Mixed Pickles - the Book log 2012

Ever picked a book up off a pile of stuff to go to Oxfam, and started reading it? And even though you don't want to you just keep turning the pages? well, that's me and Harry Redknapp's 1998 biography, written while he was still in charge at West Ham, and timed to coincide with their return to European football. Read it because I rememebered watching Redknapp as a player at West Ham, and because I followed the team through many of the years he managed them. And despite all the Tom Bowyer allegations, there is still something charming about 'Arry and the way he talks about overpaid footballers, underpaid managers, and how he never made any "dough" from the game. One hideous piece of dramatic irony - he talks about signing Marc Vivien Foe when Liverpool turnewd him down, apperntly because of a "dodgy medical condition": Harry couldn't see any sign of anything wrong with the player and reckoned he was one of the fittest players around. Foe colapsed and died in the middle of a fottball match just a few years later.