Harry and Me; 2 Peas in a Pod

I've always had a suspicion that I have more in common with Harry Redknapp than I've ever cared to admit, and that's without the obvious jokes to do with his alleged tax fraud and management of Tottenham Hotspur to compare with my religion of 'choice'.

The mad scramble for Mata's goal

I mean despite the fact I think Harry is an overrated manager or at least he was, not sure if anyone is currently rating him that highly, he clearly loves his football, is passionate about it and tries to play attacking football. According to that font of all knowledge, Wikipedia, we're both 5"11 and whilst both at Wembley for Spurs F.A Cup semi final vs Chelsea neither thought that Juan Mata's goal had crossed over the line. Okay so I've been kind of clutching at straws since the opening 'joke', although my first game in charge of Sporting JLGB did end in a 5-3 loss so we are both clearly happy to give up defensive solidity for goals, but there does seem to genuinely be one thing 'Arry and I have in common, apparently we both love Football Manager.

Now I can't deny my love for the game franchise. Football Manager and, before the split in 2005, Championship Manager have ruined big portions of my life. There was my GCSE's and the arrival of my new laptop the day before the English Literature exam. Whilst I should have been going over the notes in my Anthology and re-reading 'Half Caste' by John Agard I was too busy leading Millwall into the European Champions League using Championship Manager's 03/04 edition. It wasn't really my fault Josh Taylor, a good friend of mine, had challenged me to do better with 'The Lions' than he'd managed plus Freddy Adu was on fire! Then in 2006 my A-levels were interrupted by a mixture of the World Cup in Germany and Football Manager, but who would choose learning about local government over an afternoon of watching a small dot that represented Daniel Sturridge score a hat-trick for Bury against Portsmouth in the opening game of the Premier League season 2011/12?

To be honest with you the current version, Football Manager 2012, is currently open on the very laptop I'm typing this blog post on and the very same Daniel Sturridge, now represented by a 2D humanish shaped shape, is now scoring a brace in the Spanish Super Cup vs Barcelona for Athletico Madrid.

So what's all this got to do with Harry? Does the Sidler have some extraordinary inside information that he can confirm the Spurs boss is a big FM fan?

Well.... No but, back in January, Redknapp did some incredible transfer business that left most of us asking some questions we couldn't answer. At the time I couldn't quite put my finger on it but after reading an exclusive by Matt Law in the Express today I suddenly realised what he'd done. Law's piece in today's paper centred on the signing's that Spurs had made in January in the form of Louis Saha and Ryan Nelsen and the fact they had not added to the teams quality, in fact they'd done the opposite, and this is where the game comes into it. Those who have ever played Sports Interactive's highly addictive games will know that it is almost impossible, no matter how good your side might be, to at least attempt to make signings in every transfer window- a great example of this was when, as Manchester United boss, I sold an out of form Steven Gerrard back to Liverpool and replaced him with an over the hill Emerson essentially just for the sake of it. In January Harry sold Roman Pavlyuchenko (yeah I used Google for the spelling) a perfectly capable but generally unfancied centre forward and replaced him with haplessly out of form, injury prone, Louis Saha. He also sent useful but unfancied central defender Sebastien Bassong out on loan to QPR and bought in massively injury prone Ryan Nelsen from Blackburn into a side who already had central defenders well known for spending mass amounts of time in the physio's room. No one is doubting that Harry needed to invest in his squad, behind the first 11 it was always going to be a side lacking in real quality, but he had to invest for the sake of improving the squad and not invest just for the sake of spending money- ending up with like for like replacements.

Penny for your thoughts?

Harry has also struggled with another 'in game' issue with his tactics. Every now and again on Football Manager one will simply find his tactics not working any more, or perhaps get bored of them, and will end up changing them to regain some sort of positive form but this is clearly foolish. Teams, and players individually, will obviously go through both good and bad form in a season and a change of formation just because things aren't going well for a while are far too reactionary and will not help get players back to form considering they were in form in the original formation early on. Spurs have suffered from having a decent, not great, group of players in very good form early on in the season, that group is now not in form and without being great players this means they will obviously suffer as they are generally better than the sum of all their parts.

Without winning their last four games of the season Harry and Tottenham may miss out on Champions League football, unfortunately for Redknapp there is no option to quit and start from his last saved game... not that I've ever done that!