The joke has already been doing the rounds that when Harry Redknapp got off the plane from Stuttgart after watching the Bundesliga club’s Champions League match against Rangers and was told that he was wanted, he asked: “By England?”

As the highest-placed English manager in the Barclays Premier League, Redknapp was riding a growing wave of popular acclaim that, some imagined, could have swept him into Soho Square as the successor to Steve McClaren as England head coach. Some experts who should have known better were seriously calling for him to be considered.

On football grounds alone they had a case - although his “old-school” ideas might have counted against him in competition with the wielders of clipboards, stopwatches and diet sheets. But the FA would have been too wary of just such a development as yesterday’s arrest to have put him on a shortlist.

The organisation that would not extend the contract of Terry Venables beyond Euro ’96 for fear of a forthcoming court case would be reluctant to appoint a man who was damned by rumour and innuendo. He had a chapter devoted to him in Broken Dreams, the book by Tom Bower that won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year prize in 2003 and which suggests that Terence Brown, the former chairman of West Ham United, was concerned that Redknapp was taking bungs from agents.

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The fact that the police are carrying out the investigation raises the issue of whether the football authorities are equipped properly to regulate the game

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Background

• Police arrest Redknapp over dealings

• Whispers will not go away for wheeler-dealer

• Newell left on a road to nowhere

• Mandaric will ''offer full support' to police

Background

• Fans’ chants for Mandaric silenced

• Former bookie who knew value of being the middleman

• Faye gets caught in Redknapp’s net

• Old pals that survived Upton Park fallout

Background

• Police moves highlight FA resources shortfall

• How events unfolded

Then there was the Panorama investigation last season that secretly filmed Redknapp discussing Andy Todd, a Blackburn Rovers defender at the time, with a bogus agent. Redknapp came out of the programme blameless, but there will always be those who imagine that the programme must have had reason to target him.

It might be considered more culpable by some that Redknapp seemed to rate Todd highly as a player, but he can be forgiven the odd piece of misjudgment when weighed against his successes – discoveries such as Yakubu Ayegbeni and reclamation projects such as Paolo Di Canio at West Ham and Paul Merson, Sol Campbell and Kanu at Portsmouth.

He also had the vision to promote young players early, such as Rio Ferdinand, Joe Cole, Michael Carrick and Jermain Defoe at West Ham, and his teams have usually been worth watching. No one who saw West Ham’s match against Leeds United in 1999 will forget the final ten minutes. With their team 5-1 down and reduced to eight men after three red cards, Di Canio and Eyal Berkovic tormented the visiting team’s defence, who could not get the ball from them.

Redknapp will play defensively only with reluctance and said that he preferred the 7-4 victory over Reading to a boring 1-0. He loves talented players such as Kanu and Di Canio and was unconsciously miming Kanu’s tricks while eulogising him to the press after his debut for Portsmouth last year.

Those members of the press have usually hung on Redknapp’s words because they know he is quotable. And it is a measure of their regard that anything he says off the record stays there. So although some will regard yesterday as a day that they saw coming, few will enjoy reporting it.

Even those who sometimes saw Harry when he had “the hump”. “You can go to dinner and he’ll have you in fits,” Peter Storrie said of Redknapp last year. “But also he can be moody. When things aren’t going well he can let things get on top of him at times.”

Redknapp has recently revealed that stress has got to him, with the pressure to deliver results giving him sleepless nights and an addiction to a sleeping potion. Perhaps there were other pressures he chose not to reveal.

Many would even have relished the idea of seeing a Harry Redknapp England team take the field, even if it was a question of Wayne Rooney and Joe Cole taking on Germany by themselves while 5-1 down. Sadly, such a prospect is even less likely today than it was yesterday.

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