Harry Redknapp's full English: fat former footballers take one last shot at Germany for ITV
A sublime week of sport on ITV last week, with Bryony Frost and the Willie Mullins Gold Cup followed on Saturday by perhaps the greatest Six Nations match ever. And this week, the ridiculous, as Neil Ruddock splits his enormous shorts in football training.
Harry’s Heroes: The Full English asks the question that was on the nation’s lips, and perhaps on its hips as well: what would happen if you put Harry Redknapp in charge of a collection of much-loved retired footballers and tried to get them to lose a bit of weight by gingerly stepping onto the football pitch for the first time in years?
It’s a heavyweight cast: there’s John Barnes, who has a knee injury and, on the evidence of this two-part programme, a bucket of KFC permanently welded into his hand.
Here’s Matt Le Tissier, captured having an intimate moment with an ice-cream the size of a traffic cone. Paul Merson, who has in his day wrestled with cocaine, gambling, alcohol, and his famously obscure PhD in the philosophy and ethics of ancient Assyria, is unsurprisingly also partial to a pie or three.
The aforementioned Razor Ruddock is the big daddy of the lot: he’s currently tipping the scales at 23 and a half stone, making the 14 stone that was his early playing weight look positively ethereal.
And here’s dear old Mark Chamberlain, who cannot put his socks on. His son Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain sighs: “no getting away from that belly. There is no way he is making it through 90 minutes.”
That 90 minutes, the lads find out, is going to be against a side full of former German internationals. Everyone universally agrees that the Germans will be well-organised, better prepared, not actually eating an all-day breakfast bap during the match and so on. Harry and his 1990s legends have their work cut out.
The plan is to lose weight via all the modern techniques that had yet to be invented during their careers: i.e. not drinking 90 cans of Skol on a Tuesday afternoon, eating pasta rather than lard, stretching for increased mobility, rather than to reach for a betting pencil.
An early assignment against Ridgeway Rovers Youth, a lads’ team that counts David Beckham and Harry Kane among its alumni, does not bode well. It’s men against boys out there, and that is not good news for these men in their 40s and 50s, who look like they could be in for a humbling from some lads who don’t own a razor between them.
Chamberlain and Ruddock can barely make it through five minutes, let alone a whole match. On the touchline, Redknapp looks like eating scorpions in the jungle alongside reality show landfill is a wheezy walk in the park by comparison.
Crystal Palace Ladies, who operate in the second tier of English women’s football, are also a stern test. Le Tissier rolls back the years to split open their defence for Merson in that one, albeit that Merson looked a mile off.
And then onward to the big one. Among the Germans are Thomas Helmer, Steffen Freund and Jörg Heinrich; I won’t spoil the result, but will say that it is an outcome quite fitting for the famous rivalry.
Along the way, the merry band, which also features Chris Waddle, David Seaman and Mark Wright, talk about Italia 90 and Euro 96, life after football, and something that many more of us can personally relate to: the sobering realisation that they have let themselves go in middle age and that refuelling habits which once washed off are now doing lasting damage.
You probably don’t need three hours of this spread across two nights, and it should come with a government health warning for the spectacle of Ruddock in his undercrackers, but all-told an enjoyable, and well-meant, bit of fun.
Harry’s Heroes: The Full English (Mon & Tue, 9.30pm, ITV)
