Harry Redknapp, the former Tottenham Hotspur manager was a guest on the Peter Crouch podcast and talked about being offered the Spurs’ manager job two years prior to actually taking the role but turned Daniel Levy down.
Harry Redknapp said “Everything’s done behind closed doors, I was offered the job at Tottenham two years before I took it. Martin Jol was the manager. I said it wasn’t the right time, I didn’t want to take it. The second time, the day I went to meet Daniel Levy I wasn’t going to take it. I was so happy at Portsmouth, loved my time there, but then I spoke to my chief executive at Portsmouth who said we were getting £5m in compensation and the Russian owner was well pleased. It made my mind up for me.”
The podcast also talked about the claims how he almost loaned out Gareth Bale to Birmingham. Alex McLeish, the then Birmingham manager had said once that Gareth Bale was being played as a left-back at Spurs and he had almost managed to get him to Birmingham.
Alex McLeish said “At that time he was struggling at Spurs as a left-back. We thought maybe we could take the pressure off with him coming to a smaller club, help him find his feet and if he did really well Harry could take him back or we could put in a cheeky bid. If my memory serves me right, Harry needed him that week for a midweek game. He played him further forward and he got a couple of goals. The next day I said to him: ‘I take it I should forget about that now?’ And the rest was history.”
But Redknapp denied any such claims and cleared the air later in the podcast and shot down any suggestion that Bale would have been loaned out.
Harry Redknapp said “Listen, it ain’t rocket science, being a manager. Some would kid you that it is. The most important thing you need to be a great manager is great players. I mean that, I went to Tottenham and they had two points from eight games but my missus could have got Tottenham up the league. Luka Modric was a genius, Gareth Bale was scary. People tell me all the time that I was going to loan him out before he made it big but I don’t know where that came from. I was never going to loan Gareth out. You looked at him and he had everything. What a player.”
