At last, just when he thought he could wander quietly off into the sunset, the big club has come calling for Harry Redknapp.

He will wonder in that colourful way of his why they have taken so long. He has been plundering Tottenham’s rejects so successfully for so long that he has almost been managing a Spurs side down on the south coast anyway.

This season, he has been puzzled and bemused by Spurs’ plight, never missing the opportunity to number them as a potential gatecrasher of the big four in the Premiership even as they slid deeper into trouble of their own making. He took particular delight in Portsmouth’s 2-0 victory at Fratton Park earlier this month, a defeat from which Juande Ramos arguably has never recovered.

With his unerring eye for a deal, Redknapp knew better than anyone how poorly Spurs had managed their resources in recent years. Though he turned down a lucrative offer from Newcastle last season, the chance to resurrect Spurs was a temptation too far for a man of Redknapp’s latent ambition.

Times Archive, 1984: Redknapp plots United's downfall

Harry Redknapp had planned the biggest triumph not only of his career, but also in Bournemouth's 85-year history

• Times Archive: Sport

Related Links

• The wrong man from Sevilla

• Redknapp takes charge at Spurs

Even for Spurs, from Ramos to Redknapp, from a fancy foreign coach, as Harry would have it, to a real football man is a big leap. Redknapp, though aware of every draft blowing through the corridors of White Hart Lane, will still be surprised by the shift of thinking in the Tottenham boardroom and will need plenty of reassurance about the extent of his powers.

Harry has never been much of a one for directors of football. He decamped to Southampton in protest at Milan Mandaric’s interference with the management structure at Portsmouth, Southampton went down and Redknapp returned to Fratton Park to mastermind a remarkable escape.

In the main, since starting his managerial career at Bournemouth with a 9-0 defeat at Lincoln City, Redknapp has been associated with a particular sort of club, first at West Ham, then Portsmouth. Both were proper old-fashioned clubs, with beans and chips on the menu and the clack of studs on concrete echoing down the corridors. Rival managers are aware of Redknapp’s tactical brain. He has never been frightened to change a team, usually in pursuit of victory, but Redknapp has always held to an ancient belief that good players, not good tactics, win football matches. Good managers simply find the good players at the right price.

Yet the perception of Redknapp as the arch wheeler-dealer in the transfer market, an image he dislikes, has both restrained and aided his career. At West Ham, he helped to bring through a golden generation of young players — Rio Ferdinand, Michael Carrick, Jermain Defoe — and arguably should have done more than simply keep them in the division. But there can be no arguing with his deftness of touch in bringing Portsmouth out of the wilderness and into Europe via an historic win in the FA Cup.

This was really Harry’s time and he loved every minute of it, building a team through shrewd investment and intimate knowledge of the leagues at home and in Europe, dominating a club without its own training ground and with a dilapidated old stadium for a home through sheer force of his personality.

It did not take long for Portsmouth fans to forgive him his sojourn at the Saints because when he came back to Fratton Park, relegation was a near certainty. Somehow Redknapp fashioned a miracle in leading Portsmouth to survival and another in pushing dear old Pompey into a Uefa Cup tie with AC Milan next month.

Through it all, Redknapp has remained true to his populist nature. He has a rare gift for knowing what the fans really think and articulating it in the plainest terms. Young footballers these days spend too long in front of the PlayStation and the computer and not enough out on the park playing the game as he once did in his beloved East End, he believes.

His last match in charge of Portsmouth was a 3-0 defeat by Braga in the first group match of the Uefa Cup. The post-match press conference was a gem. “Where’s the ref from? Slovenia. Yeah, they must have a lot of big games there. He hadn’t a clue. It was frightening.” Instead of popping along the south coast, Redknapp will now turn his attention to saving a mighty club in distress. Just a week after celebrating 25 years in management, he has finally found his mission impossible.