Always Managing: My Autobiography by Harry Redknapp

because of the power cuts caused by a miners’ strike. The gates were closed two hours before kick-off. There were 42,000 inside and another 10,000 lockedout – the tie had caught the public imagination and everyone was up for seeing it. We were in a hotel having our pre-match meal when the entire Hereford team walked in – more master planning from our secretary, as usual – including the lovely Billy Meadows. Up he strolled to Bobby, big as you like, ‘All right, Bob – no hard feelings about last week. Sorry if I was a bit out of order.’ Bob nodded at him, as if to say forget it, and off Meadows went. Then the game started, and he was at it again – except twice as bad this time. Even then, Bobby wouldn’t bite. He should have said to him, ‘Piss off, you mug.’ In fact, he should have said that in the hotel before the game. But that wasn’t his nature. He was too classy to react, too classy to even ask, ‘Who the hell are you?’ He didn’t even crow when Geoff Hurst scored his hat-trick and knocked Hereford out, 3–1.
    I helped get Bobby his only job in league management. It was at Southend United in 1984. Anton Johnson, who was my chairman at Bournemouth, confided in me that he was going to buy Southend but didn’t know who to put in as manager. I had already turned him down. ‘There’s only one man for the job,’ I told him. ‘Bobby Moore.’ Anton liked the sound of that and later in the season went for it, but Bobby couldn’t stop Southend being relegated and this was another football-club venture that sadly ran out of steam. Anton left quite quickly after the first season relegation fight, and Bobby was on the cusp of building a decent side when he departed, too. He didn’t hit it off with the new chairman and was gone at the end of his second season, with Southend finishing ninth. David Webb took the core of Bobby’s team up the following year. I hear people say that Bobby failedas a manager, but it is difficult to achieve at that level. You’ve no money and if you don’t make a success of it immediately, people are quick to judge.
    It was tougher for Bobby than most managers, too, because all eyes were on him, wherever he went. Bad result at Southend, no surprise there – but bad result at Bobby Moore’s Southend and suddenly it was news. And the club wasn’t really going anywhere at the time. Frank Lampard went down to Roots Hall, Southend’s ground, with Pat, his wife, and they sat in the directors’ box as Bobby’s guests. Southend were losing and Frank told me that one of the board starting shouting down to the dug-out so that everyone could hear: ‘Is this why we’re paying you all this money, Moore, to watch a load of crap?’ He sounded a complete wrong ’un. I almost regretted helping put Bobby in there, after the way it worked out. It is embarrassing to think of him being treated like that. I’ve worked at the lower level and unless your club is ambitious and you have a chance to achieve success, it becomes a dead end.
    Even so, you’d have thought that someone, somewhere, would have snapped Bobby up and given him a second chance. They only had to see him play to know the way he read and understood the game. And he was Sir Alf Ramsey’s captain. That should have meant something, surely? I won’t have it that Bob couldn’t have become a good manager. His football brain was on a different level when he played, so surely that would have converted to management, over time. To this day I will never know why he could not get a break. I still believe that, with the right support, he could have been the greatest manager in West Ham’s history. But we’ll never know. I still hear that Bobby was a failed manager, but I tell people that henever got a chance to show otherwise. The year I had with him, even at Oxford City, you could see he knew so much about the game. The results were not always the best, but he always talked sense about football. Everybody that played with him