Brian Viner: FA Cup glamour will not deflect Redknapp from promotion goal

'The one thing you don't want when you go to Old Trafford is to get a real belting, which can happen to anyone'

What price Portsmouth overcoming Manchester United in today's third-round FA Cup tie at Old Trafford? Mr Ladbroke, I gather, is offering 10-1, which the Portsmouth manager, Harry Redknapp, a man not averse to the occasional flutter, thinks is about right.

"Mind you, we were 33-1 to win the league this year," he points out. With Portsmouth comfortably leading the First Division, the odds are substantially shorter now. Moreover, Redknapp has some excellent form against United in the Cup. He masterminded a famous 2-0 victory as the manager of Bournemouth, during United's Ron Atkinson years, and more recently steered West Ham to a 1-0 win in front of a horrified Stretford End.

It must also have crossed his mind that Manchester United v Portsmouth, next season, will very possibly be a league fixture. This time next year, the Redknapp strategy for beating top Premiership teams might need to be deployed as a league necessity rather than a Cup luxury. But what, in the meantime, is the strategy for today?

"I haven't been thinking about it too much," he says. "I don't want to take anything away from the Cup, but promotion is the main thing on everybody's mind at this club. The one thing you don't want when you go to Old Trafford, though, is to get a real belting, which can happen to anyone. I do think they're a fantastically well-balanced team. They come at you from everywhere. And we're going into the game without any regular centre-halves. I've had to take a boy on loan from Arsenal, a Greek boy, Tavlaridis. Don't ask me how to spell it."

We are talking in the University of Southampton Athletic Union, where Pompey have their training ground. Our surroundings are decidedly less salubrious than they were when Redknapp and I last chatted, overlooking Poole Harbour on the deck of his sumptuous home, built in the style of a French château (since when he has apparently moved to an even more splendid residence further along the coast). It can't have been for the money that he took the Portsmouth job, nor for the glamour of wet Tuesday nights in Grimsby.

So why did he take it? And in doing so, did he, frustrated with his nebulous position as Fratton Park's director of football, deliberately undermine his predecessor as manager, Graham Rix? He smiles. He's heard it all before. "Anyone who thinks I wanted Graham Rix's job is crackers," he says. "I don't need to work, I enjoy being with my missus, I was going to go to Las Vegas for some big fights... I never, ever wanted to be manager of Portsmouth, it was the last thing on my mind.

"The chairman [Milan Mandaric] tried to push me into being manager on three or four occasions but I turned him down every time. I didn't fancy it, didn't like the team, didn't like the look of the players, the training ground was rubbish, and I could have gone to Leicester for twice the money if I wanted to get back into management. Graham Rix didn't want me at the training ground, OK, fine; I wasn't bothered either way.

"Then the chairman tells me he's sacking Graham, and this time he says: 'If you don't want the job, I think I might pack it in, too'. And if he was going to leave, where would the club go? So I took it on, but for the first few weeks, at the end of last season, I hated every minute of it. Worst three or four weeks of my life. This year I have loved every minute. I've brought in Kevin Bond [as coach], Jim Smith [as assistant manager], who are fantastic lads, I've got a lot of new players in. I'm loving it."

And so for the $64,000 question. Does he expect to take Pompey back into the big time? He regards me with those sleepy eyes behind which lurks one of the shrewdest of football minds. "If I had [second-placed] Leicester's squad, I'd be an awful lot more confident," he admits. "There's still a long way to go, and look at what they've got: Sinclair, Taggart, Elliot, Davidson, Muzzy Izzet, Scowcroft... man for man we're not in the same class as Ipswich, either. They've got almost the same team that finished fifth in the Premiership. And look at Wolves. Dave Jones has spent £16m on their squad, we've spent hardly anything. But we keep digging out results somehow."

The somehow, I venture, plainly has plenty to do with a top-notch management team. "No," he says, "I don't know what it is." This is classic Redknapp, declining to blow his own trumpet having got it out of its case, polished it, stepped on to a podium and set up a music stand. He knows that I'll have to blow it for him, not that I'm reluctant; as well as being manifestly good at what he does, he is also one of the most engaging characters I've met in football.

What I admire about him, too, is that, like his teams, he gives value for money. He might offer one or two bland, non-committal answers, but you know that he can't keep it up, that eventually you'll get something more robust.

Which brings us first to Sven Goran Eriksson, and secondly to West Ham. His feelings about Eriksson have not changed since we last met, namely that an Englishman could run the England team as well if not better.

"Sven's not a coach, is he? You don't see him on the training ground, do you?" says Redknapp. "So you're looking for somebody who understands football to pick a team. It's not that difficult a job. Are you telling me you can't find me somebody in England to do that? Sven's done OK, he's a nice fella, but it doesn't take a genius to pick Owen up front.

"I still think Glenn Hoddle is a bright young coach, and I could see where Glenn was going, he was looking to play someone as a spare man at the back who could come and join the midfield. Rio Ferdinand could have done that job fantastic, but he's wasted in a back four. With three at the back he can join in midfield, run with the ball, open things up. You don't get him on the ball in a back four."

It was Redknapp, Ferdinand's old mentor, who, having sold the player from West Ham to Leeds, then helped to persuade him to leave Leeds for Manchester, telling him that he would have opportunities at Old Trafford he'd never have at Elland Road. By contrast, Redknapp will never himself enjoy the opportunities afforded by a big club, will surely never manage a club with the resources to buy, rather than sell, a Rio Ferdinand. But I suspect he has never really wanted to. After all, a fat chequebook would diminish one of his greatest skills, to wheel and deal with the guile, although we had better not say the morals, of the Artful Dodger.

"I bought Berkovic for £1.5m, sold him for six," he says, recalling some of his greatest triumphs (the cock-ups, and there have been a few of those, too, we leave unmentioned). "Slaven Bilic I bought for one, sold for £4.5m. I doubled my money on Hartson. Sinclair, bought him for £1.5m, turned down £9m from Sunderland.

"But my best buy, I think, was Di Canio. That was a gamble, and everyone said I was crazy. He's still got his critics, but I think he's a genius. I remember the day I told the [West Ham] chairman [Terry Brown] I wanted to sign him. He put his head in his hands for about five minutes."

In the same office, Brown later terminated Redknapp's long association with West Ham. But the Portsmouth manager insists that he will feel no satisfaction if his new club, at the end of this season, trades places with his old club. I ask whether he can explain why West Ham are struggling so? "I can't, because if you look at them, man for man, they've got to be one of the top six teams in the country. What is Cole worth, Carrick, Defoe, Kanouté, Di Canio, Sinclair, James? I can't work it out, what's gone wrong.

"And I hope it starts going right, that Glenn [Roeder] keeps his job. The only time I got the hump with Glenn was last season when I picked up the paper after they got beat [by] seven at Blackburn, and read him saying that he'd been left a bad squad. That was hurtful. He was left with a good group of players, make no mistake. He still had Lampard then, too.

"He says now that he needs three more players. Well, it still looks a strong squad to me. There are a lot of poor teams in the Premier League this year, teams that could finish anywhere from fourth from bottom to seventh from top, like Aston Villa and Charlton. Charlton ain't better than West Ham. Whose team do you want, West Ham's or Charlton's? I would take West Ham's every day of the week. Southampton's team, or West Ham's? You'd have to say West Ham's. But if Glenn feels he needs three players, great. I don't want to see Glenn suffer. What good does that do me?"

And what good, too, would it do him if West Ham do get relegated, except that it would remove the need for him to go back to Upton Park. He hasn't returned, he tells me, since the day he was told to clear his desk. "And I don't want to. West Ham's a funny club like that. John Lyall never went back, either.

"It's supposed to be a family club, but it's not true. They wanted to build a Bobby Moore stand after he died, but when he was alive they didn't want to know him. Why didn't they do what Man United have done with Bobby Charlton, or Bayern Munich with Beckenbauer, and use the greatest ambassador the club has ever had?

"Bobby was never made welcome at West Ham, and anyone who says he was is a liar. I saw Bobby removed from his seat at West Ham, back in the old First Division. Bobby used to sit in E-block, up in the corner, and I was about four rows in front of him. A steward came up to him just before half-time, and said 'Bobby, it's not me, but I've been told you're not allowed in here without a ticket'. He never went back after that. And he'd died by the time I became manager. Otherwise, my first move would have been to bring him in. Never mind a stand, they should name the ground after him, he should have had a seat on the board."

Another distinguished former player, Trevor Brooking, does, I say. Redknapp looks at me almost witheringly.

"Yeah, but he's not Bobby Moore," he replies. "I'll tell you about Mooro, when I realised what he meant to everybody. He was playing in the States with me, and there was a tournament between Team America, Italy, England and Brazil. Bobby captained Team America against Brazil, in Seattle. When the game finished I was sat in the stand with his wife Tina, my wife Sandra, and my boys Jamie and Mark, and I saw this fella in the Team America side called Keith Eddy, who'd played for Watford and somehow ended up at New York Cosmos, go up to Rivelino and start taking his shirt off to swap it with him. But Rivelino shook his head, and sprinted to catch up with Bobby, who was 90 yards away from him on the other side of the pitch. Rivelino, who was a superstar himself, wanted Bobby's shirt. I can still see it now."

I interrupt his reverie about the past to quiz him on the present. The acid test for Redknapp as a manager is not Manchester United in the Cup, but promotion, followed by Manchester United in the league. So, if Pompey go up, will they stay up? "Not with the squad we've got," he says. "I'll have to do a lot of wheeler-dealing." He all but smacks his lips at the prospect.