On The Premier League:Harry Redknapp might just be the most talked-about manager in Premier League history. Sadly, most of the talking has been done in conspiratorial whispers in darkened corners, accompanied by the sorts of nudges and winks more commonly seen in a Monty Python sketch.
Until last week, the Portsmouth manager could dismiss the apocryphal tales of brown envelopes and motorway service stations with as much airiness as someone from the East End can muster. But no longer: his arrest last Wednesday in connection with a police investigation into corruption in football meant that discussion of his probity, or lack of it, was now taking place on the front pages and television news channels. Suddenly, there are no hiding places.
The first thing to say is that Redknapp, who was questioned on charges of false accounting and conspiracy to defraud, unequivocally denies any wrong-doing. He launched an impassioned defence of his behaviour at a press briefing last Thursday, where he claimed he had been arrested simply because of his high profile. There were allegations of set-ups and stings aimed at torpedoing his bid to become the next England manager: in short, it weren't me, Guv.
Redknapp's problem is that, regardless of the old adage that everyone is innocent until proven guilty, many supporters - whose knowledge of the case probably extends no further than reading a headline screaming "Top Boss Nicked In Bungs Probe" - have already made up their minds. No smoke without fire, after all, and besides didn't he once sign that bunch of dodgy Romanians at West Ham? Where the law of the wagging tongue is concerned, there is little justice.
And yet, as contradictory as it may seem, it is absolutely right that the Football Association dismiss Redknapp's job application out of hand. Innocent or guilty, the ramifications of the 60-year-old's appearance at Chichester police station will reverberate for many months and for the public face of English football to be the subject of such damaging insinuations would simply drag the game's reputation further into the gutter. Not even the duffers currently in residence in Soho Square are imbecilic enough to countenance such a scenario.
The same wasn't true 13 years ago, when Terry Venables was appointed as England's head coach despite having been stripped of his position as Tottenham Hotspur's chief executive by fellow board members due to concerns over his business practices and with police pursuing an investigation - subsequently dropped - into whether he had offered Brian Clough a £50,000 bung to complete a transfer deal.
Now a leading candidate for the Republic of Ireland job, Venables, always an over-rated manager whose reputation bears little relation to his actual achievements, was a palpably unsuitable candidate for a position of such gravitas and the FA should have steered well clear. Instead, they caved to pressure applied by the Londoner's sizeable coterie of admirers in the media and handed him the position, only for it to end in predictably messy fashion less than two years later when Venables' legal commitments proved too great a distraction.
He may never have been banned from holding company directorships, but Redknapp has much in common with Venables. Both are working-class London boys made good, popular with players and supporters alike and widely hailed as among the most talented managers of their generation. They are clever in their dealings with the media and generally receive a good press, regardless of their failings, as proved by Venables slipping away from England's Euro 2008 qualifying debacle relatively unscathed while Steve McClaren was given the lynch mob treatment. But now Redknapp seems fated to share something else with Venables: the gnawing frustration of an unfulfilled career. He is shrewd enough to realise that it is not just his England chances which were incinerated by his apprehension last week, but any hopes he still harboured of securing one of the Premier League's elite positions.
No club wants to be linked, however tenuously, with a criminal investigation and Redknapp will now be written off by many boardrooms as damaged goods: not fair, perhaps, but inevitable given the exposure of the case and the eagerness for clubs to appear whiter than white. A pity. Redknapp might not be to everyone's taste but few home-grown managers can claim to have matched his success in the Premier League era. He has helped West Ham and Portsmouth, featherweights both, to land some impressive punches in a heavyweight division and players love working for him.
But in these highly scrutinised times, that is no longer enough. Rightly or wrongly, Redknapp's inability to prove that the rumours which have shrouded his career were simply that has proved fatal.
