“It’s not easy. You get that feeling of ‘When your luck’s out, your luck’s out.’ But you have to keep morale as high as you can.”
Harry Redknapp is reliving his experiences of managing a team in a sticky spot and how to best come through it.
He was speaking to The Athletic ahead of today’s Premier League matches, with Southampton, Ipswich Town and Wolverhampton Wanderers all still searching for their first win of the season three months in. It is only the second time in English top-flight history that three of its clubs have not won in their opening nine matches. The other was in 2021-22, when Newcastle United, Norwich City and Burnley were the winless sides).
Redknapp inherited a dire situation when he replaced Mark Hughes as Queens Park Rangers manager in November 2012. The west London club were bottom of the table and had gone 13 matches without a win at the start of the season.
So, what’s the message?
“If your team is playing OK, you’ve got to keep convincing them that the results will come,” Redknapp said. “You’ve got to keep believing. There’s no more transfers (with the summer window long since having closed), so you’ve got to get on with what you’ve got. You’ve got to keep spirits as high as you can around the training ground.
“You hope you get a break somewhere. You need a little bit of luck sometimes in life, and you hope it comes. You need good people in that dressing room. If you’ve got some bad ones, that can make it worse, for sure.”
Redknapp presided over three draws before QPR finally got that elusive first victory against neighbours Fulham in the middle of December. However there was to be no great escape from relegation; they finished 20th (aka, last) the following May.
Redknapp said it is important that managers of newly-promoted teams hold their nerve — even if they have a brutal introduction to the top flight: “You lose a few games and suddenly it’s, ‘The football is wrong, the style of play is wrong, this (other thing) is wrong.’ It’s very difficult. They’ve got to keep believing that what they’re doing is right.”
He also discussed the importance of creating a sense of togetherness during tough moments.
“You have got to try things and do something different,” he said. “I’ve been in situations where you take the players out — you go out for a meal, or you go and have a day at the races, I did that at West Ham. We got a coach and had a day out at the Cheltenham races, we stopped on the way home and had an Italian. I know it’s probably nothing to do with it whatsoever, but we went on a great run after that. A bit of team bonding can help.”
John Moncur regaled a similar — albeit blurrier — team bonding tale during his time at Swindon Town during the club’s only season in the Premier League, in the 1993–94 season. They also ended up relegated, and conceded 100 goals in the process.
In a bruising start to what was a painful campaign, Swindon failed to win during their first 15 matches. In a previous piece by The Athletic, Moncur told how he decided to switch things up.
“We went out for a run,” he told my colleague Stuart James. “I then had a mad idea — and this is true — there was a pub there (near the training ground). I was close to John (Gorman, the manager) — I loved him, really — and I said, ‘John, let’s sack this. It’s still not-half cold. How about let’s go and have a little heart-warmer?’ I used to drink brandy. And I was thinking he’d say no. He went, ‘Shall we?’ Whether he planned it or not, I remember going into the pub. Well, f*** me, I think that was the greatest afternoon I’ve had in football!
“It was, ‘Right, let’s have 16 large brandies.’ Within half an hour, it was eight Guinness, 10 more of them brandies, steak sandwiches. The jukebox was on. The geezer had a lock-in, we were partying in there until about 5pm.”
Remarkably, the boozy knees-up worked a trick as Swindon won their following match, 1-0 at home to QPR, despite having a player sent off after 10 minutes. “We had a lot of bonding that day before, had a few rows, had a few cuddles, and I think there’s a place for that sometimes, especially when you’re struggling like we were,” Moncur said.
A similarly thirsty bonding session was also credited with helping Sheffield United turn their season around in 2016–17, when defeat away to Millwall in the August saw them rooted to the bottom of League One, English football’s third tier.
As they began their journey home to Yorkshire, manager Chris Wilder told the coach driver to pull over an off-licence in south London and handed captain Billy Sharp a wad of cash to buy beer for the squad.
“I have never had a manager do that before or since in my career,” United defender Chris Hussey told The Athletic for a previous piece. “A total one-off. All the lads were wondering what was going on at first. But you only have to look at the results that the team went on to get afterwards to see it worked.”
“It was a pressure reliever,” added midfielder Paul Coutts. “Everyone was low and there was so much criticism coming our way from outside. To release that was a great bit of man-management. Giving us a few beers on the bus was the best thing the manager could have done because after that we went on a great run.”
United finished as League One champions that season, getting promoted with a club-record 100 points.
Fast-forward four years and with United by then in the Premier League, still under Wilder, they held the unwanted record of having the division’s longest run of games without a win — 17 in total — during the pandemic-impacted 2020-21 season, having finished ninth the previous campaign in their first year after promotion.
Ben Osborn was in that group and remembered that bleak period, when matches were played in empty stadiums because of a government ban on crowds gathering in an attempt to limit the spread of the Covid-19 virus — which certainly didn’t help United’s cause.
“When you start going on a bad run, every game feels more pressured,” Osborn tells The Athletic. “And then in the Premier League, you can get stuck with a fixture list where you play Arsenal, Manchester City and Liverpool in a row and you’re thinking, ‘When is this win going to come?’
“You try and stick to what you believe in and you’d always go out feeling positive and training as hard as you can, none of that drops, but one thing that does happen is that when you do concede, it absolutely knocks the stuffing out of you. You’re not playing with that swagger that you normally are and you just don’t want to get embarrassed.
“You try everything. You tweak shapes, you tweak formations, you tweak personnel. I think because what we’d done had worked well for so many years under Wilder, maybe in hindsight, we could have tweaked things a bit earlier.”
Citing Ipswich’s recent 2-0 home loss to Everton, Osborn says those types of defeats really stung. “Games like that sucker-punch you because you know, round the corner, you’ve got some really difficult games,” he says.
Leon McKenzie knows what it’s like to be in a newly-promoted team desperate for that first win. When Norwich were promoted for the 2004-05 season, they failed to win in their opening 13 league games.
“When you come up, there’s a lot of adjusting in the early part of the season as you try to get into the swing of the best league in the world,” former striker McKenzie tells The Athletic. “We were quite hungry in wanting to prove we were good enough to be in that division.”
After those early struggles, Norwich turned a corner once they recorded their first victory, 2-1 at home against Southampton in late November.
“It’s about collectively staying focused and sticking together,” McKenzie explains. “We had to make sure we trained as best we could to create good daily habits. Those were our non-negotiables. We had that belief of, ‘It’s not over until it’s over.’
“We had certain things we’d do too — we used to listen to the Any Given Sunday speech by Al Pacino from about halfway through the season towards the end. We all seemed to spiritually connect with it. That was played five minutes before we went out, (manager) Nigel Worthington used to bang it on.
“It’s really about instilling that self-belief and understanding each other’s roles.”
Norwich took their survival fight to the final game of the season but ultimately came up short, finishing 19th and returning to the Championship. “We didn’t have millions and millions of pounds in our squad,” McKenzie says. “So taking it to the last match showed a lot of character.”
George Boyd was part of another promoted side, Sean Dyche’s Burnley in the 2014-15 season. They also found it challenging to start with, failing to win in any of their first 10 games. Results picked up but they finished 19th too.
Former Scotland winger Boyd spoke about the importance of getting that first victory. “Sean never let us get down and he always tried to stay positive,” he tells The Athletic. “We got close to a win a few times, I remember we went to Crystal Palace, drew 0-0 and missed a penalty, so we weren’t far off, so that belief never really went from the players. But you just want that monkey off your back. You get a feeling you belong in the Premier League once you get that win.”
During that testing start, how did Dyche try to boost morale? “It was all about keeping it fresh and lively in training,” Boyd says. “We always trained as we played under Sean. It’s just those little details at the top level — set pieces are huge at any level, so we practised those a lot, and making sure you take your chances.
“Sean was never up and down. If you won a few games he was never overconfident, and if we lost, he was never negative, always positive. You see that with (Southampton manager) Russell Martin now, who I played with (at Peterborough United), he’s never negative. He won’t change the way he plays, he’s got that belief in keeping doing it and that eventually it will work.”
What would Boyd say to those players new to the Premier League? “You’ve got to keep the belief,” he replies. “You are good enough to play at that level because you’ve been promoted. That first win gives you so much confidence and you really kick on from there, that’s what I found.”
Nedum Onuoha, who was in that QPR squad as they went 13 games without a win in 2012, agrees.
“That first win gives you that sense of belief and that can make a big difference,” Onuoha tells The Athletic. “Players have more belief in themselves, fans have more belief when they go to the stadium, it changes the environment from top to bottom. You arrive at training on Monday after a win on Saturday and it’s good vibes, people are bouncing, as opposed to that sense of disappointment.”
With the winless three all at home today against sides also at the wrong end of the table, it gives them a great chance to pick up maximum points for the first time this season and kickstart their campaign.
Failing that, a boozy pub lock-in, a pit stop at a south London off-licence or looking up Al Pacino on YouTube could do the trick.
(Photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
