pointed than usual. And so he did what he always does: he served up a distraction, cooked to perfection. He offered us a fable. “The chairman asked me a few weeks ago who I would sign if I could have any central defender in the world, if money was no object,” he grinned. “I said Rio Ferdinand, Nemanja Vidić, John Terry, Chris Samba. I had no idea he was going to go and get him.”
Redknapp is not as cerebral in his style as many of his peers in management, but this was flawless news management. The story offered a glimpse into his world, welcomed his interlocutors into his inner sanctum; it punctured the mood and changed the narrative.
It is hard to believe Redknapp. It is hard to believe that he genuinely sees Samba as a rival to Ferdinand, Vidić and Terry (for all that the former Blackburn defender is a fine player). It is hard to believe that he had no input into his signing whatsoever, given that he tried to buy him at Tottenham, too, and that he had had contact with Samba’s representatives in recent weeks, and that QPR’s interest in the player was well-documented.
And it is hard to believe him when he insists that QPR’s future is safe, regardless of the financial perils of relegation, when it was Redknapp who, upon arriving at the club, declared that his squad was bloated by too many players earning substantial wages and contributing very little, and decried his predecessors for taking Fernandes and the rest of the team’s board for a ride.
QPR are taking a huge, unnecessary risk. They rather give the impression of a club determined to implode; they tried it under Neil Warnock and Mark Hughes, signing big-name players on big-name wages, and now they are doing it under Redknapp, too.
It’s all very well saying that the likes of Samba and Loïc Rémy will be sold if they are relegated, if the worst happens, but it is not that easy: there are not that many clubs out there who will pay Samba the money he is earning at Loftus Road. What if they can’t shift him? And what of the likes of Luke Young, Andy Johnson, Shaun Wright-Phillips, Ji-Sung Park, Bobby Zamora? They are all earning better money in West London than they might expect elsewhere. Maybe Fernandes and the Mittal family will bankroll the losses. Maybe.
If not, well, Redknapp knows he will be blamed. That is the other function of his little tale, to divert criticism from the manager onto the owners. And on this it is impossible to disagree with him. If QPR are relegated, if they do follow Portsmouth and Leeds and all the other financial Icaruses, it will not be his fault. It will be Fernandes’s, pure and simple.
Not only because QPR’s recklessness predates Redknapp’s arrival. Not only because it was under other managers that the vast majority of signings were made, all of them on unsustainable wages and with, apparently, little or no thought. QPR’s squad list reads like a retirement home for the Premier League’s waifs and strays.
But because it is a manager’s job to push for everything he can get. Redknapp’s task is to keep QPR up. He knows that to accomplish it, he needs the very best players he can get. It is not his job to manage the budget, though he should, in an ideal world, be conscious of it. That falls to his owner.
It is for Fernandes to say enough is enough, to say that QPR cannot afford this central defender, or this washed-up Tottenham midfielder. If the gamble fails, it is Fernandes who should be cast with the Storries and the Ridsdales, damned for their thoughtlessness, their abdication of sense and responsibility, their mortgaging of a club’s future for their own gratification and their own pride. It is for Fernandes to say no.
Redknap is a storyteller. He gives the people what they want. It is for Fernandes to say no to him, to rein in his excesses. That is the point of his parable, even if he does not see it.
Arsène Wenger and Harry Redknapp make unlikely bedfellows. One is ascetic, professorial, the other a bubbling vat of bonhomie. One is a slave to dogma, a philosopher-king who refuses to compromise his principles, the other a devout pragmatist. One thinks, the other gives the impression he abhors thinking. And, in a much more immediate, much less intellectual sense, one spends money like Viv Nicholson, with little or no regard to the consequences, and the other does not. It is hard to imagine Wenger, for example, giving an interview out of a car window on transfer deadline day. He has never even used the word “t’riffic.”
There is, though, one trait the Arsenal and Queens Park Rangers managers share, a characteristic that unites this disparate pair. Both have an unerring ability to give the people – or, more accurately, the media – what they want.
It is not something every manager can do. Many – Roberto Martinez, Brendan Rodgers, Rafael Benítez, Andre Villas-Boas, even Roy Hodgson, among others – are fine talkers, interesting and engaging, but they do not possess that ability to divine what makes a good headline, to shape a news agenda. Villas-Boas offers insights and information aplenty, but none of it is catchy; none of it sells.
Wenger is a specialist at spotting lines. He knows how the game works. Standing in a soundproofed room deep in the bowels of the Emirates Stadium after Arsenal edged past Stoke on Saturday, a gleam came into his eye when he worked out what his gaggle of questioners wanted. The inquiries kept coming: are Arsenal more physical now? Was this result proof that his side can cope with the rough and tumble, the spit and sawdust rather better than in days gone by?
Villas-Boas – for example, and it is only an example – might have shied away from such an issue, knowing that there is a criticism inherent in affirming it, because it indicates that his previous sides were flawed. Not Wenger. Wenger gives the people what they want. Yes, Arsenal are more physical. Yes, they can cope with the brute force and the sheer strength better. There’s your headline, there’s your spin. See you again, same time next week.
Redknapp has a rather different style. He might have known, on Friday morning, that he was in for a tough time. After all, when he faced the media at 10am, it was barely less than 12 hours after Peter Odemwingie’s impromptu road trip to West London (if only you’d gone to Westfield, Peter, if only), after Christopher Samba arrived at a club with a stadium which holds 18,000 people, to play for a team lying bottom of the Barclays Premier League, without nearly enough points and running out of games, for a fee of £12.5 million and on wages which amount, according to some, to about £20 million over the duration of his contract.
Yes, Redknapp is canny enough to know that the questions might be rather more pointed than usual. And so he did what he always does: he served up a distraction, cooked to perfection. He offered us a fable. “The chairman asked me a few weeks ago who I would sign if I could have any central defender in the world, if money was no object,” he grinned. “I said Rio Ferdinand, Nemanja Vidić, John Terry, Chris Samba. I had no idea he was going to go and get him.”
Redknapp is not as cerebral in his style as many of his peers in management, but this was flawless news management. The story offered a glimpse into his world, welcomed his interlocutors into his inner sanctum; it punctured the mood and changed the narrative.
It is hard to believe Redknapp. It is hard to believe that he genuinely sees Samba as a rival to Ferdinand, Vidić and Terry (for all that the former Blackburn defender is a fine player). It is hard to believe that he had no input into his signing whatsoever, given that he tried to buy him at Tottenham, too, and that he had had contact with Samba’s representatives in recent weeks, and that QPR’s interest in the player was well-documented.
And it is hard to believe him when he insists that QPR’s future is safe, regardless of the financial perils of relegation, when it was Redknapp who, upon arriving at the club, declared that his squad was bloated by too many players earning substantial wages and contributing very little, and decried his predecessors for taking Fernandes and the rest of the team’s board for a ride.
QPR are taking a huge, unnecessary risk. They rather give the impression of a club determined to implode; they tried it under Neil Warnock and Mark Hughes, signing big-name players on big-name wages, and now they are doing it under Redknapp, too.
It’s all very well saying that the likes of Samba and Loïc Rémy will be sold if they are relegated, if the worst happens, but it is not that easy: there are not that many clubs out there who will pay Samba the money he is earning at Loftus Road. What if they can’t shift him? And what of the likes of Luke Young, Andy Johnson, Shaun Wright-Phillips, Ji-Sung Park, Bobby Zamora? They are all earning better money in West London than they might expect elsewhere. Maybe Fernandes and the Mittal family will bankroll the losses. Maybe.
If not, well, Redknapp knows he will be blamed. That is the other function of his little tale, to divert criticism from the manager onto the owners. And on this it is impossible to disagree with him. If QPR are relegated, if they do follow Portsmouth and Leeds and all the other financial Icaruses, it will not be his fault. It will be Fernandes’s, pure and simple.
Not only because QPR’s recklessness predates Redknapp’s arrival. Not only because it was under other managers that the vast majority of signings were made, all of them on unsustainable wages and with, apparently, little or no thought. QPR’s squad list reads like a retirement home for the Premier League’s waifs and strays.
But because it is a manager’s job to push for everything he can get. Redknapp’s task is to keep QPR up. He knows that to accomplish it, he needs the very best players he can get. It is not his job to manage the budget, though he should, in an ideal world, be conscious of it. That falls to his owner.
It is for Fernandes to say enough is enough, to say that QPR cannot afford this central defender, or this washed-up Tottenham midfielder. If the gamble fails, it is Fernandes who should be cast with the Storries and the Ridsdales, damned for their thoughtlessness, their abdication of sense and responsibility, their mortgaging of a club’s future for their own gratification and their own pride. It is for Fernandes to say no.
Redknap is a storyteller. He gives the people what they want. It is for Fernandes to say no to him, to rein in his excesses. That is the point of his parable, even if he does not see it.
Comment