Harry Redknapp Speaks Out About Daniel Levy, Tottenham Hotspur, and England

I'm sure we all still remember the saga that brought about the downfall of Harry Redknapp at Tottenham Hotspur. It all began with speculation the Redknapp would be the next England manager. That speculation was followed by a massive thrashing of Newcastle United and then a horrible late season collapse for Spurs. Redknapp was eventually sacked and is no managing Championship bound Queens Park Rangers.

His new position, however, has never stopped him from talking about Tottenham Hotspur. Most recently, the Evening Standard published a piece where Redknapp talks about the England saga and his final days at Spurs. Redknapp was asked if he would take the England job now. In response he said that now he wouldn't want it now. The time would have been when he was in charge of Spurs. Redknapp then said:

"I had such a badly loaded contract it was crazy, in Tottenham’s favour. That’s what you get for not reading your contract properly. "It was a massive amount that someone would have had to pay to get me out of it. If they sacked me it wasn’t so massive and that was a bolt out of the blue, a shock, I genuinely never saw it coming.

So, apparently while some Spurs fans were calling for Harry's resignation (probably a 50/50 split), Harry still believed that he would be staying with Spurs. The main source of that belief seems to have been his relationship with Daniel Levy.

"I went to a dinner with Daniel [Levy] at Christmas. He took all the staff out and he made a speech, which isn’t Daniel-like. I was embarrassed the way he spoke about me. "Kevin [Bond] and Joe [Jordan] said ‘He doesn’t show his feelings but he certainly showed his feelings towards you today, Harry’. There were other directors there, months later I was gone . . . quite amazing really.

So it would seem that Levy loved Harry or at least felt quite strongly about him as a manager. My impression was always that it was Levy, possessing higher ambitions for the club, who sacked Redknapp. Apparently, that wasn't the case.

"Was it Levy who cut the cord? It was other people, the owner of the club [Lewis] that decided."

To me, this revelation is amazing. Joe Lewis is one of the wealthiest owners in football. Yet, he is the opposite of Roman Abramovich. Lewis is almost perpetually in the background. I can't recall the last time the camera showed him in the Director's Box at White Hart Lane or him ever having made a statement about anything related to the club. It seems incredibly out of character for him to have fired Redknapp.

Now, most things Harry Redknapp says should be taken with a grain of salt. However, I'm not sure what motive he has to bullshit here. The thing that's most worrying is that many of us had hailed Levy's accumen for dropping Redknapp and hiring Andre Villas-Boas, but now it appears that it was Lewis who got rid of Harry. Levy still deserves credit for bringing in AVB (I think), but perhaps he doesn't deserve as much credit for the goings-on at the club as he has been given.