Always Managing: My Autobiography Read Online Free PDF

wrong. I wish I knew for certain. Nobody at the Football Association has ever explained why I was overlooked and not even asked for an interview. I have heard all the stories about my fractured relationship with Sir Trevor Brooking, but I cannot bring myself to believe that he would have turned the whole of the FA board against me, even if we have never been best friends.
    Sometimes, one face fits and another doesn’t. Simple as that. Roy Hodgson, who got the job, was always going to be more the FA’s cup of tea than I was. I think with the FA there are certain managers who are considered a little rough around the edges. Indeed, if you look at the people from football that get on at theFA, men like Sir Trevor or Gareth Southgate, they do all seem a certain type. Don’t get me wrong, Gareth’s a good lad, a great boy, and I like him a lot. But if you think about that generation of players from the 1990s, why him and not another aspiring manager who might be a little less polished? It doesn’t matter who you are on the football field, but the FA offices seem to be the one area of the game where snobbery exists. No disrespect to Roy, but I think we can all see that he is more of an FA man, and that the chairman at the time, David Bernstein, would seem more comfortable in his company. Roy came up through the FA’s system and has always been close to the organisers of the game, UEFA and FIFA. He is on their coaching panels at major tournaments. He is just the type that fits the bill.
    Roy was one of a generation of players who progressed as a disciple of the coaching principles of Charles Hughes at the FA. There was a bunch of them: Roy, Bob Houghton and Brian Eastick. They came out of non-league football but from an early age were very interested in coaching. They never quite made it as players, but they thought about the game and were always on the FA courses, and once they had got their qualifications these guys went to work all over the world. Bob Houghton has managed everywhere, from Sweden to China, but I always thought of him firstly as an FA man. For that reason, I don’t see it is a great coincidence that Roy is now the manager of England, and Brian Eastick takes England’s under-20 team. It is as if they were groomed for the job: they were around the FA’s senior people from such a young age; they would know exactly how the FA would want an England manager to act.
    I’m not knocking Roy. He’s got great experience, and he’s been around and managed some of the greatest clubs in the world,including Inter Milan and Liverpool. I think he ticks the FA’s boxes as England manager just fine. And maybe I don’t – well, not in the FA’s eyes anyway. Also, at least one of the stories that circulated about the obstacles to my appointment was true: it would have cost the FA an absolute fortune to prise me away from Tottenham.
    I have said before that I am useless with contracts but, even by my standards, the one I signed on leaving Portsmouth in 2008 was a cracker. I didn’t so much have golden handcuffs at Tottenham, as golden handcuffs, a golden strait-jacket and golden leg irons, locked in a golden box. I don’t know about Harry Redknapp, but Harry Houdini would have struggled to get out of White Hart Lane on the terms of my deal.
    Don’t get me wrong, I was well paid at Tottenham and very thankful for that. But the League Managers Association took one look at my contract and said it was probably the worst one that had ever been signed with regard to release clauses. If the FA put out any feelers at all they would have quickly discovered that it could have cost more than twice Capello’s annual salary to compensate Tottenham for my services. I’m sure the FA would deny they were interested anyway, they always like to say they got their number-one choice, but maybe what helped make their minds up was the thought of writing a cheque in the region of £16 million to Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy. He is known