Their time in charge hadn’t been a great success; the team had underperformed, the club’s wage bill had rocketed and almost everyone involved was miserable. Moore might have been driving a Daimler, but Redknapp had been running on empty, working out of a temporary Portakabin office. He made no secret of not missing the daily commute, but he was short of both a job and money. In the sanitized version of Redknapp’s life story, the transition from Oxford back to Bournemouth was seamless. But it wasn’t quite like that. ‘He later told me just how desperate that time had been for him,’ said Pete Johnson. ‘His money was running out, the phone wasn’t ringing and he was seriously considering forking out his last £17,000 on a taxi and licence.’ It was another Londoner, the former Chelsea player David Webb, then managing Bournemouth, who saved Redknapp from a career driving a cab round Bournemouth – and his passengers an earful – by offering him a coaching job at the club that had slid into the Fourth Division.
