‘When a man walks on to a pitch there’s always a chance something magic can happen, that’s what keeps us coming back…’
In A Man Walks On To a Pitch, Harry shares a lifetime’s experience of obsessing over football, during which he has seen it all first hand – the good, the bad and the unbelievable. Harry started in an age where players were ordinary blokes who might live on the same street as you and earn a similar wage. Now he manages in an era of player power, multi-million pound wages and teams assembled from around the globe.
As he shares stories of some of the legends and journeymen he played, coached, argued and drank with, Harry picks a team for each decade from the 1950s to the present. He gets to the heart of what was right and wrong with each era and explores the changes in the game from lifestyle to tactics. He weaves his choices together with unforgettable tales from the training pitches, boot rooms and card schools.
The author:
Harry Redknapp was born in 1947 in Poplar, East London. After starting out as a trainee at Tottenham, he signed for West Ham and played for them between 1965 and 1972. He also played for Bournemouth and the Seattle Sounders before injury took him into management and coaching. He has managed at Bournemouth, West Ham, Portsmouth (twice), Southampton, Tottenham Hotspur and QPR. He won the FA Cup with Portsmouth in 2008 and took Spurs into the Champions League in 2010. In 2018, Harry was crowned King of the Jungle in I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here. He has written three bestselling books: his autobiography Always Managing, which was number one in the Sunday Times, his history of the game in A Man Walks On To a Pitch and his survival guide to the world’s hardest job in It Shouldn’t Happen to a Manager. He is married to Sandra and has two sons, Mark and Jamie (who played for Liverpool, Tottenham and England). He is also uncle to Frank Lampard Jr. He has two bulldogs called Lulabelle and Barney.
