Dressing room demands Redknapp stays

Player power will almost certainly ensure Harry Redknapp signs a new contract to manage Portsmouth again next season after he controversially returned to Fratton Park to engineer Barclays Premiership survival.

Chairman Milan Mandaric wants to sit down with Franco-Russian co-owner Alexandre Gaydamak and Redknapp this week to offer a new deal that will replace the one which expires at the end of the season and keep the veteran manager at the helm beyond his 60th birthday next March.

It would give Redknapp the opportunity for a well-earned holiday with his family before plotting Pompey’s progress next term – something he dearly wishes he could have done last summer instead of having to throw a team together with a rash of signings in the January transfer window.

If he stays on at Fratton Park – soon to undergo a massive redevelopment - Redknapp wants to aim for some of the major honours in the game rather than the perennial battle for survival.

And although he now clearly has the basis of a squad good enough for such ambition, many of them would be looking for the exit door as well if he decided that it was time to call it a day and sit back and relax in his luxurious Dorset home.

Skipper Dejan Stefanovic, who found it necessary at the weekend to deny reports that he is set for a summer move to Dutch giants Feyenoord, also revealed that it was he and a group of team-mates who went to Mandaric earlier this season – when the team were struggling under Frenchman Alain Perrin – to beg for Redknapp’s reinstatement.

“We told Milan that Harry was the only man who could keep us in the Premiership and that he had to get him back in,” said Stefanovic after Saturday’s safety-clinching win at Wigan.

“Because of him we have stayed up – simple as that. Perrin’s ideas were different, but they didn’t work. He lost the dressing room within a month.”

Former Marseille and Troyes head coach Perrin was the man eventually brought in seven games from the end of last season after Mandaric and Redknapp fell out five months earlier over the appointment of Velimir Zajec – who has since also quit – as director of football.

Redknapp walked out and soon afterwards joined Pompey’s deadly rivals Southampton but he fought a losing battle there against relegation and when Perrin was sacked at Portsmouth he controversially quit Saints and returned.

Mandaric admitted: “When I brought Harry back it was a bold decision and some people questioned it, but it was made because I don’t think there is a better man to have done what we’ve done.

“I’m still feeling a bit numb (after Wigan) but let me get over that and we will sit down shortly and do some serious planning which will be great for the future of the club.

“I want to work with Harry for as long as long as I am in football. No other manager could have got us out of this. He just doesn’t panic no matter what the pressure. He always keeps his head.”

Redknapp admitted after the 2-1 win at Wigan that he would have given serious consideration to quitting had Pompey been relegated this season. He said: “I took on a massive challenge but I took it because Milan asked me to come back and we’ve done the job.

“I knew when I came back from Southampton I would never win over everybody. But I took Pompey into the Premiership and kept them there twice. I’m proud of what I’ve done and now the club’s future looks bright.

“If the owners want me to sign a new contract they know where I am.”