A Man Walks On To a Pitch: Stories from a Life in Football

Harry Redknapp

Oct 2014 · Random House

About this eBook

‘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.

There are tales of the untutored genius of Duncan Edwards and Tom Finney, legendary tough Scots like Bobby Collins, Dave Mackay and Billy Bremner, the world-beaters of 1966, unpredictable one-off wizards from Sir Stanley Matthews to Matt Le Tissier, natural-born goalscorers from Greaves to Dalglish and the greatest foreign players to grace our game from Trautmann to Bergkamp. It is one of the best informal histories of the British game you’ll ever read.

Ratings and reviews

Really enjoyed this book. Picking a team for each decade and justifying each selection is no mean feat. Every fan has his opinions and what shone through for me was that this was written by Harry the football fan. Highly recommended.

What a bell end

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About 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. He has written two bestselling books – his autobiography Always Managing, which was number one in the Sunday Times – and his history of the game in A Man Walks On To a Pitch. 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. He has two bulldogs called Rosie and Buster.