Always Managing: My Autobiography, page 35
It was scary. Of course there were some good guys. Within weeks I had worked out that my best player was Ryan Nelsen, a 35-year-old New Zealand international central defender, whom I had taken on loan at Tottenham as cover during the previous January transfer window. Ryan, for one, was a terrific guy, but he had started only FA Cup matches against Stevenage Borough and Bolton Wanderers at Tottenham – now here he was, the captain and mainstay of my team. Even worse, I knew I didn’t have him for much longer. He had an offer to coach at Toronto FC in Major League Soccer and was going to take it up a few weeks into the New Year. We really needed him but Ryan clearly couldn’t wait to get out of QPR. ‘You’ve got no chance,’ he told me. ‘Not a prayer. This is the worst dressing room I’ve ever been in in my life. You haven’t got a hope with this lot. I don’t know how you solve it – they are just so bad.’
‘What do you think is wrong?’ I asked him. ‘Is it the team, the spirit …?’
‘It’s everything,’ he said. ‘Everything is wrong. I wouldn’t have one of this lot anywhere near my football club. It’s not just that they’ve got a bad attitude – they’re bad players.’
And then he started going through the group, individually, telling me their faults. He slaughtered them. I’ve never heard a battering like it. Maybe he was already thinking like a manager, wondering how he would handle such a group. He certainly wasn’t going to be an arm-around-the-shoulder type, I can tell you that!
I can’t vouch for Ryan’s views because a manager isn’t in the dressing room all the time, but a lot of what he said rang true, particularly when he told me about the players he thought simply didn’t care. ‘Those boys have ruined the spirit at this club,’ he said. ‘They’re a disgrace and I have no time for any of them.’ Ryan was a fantastic professional. I wouldn’t say he was 100 per cent right about all of the group, but he wasn’t far wrong about quite a few. If that was the captain’s view, I knew I had a tough job on my hands.
Rob Hulse returned from loan at Charlton Athletic and said much the same thing. He was another player I could relate to, and his take was very similar to Ryan’s. Charlton was Rob’s seventh club. ‘I’ve been around a lot,’ he said, ‘and this is the worst dressing room I’ve ever known.’ He was right. The attitude stank. Attitude towards the game, attitude towards training. I can’t remember a worse one – and behaviour like that cannot be altered overnight.
Bottom of the league, a new manager, the transfer window more than month away, you can’t walk in and just start smashing people. You have to coax them along, try to take them with you. I tried to bring discipline in, with fines for lateness and poor behaviour, but the culture of decay was too ingrained. Part of the problem was that the owners hadn’t actually spent serious money on transfers. They didn’t buy players at the top of the tree, but they did pay big wages. So what they had was a squad full of very average footballers earning more money than they deserved. It made them very arrogant and contemptuous. They would rather come in late every day and just pay the fine than behave in a professional manner. When they were there they ran around and did what was necessary – but getting them in was daily aggravation. There were players who were late three, sometimes four, times each week – and the most we ever trained was five days. There was always an excuse. ‘The traffic was bad.’ Well, leave earlier, then. Whatever you said, whatever you did, it didn’t seem to bother them. Not every lad – but the bad outweighed the good, and that made it very difficult.
One day I heard that one of our players had been out until 4.30 a.m. at a casino in London, when we were playing Manchester United at 3 p.m. the next day. When I called him into my office and confronted him with this information he seemed genuinely puzzled. ‘Friday?’ he said. ‘I don’t think it was Friday. Maybe it was Thursday.’ That annoyed me even more. I was expecting him to be angry at the mere suggestion of it. A professional player out until the small hours, the night before a game? It is unheard of now. I was expecting a real row and to go back to my source with a load more questions. Instead, this idiot genuinely couldn’t remember if he was out until dawn on the Thursday or the Friday – so clearly there was a chance he was out both nights. I thought he would go off his head, but instead of shouting and screaming at me for even daring to ask him, he sat there wondering. Not even an apology. Not even a thought that he had let the team down. I suppose that is what shocked me most, the lack of consideration for the rest of the group. I was brought up at a time when footballers were not the athletic specimens of today. Yes, we knew how to have a party – but we worked hard for each other, too. Yet some of these guys never seemed to give the team a thought. They would train all week, then have a mystery injury and cry off for the match on Saturday. Rarely would anyone play through a knock or a tweak. I don’t know how they had the front to pick up their wages some weeks. I felt truly sorry for the guys like Clint Hill. Clint was not the greatest player, but he would run through a brick wall for QPR. You could tell he was disgusted with some of the attitudes he encountered. He didn’t have the technical ability of those players, but if we had more like him we might have stayed up. It doesn’t matter how good a player is technically – without heart, he is nothing.
The transfer window was looming but we had too much work to do. What was my plan? Ditch fifteen of them? No chance. I was probably being too open about my feelings, as well. After we lost at Everton, for instance, I said we were sloppy and undisciplined and had turned into Raggy Arse Rovers after half-time. It was the truth. We had been playing very well for the first forty-five minutes, easily a match for Everton, but their goal had taken a massive deflection off Clint Hill. We started feeling sorry for ourselves and had just faded from the game. I was fed up with it. You can’t do that. We were meant to be fighting to the last breath, not chucking it in at the first sign of bad luck. Jamie was on the phone almost every week telling me stop having a go at the players. Really, by then, I didn’t even know I was doing it. I’d get asked a straight question, and give a straight answer; I was too frustrated with too many of them to cover their backsides any more. If I could I would have booted half the team out in the January transfer window, but we couldn’t have found that many replacements, and we just needed the bodies. Also, the players a manager gets offered in January are often a jump from the frying pan into the fire. I thought the agents and advisers that had dragged QPR into this mess had a duty to get them out of it – but the deals they came up with were rubbish, really. An agent would find a European club who would take Bosingwa – but only if we took a particular player of theirs on loan in return. I would search him out, and he would turn out to be another waster – just their equivalent of Bosingwa. You were just swapping one guy with a rotten attitude for another. What would be the point in that?
I looked around the dressing room wondering how many I could get out and in, but it was a doomed mission, really. There were too many who simply wouldn’t get that sort of money elsewhere, and they knew it. Their agents knew it, too, and made life very hard. Any attempt to instil discipline was resisted. All we could do, in the January window, was try to buy our way out of trouble – adding to the squad in the hope of making a difference. I already had one name in mind.
Loïc Rémy, a striker with Olympique Marseille, had been a target during my time at Tottenham, and I was told he was still interested in coming to England. How interested he was in coming to QPR was another matter entirely. I flew to France to watch him play and had arranged to meet him after the game – but he wouldn’t even see me. He sent a message saying he had met Mr Redknapp when he was manager of Tottenham and he was a nice man, but he didn’t want to meet him now, because his team was bottom of the league and he didn’t want to be rude by turning him down. Newcastle United were also in for him and had offered £9 million. I didn’t think we had a hope of doing the deal. But Tony Fernandes, our owner, was fantastic. He took over the negotiations, and just when it looked as if Rémy was going to Newcastle he changed his mind and signed for us. People said I was frittering away the board’s money again – but it was completely in Tony’s hands. Despite only joining us in mid-January, and suffering rotten luck with injuries, Rémy was Rangers’ top scorer during the season with six goals.
Christopher Samba was our other big signing in January, although he proved a terrible disappointment. With Nelsen leaving we needed a centre-half. I know Rangers had been interested in Michael Dawson at Tottenham, but that had come to nothing. I was talking to Tony Fernandes, who asked me who I thought were the best central defenders in the country. I told him there was no point in discussing the best – guys like Rio Ferdinand and John Terry were not about to come to Rangers. I said that I had always held Samba in high regard when he was at Blackburn, and he was meant to be unhappy at his new Russian club, Anzhi Makhachkala. I said an agent had called a few weeks back and had asked if I wanted Samba on loan. I was definitely interested but sceptical the deal could be done. ‘He’s here with me now,’ Chris’s man had said. ‘You speak to him.’
Chris came on the line and we started talking. ‘And you’re available on loan, I hear?’ I said.
‘I don’t know where’s he’s getting that from,’ said Chris. ‘It’s rubbish – they’ll never loan me.’
It wasn’t the brightest start. I threw Christopher’s hat in the ring with Tony, but I didn’t think we stood a chance. A few days later, the owner came back. ‘You’ll never guess who I’ve got for you,’ he said. ‘It’s a great signing, a brilliant player.’ Tony had done the deal for Samba – and it wasn’t a loan.
It was a shame that it didn’t work out with Chris. I still think that when he is right and fit he is up there with any central defender in the Premier League, but he was unfit when he came to us and, after one very poor performance, his confidence completely fell apart. It was very strange. Chris had taken a few games to get up to Premier League speed again but against Southampton on 2 March he was outstanding in our 2–1 away win. That was a big result for the club, but also for me, personally. On the day of the game a newspaper report came out alleging all sorts about our winter training break in Dubai. It made it sound like a holiday camp, with players out drinking and no work being done. I knew that wasn’t the case. I also had my suspicions about the source of the story – an agent looking to cause trouble.. There were players quoted, anonymously, too. The article stank. It seemed as if it had been planted deliberately to undermine me. Had we lost at Southampton, I could imagine the fallout on the back pages – but we won, Rémy scored, and Samba was magnificent. I really thought that night we might rise above all the negativity and turn it around. Yet just two games later we lost Samba for the rest of the season.
Not physically, but mentally. He still played, but his head was gone. He had a really poor game against Fulham and it seemed to affect him. He was at fault for two early goals and seemed so desperate to make amends that by the end of the game he had disobeyed all our instructions, and was playing as a centre-forward, looking for an equaliser. It was as if he had a brainstorm and he just lost his way after that. He wasn’t as mentally strong as he appeared on the pitch. When I saw this big, imposing figure, I couldn’t imagine that he would be mentally fragile – but he crumbled beneath the pressure of our fight against relegation. He didn’t start in our final four games of the season and nobody could work out what was wrong with him. He went back to Anzhi Makhachkala at the end of the season, for the same money we paid. We might as well have got him on loan, after all.
We did some good business with Tottenham for loan signings, though, and Andros Townsend was excellent for us, but, overall, the team was short and we just didn’t have the ability to stay up. As is usual with relegated clubs, goals were the main problem. The team had lost its two main goalscorers, Andy Johnson and Bobby Zamora, through injury, and never really caught up. The numbers say it all: Rémy was our top scorer with six goals: Aston Villa, who stayed up, got nineteen from Christian Benteke, nine from Gabriel Agbonlahor and seven from Andreas Weimann. Big difference.
On the football pitch, we were always finding ways to lose. It became our specialty. We went 1–0 ahead against Aston Villa away, and lost 3–2; we lost 3–2 against Fulham, when Rémy missed a penalty; we gave away a stupid free-kick in injury time against Wigan Athletic and Shaun Maloney scored to make it 1–1. Any way we could find to mess up, we would.
Indiscipline was also a huge frustration. Stéphane Mbia got booked every week, it seemed, so much so that I actually left him out against Everton, because I knew he would get a yellow card up against Marouane Fellaini and miss a game at home to Stoke City that was absolutely vital. It had been like that all season, even before I arrived. I saw Rangers play Arsenal on 27 October, they were doing really well, and then with eleven minutes to go Mbia made a stupid tackle, got sent off, and five minutes later Arsenal scored. It was as if there was a disease being spread – even affecting the reliable ones. I always found Bobby Zamora to be a sensible boy, the sort of lad you could talk to every day and he would always have an intelligent contribution. I liked him as a player, too. He was a good trainer, one of the few who wanted to play on even with injury, and when he was fit he was a handful. I can remember the night Fulham knocked Juventus out of the Europa League. He was terrific. Held the ball up, brought the other forwards into the play, he absolutely murdered Fabio Cannavaro. It was one of the best performances from a striker that I have ever seen. So what was he thinking when he got sent off against Wigan after 21 minutes, for a chest-high, studs-up tackle, defending a throw-in? It was madness, and so out of character. How many times did I have to impress on the group that season that we were going to need eleven on the pitch to stand a chance of winning?
As the weeks went by, the harsh reality was plain. Looking at the mentality of the players, the lack of goals and the general weakness of the squad I had inherited, we were going down. I don’t think anyone could have kept them up, in all honesty. I don’t think Mark Hughes would have turned it around had he stayed, I don’t think José Mourinho would have made a difference had he come in – there was too much wrong and I had overestimated my ability to affect that. I can’t have been much fun to live with over those months, either. A lot of managers say they are lousy to be with on a Saturday if they have lost, but I cannot imagine too many would be worse than me. It’s sad. Pathetic, really. The day we lost at Everton, I couldn’t even speak to Sandra when I got home. A couple of days later, when I can look back at it all rationally, I do think there is something wrong with me. Why am I like that? I get so low it is frightening.
Losing produces a weird reaction in me, no doubt about that. I surrender all sense of perspective. I don’t want to talk to anyone, I don’t want to go out; I don’t want to mix, I can’t bring myself to socialise. I just want to go home, and sit, and stew. It’s just a horrible feeling. I know it’s terrible, I know it’s wrong, but I feel as if something really bad has happened in my life, as if someone has died. I know it is not like that, nothing is, but my emotions are just raw. I don’t sleep all night: I lay in bed, with my head playing everything over again and again. It’s ridiculous, really. All this over a football match.
We came back from Everton on the train and I found it hard to communicate with anyone at all. Normally, I might have tried to throw my thoughts forward, bounce fresh ideas off the other coaches, but I just felt so depressed. I was the same after the draw at home to Wigan. I’m not the sort of manager to throw plates of sandwiches around the dressing room in frustration, but that day I walked in my little office and I booted anything kickable up the air. I wrecked it. All the food that was laid out, the lot. It all went. There was no one in there but me and suddenly all my frustration came out. My head was exploding. I knew if I went in and started shouting at the players I might say something I would regret. When I had calmed down, I told them, ‘Lads, you’ve got to learn how to win games. We can’t give free-kicks away like that in the last minute. With a chance to keep the ball in the corner, we failed, and allowed them to score.’ I stayed very calm, walked back to my room and felt the urge to start booting everything around again – unfortunately, there was nothing left that I hadn’t already had a go at. Managing is hard when you feel that way. If I didn’t care, I could go home and think, ‘Well, I’ve got my wages, I’m not bothered.’ A friend will say, ‘Just keep taking the money,’ but that’s not what it’s about. I didn’t come back in just for the money. I could have got more money coaching Ukraine. In fact, the way my settlement with Tottenham worked, I wasn’t earning much more at QPR than I was just sitting at home. And I would have given the lot back, my whole year’s salary, to have kept them up. If I could have made a deal – work for nothing, but QPR survive – I’d have taken it. Your pride wants to stay up, your pride demands that you are successful. There is nothing worse than being down there at the bottom; there is nothing worse than the crap feeling of being beaten. It’s murder.
