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my popularity at Upton Park. My confidence was draining and, for a long spell, the punters hated me.’
    All of which makes sense, yet doesn’t quite tell the full story. It’s the comments Redknapp almost throws away as asides that are the most fascinating. Consider his phrase ‘unless you played in a dominant team which enjoyed a lot of possession’. West Ham was unquestionably not a dominant team at that time. In the years that Redknapp played for the club, it only had one top-ten finish – eighth in 1968–9; in the other seasons, it finished twelfth, fourteenth (twice), sixteenth, eighteenth and twentieth. That’s a horrible series of results for a club that was generally lauded for the style of its football and, in Ron Greenwood, had one of the league’s most respected managers. It’s even worse when you take into account the team had Bobby Moore (one of the best centre-backs in the world), Geoff Hurst (one of the two best strikers in the country), and Martin Peters (one of the country’s best mid-fielders). With these players at its spine, West Ham was a team that ought to have been contesting the league title, not propping up the division. If Redknapp was underperforming, he wasn’t alone; underperformance was endemic in the club culture.
    â€˜It’s the million-dollar question every one of us is always asked about that team,’ says Sissons. ‘With the players we had, we should have achieved far more than we did. You could argue that in some cases Ron Greenwood just wasn’t ruthless enough and failed to accept some players were past their best until a couple of seasons too late. You could also say Ron didn’t control the team as firmly as he should have done . . . he was too nice and he let the bigger personalities dominate him. But the bottom line is that it was our fault. We knew we were a talented team but we just weren’t professional enough.’
    You have to be careful making judgements across generations. Back in the 1960s, diet and fitness weren’t taken nearlyas seriously as they are now. A pre-match steak and chips followed by a couple of cigarettes to get the lungs working properly was considered fairly standard, almost self-denying. And a post-match drinking binge was often obligatory for some players. But even by these standards, West Ham acquired the reputation of being a party club. And wherever there was a party, Redknapp seems to have been at its centre. ‘It was a good time,’ Rodney Marsh, another footballer noted as much for his fondness for the high life as his on-field brilliance, said in Les Roopanarine’s biography of Redknapp. ‘We drunk a lot and ate a lot and we laughed a lot, and Harry was at the forefront of all that.’
    Bobby Howe, a West Ham team-mate of Redknapp’s, also agreed that Harry was the life and soul of the dressing room. ‘Harry was a real product of the East End,’ he said. ‘His wit and story-telling were fantastic. He was also a prankster and incredibly street smart.’ In his autobiography, Redknapp tried to play it both ways; he couldn’t resist telling great stories about how he and the lads – Bobby Moore in particular – would go out on the lash but still turn up for training on time and play out of their skins. As far as Harry was concerned, he was doing nothing wrong; he wasn’t ‘giving it large’ in the West End like some of the glamour boys, he was just going out and having a few bevvies down the local with the lads. He didn’t help his cause, though, by calling that particular chapter ‘Win or Lose – on the Booze’.
    It’s hard to avoid the image, then, of Redknapp as a gifted player who rather took his talent for granted and let it slip slowly, like grains of sand, through his fingertips. There was no spectacular George Best-style self-destruction – he wasn’t an alcoholic. Rather, he was an