Telegraph
Tony Fernandes in Feb talking to Telegraph re Redknapp Departure, Ramsey Hire and Future
Tony Fernandes: I had to draw a line after Harry Redknapp quit QPR
Exclusive: Rangers chairman tells Jason Burt the truth behind Redknapp's departure, why Charlie Austin is likely to leave this summer - and how Chris Ramsey could stay even if the club are relegated
Tony Fernandes: Chris Ramsey could stay as QPR manager - even if we are relegated
Main man: Tony Fernandes has spoken for the first time about Harry Redknapp's sacking Photo: ACTION IMAGES
Jason Burt
By Jason Burt
9:30PM GMT 21 Feb 2015
Comments19 Comments
Tony Fernandes “drew a line” once Harry Redknapp called him to say he was quitting as Queens’ Park Rangers manager.
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It was time, the QPR chairman says in an interview with Telegraph Sport, to “do things properly”, to stop “chasing our tail” and to “put our foot down”.
Fernandes is desperately hoping that come the end of the Premier League season QPR are above another line – the relegation zone – but if the worst happens “we will deal with it”, he says, “because it’s not the end of the world”.
That includes the threat of a fine of up to £40million from the Football League for infringing their rules on Financial Fair Play. Fernandes will fight any punishment, arguing the rules have been changed, in the hope that “sense” prevails.
And neither will relegation necessarily mean the end of Chris Ramsey’s hopes of succeeding Redknapp on a permanent basis as head coach. Far from it, in fact. The Malaysian entrepreneur is minded to keep the 52-year-old come what may.
But, first, how did he deal with that phone call from Redknapp – at 6.30am the day after the January transfer window closed – when the 67-year-old told him he could not carry on.
“A lot of people said ‘Harry wasn’t getting any players so he decided to call it a day’,” Fernandes says. “But that was not the case at all. They also said we’d lined up Tim Sherwood and that wasn’t true either.
"He (Redknapp) called me up and said ‘Tony, my legs don’t feel good. I really don’t think I can give it the best shot. It’s going to be a dog-fight and I really think someone else can give it a better shot’. I think it’s admirable from his side. So I just felt it right that I didn’t try and persuade him.”
But why not? “What’s the point in persuading someone? It’s tough enough anyway. If you have a bit of self-doubt then I can’t do it,” Fernandes says. “So I put the phone down and thought ‘Mmm, what am I going to do?’ I was brushing my teeth – so I finished doing that! And I thought ‘well I always wanted Chris Ramsey as a coach and I’ve always wanted a coaching leader’.
“I’ve always felt we could get more out of our players and it was something I always had a discussion with Harry about. His view was ‘good players are good players’ but I think you can always make players better and the game has moved on so much.”
Out: Harry Redknapp quit due to concerns over his health
But Ramsey was initially only put in caretaker charge with Fernandes tweeting before the away game against Sunderland that he had found his “dream manager” – and it clearly was not the former Tottenham Hotspur coach. And neither was it Michael Laudrup.
“My first thing was ‘ok, Chris for the next few games but do we keep Chris for the long-term or do we look for someone else?. Obviously everyone was applying for the job, I started looking around – and the speculation was irritating me, to be honest.
“But I actually did find someone who I really liked. Then I tweeted ‘I’ve found the dream manager’ because I wanted the fans to realise and wanted the players to stop speculating as well and focus on the game at Sunderland. So it was ‘okay, we’ve found someone, let’s go and play’.
“When I did that I then saw some of the reaction and I spoke to Chris Ramsey – and it was a phenomenal phone call. He’d finished a training session, he’d gone to the EDS (the development squad), then he had trained the under-14s and then he was in the office finishing off some paper work. And I thought ‘what’s my dream manager?
"My dream manager is someone who has passion, who loves the game first for what it is as opposed to money, who wants to coach, wants to develop young players and is positive’.
“We’ve had some serious injuries and Chris Ramsey is like ‘we’ll get by Tony. There’s enough in the squad. I will find people and we’ll get organised’. As opposed to other people who might say ‘we’re finished, how are going to cope?’
Chosen one: Chris Ramsey impressed Tony Fernandes with his energy (REX)
“I love positive energy, I’ve lived off it all my life. And suddenly I thought ‘this dream manager, yes I’ve found someone but I don’t really know him that well. He looks to fit the bill but here’s someone I know who actually ticks all the boxes’. Yes, he (Ramsey) is not experienced but Harry was the most experienced manager in the Premier League. So I thought ‘let’s give him (Ramsey) the gig until the end of the season’. Just like Raheem Sterling. He gets the gig at Liverpool and the next moment he’s playing for England at the World Cup.”
But what happens at the end of the season?
“It’s for him to lose,” Fernandes says of Ramsey. “If we get relegated he can still do great. It’s not ‘if he stays up then he gets it’ although, of course, he would because I’d be crazy to let him go. But if we go down it doesn’t mean he won’t get the job.
“We have to assess what he does on 15 matches. Have we improved? Is he going to continue to improve? Is he going to commit to a playing philosophy? And that’s how we will make our decision.
“The names that I was looking at where not ‘names’. There were guys in Ireland, England, different parts of the world but they were all English. I wanted someone who understood English football. I was not keen on a foreign manager and there is lots of talent out there in the same way as we are looking at players in League One, League Two. We signed Ryan Manning (18-year-old from Galway) and it was a show of our cards as to what we want to do. There are enough of them out there – look at Charlie Austin, Dwight Gayle at (Crystal) Palace now.”
Target: Charlie Austin's goals have made him coveted by other clubs
Mentioning Austin raises another fear of QPR fans – that the striker, who has just one more season after this on his contract, might leave. It could happen, Fernandes admits. “Charlie is great guy. We are in discussions (on a new deal),” he says.
“But we are a new QPR and we are going to do what’s right for the club. I’m very optimistic that Charlie will be with us for a very long time. If you ask him I think he enjoys being at QPR tremendously but it’s a short career, players have to look after themselves and we have to respect that. It’s a big decision for him.”
If QPR are relegated then they face being penalised heavily under Football League FFP for the losses they incurred when they went down last time. But Fernandes will fight it.
“I’m a big believer in the British system of fairness,” he says. “Look, the rules have changed. Why should we be penalised on old rules when they are now new rules which are clearly, much fairer? On our side we have made every attempt to do things properly.
“As a Premier League club if we go down we can’t just sack players and neither can we give up half way through the season and say ‘I’m going to get relegated so I will cut every cost’.
“On the other side – if you look at our transfer windows, the last transfer window we bought nobody and every player we bought last summer has a re-sale value. We’ve learnt the ropes much better. So the effort has been put in there. I’m a believer – and here’s the irony – that football clubs should make money and I voted in favour of that (FFP).
"I was the deciding vote when we went down that season, much to the distain of some richer clubs. So I think sense will prevail and the effort we are putting in to run a sensible football club will prevail.”
Fan power: Tony Fernandes calls himself 'an accountant' - but is also a QPR supporter
But can QPR cope? “Look, I’m an accountant,” Fernandes adds. “We’ll have to deal with it if we have to deal with it. But I’m comfortable. People predicted the end of us when we got relegated last time if you remember correctly and we came straight back up.
“We never wanted to be a buying club. We always wanted to develop players but we’ve always been chasing our tail, so to speak – promotion or fighting relegation. And we’ve just said ‘look, let’s draw the line here and do things properly’.
“If we go down it’s not the end of the world because we are still going to be on a disciplined course and doing the right thing. And hopefully becoming a Southampton or a Swansea or one of those clubs who have done the right thing and invested in the right ways.
“We’ve now put our foot down and said ‘we want to develop this club and we want to do it our way’. That’s why we went ahead with Les (Ferdinand, director of football) and Chris. The highlight recently for me was (22-year-old academy product) Michael Doughty coming on (as a substitute against Sunderland).
“Of course we were winning 2-0 but it wasn’t a vanity move as it was a critical game for us to win and yet Chris brought on an EDS player. That made me really happy. It’s a great message - and we should be a club like that.
"The chances of someone moving up from the Chelsea academy to the first-team are slim because of who they are but QPR should be a club where people say ‘I want to go there’. We shouldn’t lose players like (19-year-old) Josh Laurent to Brentford – that was just sacrilege.
Close: Fernandes sees Les Ferdinand as integral to QPR
“We are getting the messaging right. I wanted a football guy to run football and a CEO to run everything else and that’s why Philip (Beard) decided that it wasn’t what he wanted to do so we parted.
“We needed a football man (Ferdinand). Philip Beard was not a football man and we had all our eggs in the basket of a manager. Now we have a football man and a manager who can look at the longer-term of the club.
“We made our decision as to how we wanted to run the club after four years (of ownership). We’d learnt a lot. We made lots of mistakes but despite that we are still in the Premier League and we still have a chance of staying up.
“I feel very content. I feel very at ease because I think we have finally got the recipe and finally heading towards putting an infrastructure in place – I’ve talked about it for so long and the pieces of what we always wanted are now there.”
www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/queens-park-rangers/11426813/Tony-Fernandes-I-had-to-draw-a-line-after-Harry-Redknapp-quit-QPR.html
