‘I always think there’s good in people, and I get on well with people. I look at them and think, “Come on, you’re wasting your talent.” I think that challenge of trying to get the best out of them is something I enjoy doing. I’ve always done it. Even at Bournemouth I had lads who could be a bit of a handful and at times it was hard work, but they did great for me when it came to playing and I loved that. You certainly have to handle players differently these days; managers can’t shout and scream at players like some did years ago. Players don’t respond to it and they can’t accept it.’
Harry’s ability to coax the best out of players and to put together entertaining teams has always been a trademark of his. His early days in management at Bournemouth in 1983 may have been very different to his time at QPR in more recent years, but he always applied certain principles to the way his teams played.
‘When I started you went out and signed the lads on, there was no money and it was a struggle. Even something as basic as pre-season training was difficult. When I was at Bournemouth we never had a training ground. You’d go in the park and train. For one pre-season we found a field in the middle of nowhere that belonged to a little cricket club and they let us use it to train on. But we didn’t have any facilities for food, so I used to go to a local supermarket in the morning to get some French sticks and my missus would make ham and cheese rolls for the players. When I was there it was you, maybe a coach, the physio and the kit man when you played away games, four of you, and everything was put into two baskets – shirts, shorts, the lot. Now when a team in the Premier League play an away game it’s like you’re going away for a year, with trucks full up with gear. I didn’t know who all the people were when I was at Tottenham. There were people there on a Saturday and I didn’t even know what they were doing there! We had so many masseurs, physios, analysts – so many people.
‘I think it’s completely changed for managers now. In the old days you’d do everything. You’d go and watch players, sign them, train them. You ran everything. That doesn’t happen now. Agents don’t deal with managers, they deal with chairmen and chief executives. They know managers are only passing through. I found at Tottenham that a player would very rarely come and see me about football. When a player had a problem they would talk to their agent, who would ring up the chairman and complain about me not picking them or something. The agent would be straight on the blower to Daniel Levy.
‘I think the way managers have to operate now is very different. Like most managers, I used to go out and watch a lot of games looking at players. You’d go to a game and there’d be five or six other managers sitting in the directors’ box as well, because we were getting all of our players from this country. Now they don’t go to watch players. How can you when clubs are signing them from places like Argentina or Uruguay? Scouting systems are different now. You used to have a chief scout – he was the one who would bring players to you. Now so much of it is done by videos or whatever, because that is the way you get to look at players. If you get to go and see a player now it’s a miracle.
‘I think there was also a lot more contact between managers in the past than there is today. You would phone them and speak to each other more, and there was a camaraderie. When I was at West Ham we needed a striker. I remember going to watch a game in Scotland because I wanted to have a look at a particular player. When I got there the manager of this player saw me and actually warned me. He told me not to touch the player with a bargepole because he was a nightmare! There aren’t many people who would do that nowadays, and it’s very different for young managers.
‘When I started I had some sort of grounding. It was a great experience, because you basically learned the ropes. Now, if you’ve played in the Premier League, to go and take a job in the lower leagues is very difficult, because you don’t know the league and you don’t know the players. I went to Oxford City with Bobby Moore years ago before I became a manager, and we never had a clue about any of the players at that level. It was different at Bournemouth for me. I’d played for them, I knew the level and when I got the job as manager I knew that division.’
So will players from the Premier League who want to go into management be prepared to learn their trade and cut their teeth at a lower level as Harry did before getting a crack at the top division, rather than expecting to get a job with a big club straight away?
‘The problem is if a player has been earning £150,000 a week in the Premier League, is he going to take a job in one of the lower leagues for a grand a week?’ asks Harry. ‘He’s earned more money in a week than he will in a year as a manager down there, and he’s going to be thinking, “Now I’ve got to work all year for what I was earning in a week. And instead of getting home at two in the afternoon and having the day to myself, I’ve got to be out grafting!” It’s difficult.’
Like all managers, Harry’s had his ups and downs in the game. He did brilliantly at Portsmouth, getting the club promoted to the Premier League and then keeping them up against the odds, as well as leading them to victory in the FA Cup Final in 2008 against Cardiff. Another major highlight for Harry was leading Tottenham to a Champions League place in 2010 and taking them to the quarter-finals of the competition. The team he had then at Spurs, with the likes of Bale, Modric and Van der Vaart, was a really exciting one, and perhaps with another player or two they could have gone close to actually winning the title during the time Harry was manager at White Hart Lane.
‘It was a great time for me and going into training was a pleasure,’ he recalls. ‘They’d be zipping the ball about, Bale, Modric, Van der Vaart, world-class players. It was a team. They’d have been up in the top four every year that group, but then they sold Modric and then after I left they sold Bale, but that was a good team. When I went in there in 2008 we changed some things around, pushed Bale forward and shoved Modric from wide left and put him in the middle of the park and his career took off then. Bale hadn’t played on a winning Tottenham team for ages, but you always knew he was a fantastic talent.’
Harry lost his job at Spurs in 2012 but then went on to manage QPR, guiding them back to the Premier League after relegation, before deciding to resign in 2015. He’s very much a football man who still loves the game, despite all the changes there have been, and through it all Harry’s eye for a player and his natural ability to get them on side have never changed.
‘I think players respond more to a pat on the back than someone shouting and screaming at them,’ he adds. ‘Bobby Moore once said to me that our manager at West Ham when we were players, Ron Greenwood, had never once said “Well done” to him. Bobby said we all need that in life, someone coming up to you and saying, “You were great today.” People respond to things like that. Players do as well, and I think that’s important.’
While Harry is a vastly experienced manager, Chris Powell is at the other end of the scale. Chris played for me at Charlton and did a fantastic job. It didn’t surprise me when he eventually went on to coach and then turned his hand to management. Ironically, his first full-time managerial appointment was at Charlton, where within the space of little more than three years he experienced both the success of getting the club promoted and the disappointment of losing his job when a new owner took over. Six months later he was back as a manager with Huddersfield, but his time there lasted just fourteen months before he lost his job. It’s been a pretty steep learning curve for Chris, but despite the disappointment of losing his job twice, and knowing the pressures and stresses that go with the career, at the age of forty-six managing is still something he’s determined to carry on doing.
‘I think managers do the job because they love the game,’ he insists. ‘We all love the game. That’s why I do it and it’s why I want to continue doing it. When you go into it you have to be prepared for all the positives and all the negatives that the job will bring. We all have an expectation of how things will go when we take over a club, and you hope that things will go well.