Derry reveals how Redknapp trains his squad

[Stanley]

Harry rarely takes a training session but watches every minute – and then picks the team based on his observations: http://www.getwestlondon.co.uk/sport...s-how-6200674?

[Joon]

This corroborates Bosingwa's remark about HR not being there during training. Derry has also explained that HR watches "every minute" of everything even though he is not physically there, and from that it seems HR monitors players nowadays, from a distance and/or on recorded video.

Certainly, our team is performing optimally this season, but I think the above does confirm that HR has very little direct interaction with players, and that may be part of why our quite talented team of last season were so out of control and played like individuals rather than a team. Granted, they did perform worse under MH.

HR may be a good manager, and he may even be a good coach, but at QPR he has not been coaching. Our team really, reallly needed a ton of coaching last season. How can disruptive and stubborn players be turned into better behaved ones without extensive coaching? Fines need to be backed up with coaching to prevent recurrence of player misbehavior.

Minimal interaction with a manager who rarely talked with his players but often criticized them in the media likely contributed to poor player loyalty and lack of team spirit.

HR is managing well this season and I hope he stays to continue his good work next season, but in hindsight, HR was a terrible choice as MH's replacement, how could a manager of his type have turned the season into a success?

[Stanley]

This corroborates Bosingwa's remark about HR not being there during training. Derry has also explained that HR watches "every minute" of everything even though he is not physically there, and from that it seems HR monitors players nowadays, from a distance and/or on recorded video.

Certainly, our team is performing optimally this season, but I think the above does confirm that HR has very little direct interaction with players, and that may be part of why our quite talented team of last season were so out of control and played like individuals rather than a team. Granted, they did perform worse under MH.

HR may be a good manager, and he may even be a good coach, but at QPR he has not been coaching. Our team really, reallly needed a ton of coaching last season. How can disruptive and stubborn players be turned into better behaved ones without extensive coaching? Fines need to be backed up with coaching to prevent recurrence of player misbehavior.

Minimal interaction with a manager who rarely talked with his players but often criticized them in the media likely contributed to poor player loyalty and lack of team spirit.

HR is managing well this season and I hope he stays to continue his good work next season, but in hindsight, HR was a terrible choice as MH's replacement, how could a manager of his type have turned the season into a success?

There is a great deal of factually incorrect information in the above post and is based purely on assumption, hypothesis and has misinterpreted and twisted Derry's comments.

I was at Harlington on Thursday interviewing three of the players for WATRB and I was able to observe a training session first hand. Harry is very much hands on and involved at the training sessions and engages directly with all the players. The difference is that Kevin, Joe and Carl take the actual sessions and drills whilst Harry for the most part observes and takes more of a back seat. But he doesn't miss a thing, observes players' form and then at the right moments makes his points. Harry is a football man through and through; he eats, sleeps and breathes the game and has done so all his life.

[madara]

Most top managers (Ferguson et al) delegates everything and helps the team to perform his way (without him). It takes time to implement everything. This and that HR was trying to not disrupt the team balance too much caused him and the team to fail last season IMO.

[Joon]

There is a great deal of factually incorrect information in the above post and is based purely on assumption, hypothesis and has misinterpreted and twisted Derry's comments.

I was at Harlington on Thursday interviewing three of the players for WATRB and I was able to observe a training session first hand. Harry is very much hands on and involved at the training sessions and engages directly with all the players. The difference is that Kevin, Joe and Carl take the actual sessions and drills whilst Harry for the most part observes and takes more of a back seat. But he doesn't miss a thing, observes players' form and then at the right moments makes his points. Harry is a football man through and through; he eats, sleeps and breathes the game and has done so all his life.

Stanley, upon re-reading the above interview from Derry, it appears that while Derry was still with us, HR was physically present in the training sessions and observing, but not doing much coaching himself. I did misread the part about being present, but not the part about coaching.

In Derry's own words, "“Redknapp does not play much active part in coaching. He is there, watching absolutely everything, every single minute whether he takes the session or not."

Do you get to watch training sessions often? Did the players you interviewed say anything about HR's presence and role during other sessions? I ask because although you have access, you can't be there all the time, so I want to gauge how much direct information and access you have, as your description of HR during training is different from Bosingwa's (and I thought Derry's) descriptions.

Personally, I think that Bosingwa's remarks about HR being confused or delusional (the SAF bit) were very mean-spirited and exaggerated, but I did take note of what he said about HR not being present in most training sessions. I assumed it to be due to HR's bad knee, but from what you are saying, there is no truth to it at all? Were Bosingwa's comments just flat-out lies? Surely, Derry is thinking about Bosingwa's comments and he means to defend Harry's methods, yet he does acknowledge that HR does not do much coaching himself, contrary to your observations. Is it not more likely that HR's involvement in training and coaching has changed since last season and pre-season?

Thursday was already well after Bosingwa responded to HR's book, and HR appeared to be deeply hurt by the words from Bosingwa. Are you sure that HR did not just recently become more involved in coaching during training sessions after it became a hot topic?

HR talks to the media a lot, too much in my opinion, and some of the things he has effectively said include the following which I feel are not appropriate for a manager to say: 1.) his players from last season were not all that talented and in fact just mediocre, 2.) the players were entirely to blame for the relegation, not himself. These types of remarks gave me the impression that HR had no respect for, limited knowledge of and not enough care for many of his players last season, and no desire to accurately identify and make the most of the talents they did have. Furthermore, his words (and those of players) in the media gave me the impression that HR was aloof and distant rather than hands-on as I initially expected he would be.

Assuming that Bosingwa and Derry are both speaking truthfully about it, it could be that HR was less present during training sessions last season than he was during this season and pre-season, and he has increased his involvement in coaching at some point after pre-season.

[Joon]

Most top managers (Ferguson et al) delegates everything and helps the team to perform his way (without him). It takes time to implement everything. This and that HR was trying to not disrupt the team balance too much caused him and the team to fail last season IMO.

It is true that HR had no time to get settled in. I probably wanted too much of an immediate impact from him last season, which I guess was not fair or realistic. HR's ideas are bearing fruit this season, he probably just needed a little time.

Certainly no complaints about this season, but I still think that a different type of manager could have fared better than HR last season, at least for the short-term relegation battle with our talented yet broken team.

[Rangers77]

Thanks Stanley for fact, not conjecture.

[Stanley]

Stanley, upon re-reading the above interview from Derry, it appears that while Derry was still with us, HR was physically present in the training sessions and observing, but not doing much coaching himself. I did misread the part about being present, but not the part about coaching.

In Derry's own words, "“Redknapp does not play much active part in coaching. He is there, watching absolutely everything, every single minute whether he takes the session or not."

Do you get to watch training sessions often? Did the players you interviewed say anything about HR's presence and role during other sessions? I ask because although you have access, you can't be there all the time, so I want to gauge how much direct information and access you have, as your description of HR during training is different from Bosingwa's (and I thought Derry's) descriptions.

Personally, I think that Bosingwa's remarks about HR being confused or delusional (the SAF bit) were very mean-spirited and exaggerated, but I did take note of what he said about HR not being present in most training sessions. I assumed it to be due to HR's bad knee, but from what you are saying, there is no truth to it at all? Were Bosingwa's comments just flat-out lies? Surely, Derry is thinking about Bosingwa's comments and he means to defend Harry's methods, yet he does acknowledge that HR does not do much coaching himself, contrary to your observations. Is it not more likely that HR's involvement in training and coaching has changed since last season and pre-season?

Thursday was already well after Bosingwa responded to HR's book, and HR appeared to be deeply hurt by the words from Bosingwa. Are you sure that HR did not just recently become more involved in coaching during training sessions after it became a hot topic?

HR talks to the media a lot, too much in my opinion, and some of the things he has effectively said include the following which I feel are not appropriate for a manager to say: 1.) his players from last season were not all that talented and in fact just mediocre, 2.) the players were entirely to blame for the relegation, not himself. These types of remarks gave me the impression that HR had no respect for, limited knowledge of and not enough care for many of his players last season, and no desire to accurately identify and make the most of the talents they did have. Furthermore, his words (and those of players) in the media gave me the impression that HR was aloof and distant rather than hands-on as I initially expected he would be.

Assuming that Bosingwa and Derry are both speaking truthfully about it, it could be that HR was less present during training sessions last season than he was during this season and pre-season, and he has increased his involvement in coaching at some point after pre-season.

Joon, it has always been Harry's managerial style to bring in other coaches and get the benefit of different expert opinions. Listen to Brendan Rogers' recent description of him and how he refers to him as a 'great chemist'. Listen also to Harry's press conference yesterday how he describes his methods himself as well as his time with McLaren who he now also plans to replace. This has always been his way, did exactly the same at Spurs and is how he's achieved success. He's very much a people person, loves to listen and get other people's input before making the final decisions himself.

In response to your questions, I observed much of this at Harlington on Thursday as well as picking things up from my questions to Harry, Charlie and Rob at the recent fans's forum and attending regular meetings with the media team. I'll be posting up the interviews I did with Max Ehmer, Tom Hitchcock and Frankie Sutherland tomorrow so you'll have to wait for those but one of the questions I was particularly keen to ask them was how Harry is with the younger players and how it compares with the differing roles of Kevin and Joe. It was reassuring to hear that Harry engages directly with all of them and they said he is very approachable whenever they want to speak one on one. More interviews with players are in the pipeline too.

As for Bosingwa's comments, that all dates back to him refusing to sit on the sub's bench for Harry last season which was obviously totally out of order and which naturally pi$$ed Harry off no end. Rightly or wrongly Harry chose to go public with that at the time which pretty much spelt the end of Bosingwa's career at Rangers. Further revelations came out in Harry's book and in the end Bosingwa defended his name by exercising his right of reply. It has always been a criticism of Harry that he reveals too much to the press but that's just how he's always been and he's never going to change, but at the end of the day he's been a successful manager for 30 years now, one who's hugely respected throughout the game and who we're lucky to have for a club of our size.

As for Bosingwa's accusations of Harry not being present at most training sessions, Harry is now considering legal action against him for that according to The Telegraph, so you can draw your own conclusion from that. My understanding is that the only time he's not attended training is when he was being treated and recovering from his knee operation.

As for what happened last season my feeling is that he was simply brought in too late. It's public knowledge now that there were serious divisions within the squad, a toxic dressing room with an almost non-existent team-spirit. There simply wasn't the time and resources for him to turn things around because there were way too many bad eggs in the camp who were impossible to get rid of until the summer. He was hailed Harry Houdini at the time but simply put, it was an impossible task. You could just tell by Harry's body language and interviews that he knew we were doomed to go down about three games before it being a mathematical certainty.

[danarnie]

The two key points here is what is a manager and what is a coach?

Arry is a Manager like Fergie...he manages his coaching staff, and team. Has control over what his coaches do with the team

Someone like AVB is head coach, meaning he will do more coaching. With the help of his coaches. Taking a lot of sessions. Age comes into this as well. Wouldn't see running here, there and everywhere. Can't even walk normally on that knee.

Doesn't make either better or worse, it is what their job is defined as.

[MYU]

It makes a bit more sense now, I've always thought the best way is to manage and coach yourself.

[SuperHoopNik]

Bond and Jordan do the training, Harry probably has a lot of input in it as well, but his main job is to 'manage' the players, talk to and motivate them.

[Kevin Mcleod]

Good posts stan.

[madara]

I would pay to see Harry show the players how to control the fotball lol.