The unluckiest man in sport?
It was supposed to be a party, a riotous celebration of Chelsea’s coming-of-age as a continental superpower. Instead, it has turned into a wake: the west Londoners have lost to Manchester United on penalties in the teeming Russian rain, the players are tired, angry and pining for home, and Abramovich is struggling to comprehend how a night, which was supposed to represent a triumphant homecoming, has turned so sour.
Then, Abramovich spots him — a hunched, ashen-faced figure who looks as miserable as the oligarch feels. It is Avram Grant, the Chelsea manager and the man who was supposed to make Abramovich’s dream of a silver-soaked season a reality. The pair do their best to exchange pleasantries: the owner thanks the coach for his hard work and offers him commiserations; Grant, drawn and haggard, mumbles his gratitude and quickly makes his excuses.
The next morning, on the plane journey back to Heathrow, Grant is sited next to a group of journalists travelling with the team and asked for his thoughts on the future. He makes a show of insisting he should be given another season to build on his near miss in Moscow, but he knows the game is up. Sure enough, just three days later, he is summoned to Stamford Bridge and sacked. The party is officially over.
Seven months on, Grant might as well have been airbrushed out of Chelsea history entirely. While the name of Jose Mourinho is routinely bandied around west London, usually to provide a frame of reference for the current managerial incumbent Luiz Felipe Scolari, the man who succeeded the Portuguese and, lest we forget, topped his European achievements by leading the club to a Champions League final, is effectively persona non grata. He has been consigned, to continue the communist theme, to Leon Trotsky’s “dustbin of history”.
Nobody chooses to remember Grant or his work at Chelsea during his eight-month reign, and if they happen to recall him, it is with a shudder. The process of belittling his legacy began before Chelsea’s return flight from Moscow even touched down in London, with Peter Kenyon, the chief executive, remarking to those same journalists that the season had been a “disappointment”. Weeks before, chairman Bruce Buck had pointedly refused to confirm at a supporters’ question and answer session whether Grant would be in charge for the 2008-09 season, a remark that rendered him a dead man walking.
That Grant was treated harshly — absurdly so, in fact — by his employers, his squad (the rumours that various senior players had little or no respect for Grant were well-founded), the fans, who notoriously refused to sing his name once, or the media, who poured scorn on his credentials, is beyond doubt.
But whether he deserved such opprobrium is another matter. The facts hardly support the case of those who claim Grant was a dunderhead, out of his depth: he won precisely two-thirds of his 54 matches in charge — the same win percentage as the much-vaunted Special One — and took a title race which had looked all but dead after Chelsea’s poor start to the season, which was very much Mourinho’s responsibility, to the very last afternoon.
Then there was the Champions League final itself. These games are habitually watertight affairs but Chelsea and Manchester United established new standards in equilibrium in Russia, matching each other blow for blow and strike for strike until, with the clock showing 1am local time, it needed a shoot-out to decide the destination of the trophy.
Even then, it needed a stroke of outrageous misfortune to deny Grant his moment of glory, John Terry slipping as he strode up to convert what would have been Chelsea’s winning fifth penalty, and seeing his shot muddy the outside of the post. United’s inevitable triumph was duly confirmed moments later when Edwin van der Sar saved from Nicolas Anelka.
Few managers could claim to have suffered such rotten luck — to have been effectively denied club football’s greatest prize by a loose sod of turf — and yet Grant’s plight was almost entirely ignored in the aftermath.
When Frank Lampard bemoaned “the cruelty of football” and defiantly declared “he has been great all season — I just feel really sorry for him”, he was offering consolation to Terry, not his manager. And when Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, wrote a letter of condolences to Stamford Bridge, it was the name of the England captain adorning the envelope, not Grant — the man who stood to lose most.
This shabby treatment has never been adequately accounted for, especially as other Premier League managers who suffered harshly at the hands of an overbearing foreign owners — Sven Goran Eriksson at Thaksin Shinawatra’s Manchester City, for example — were granted considerable sympathy.
Indeed, in Eriksson’s case, the protests were almost hysterical: placards were waved at home games and banners erected outside the club shop at Eastlands; newspapers mentioned Eriksson’s plight in their leading articles and radio phone-ins were swamped with calls demanding his reinstatement as manager. SOS — Save Our Sven — became the distress call of a city in mourning.
THE contrast is striking. Various dark theories were suggested for Grant’s peculiarly vicious treatment — including whispers of anti-Semitism, all vigorously denied of course — but perhaps there was a more straightforward explanation.
It is not enough for the modern manager to simply select and organise his team to win football matches. Our need, in the 24-hour rolling news age, to turn sport into a narrative, demands they also have a compelling personality or, at the very least, some behavioural hook on which we can hang our prejudices.
Alex Ferguson has his infamous temper, Arsene Wenger his professorial intellect and Mourinho his rampant ego. Even Eriksson — whose press conferences are as bland as they come — was able to offer up the kind of ‘active’ social life which would put Hollywood A-listers to shame. His love of high living provided ample fodder for the tabloids so, when he faced his hour of need, there was never likely to be a shortage of volunteers to man the barricades.
Grant, in contrast, was a PR man’s nightmare. His English was passable, but hardly polished, his puffy features were manna from heaven for newspaper scribes who pad out their columns with look-a-likes: Toad of Toad Hall and Baron Von Greenback were two of the crueller comparisons.
Having spent so much of his career coaching in Israel or in shadowy executive positions, Grant was an unknown quantity to press and punter alike when he was appointed in September 2007. But, fatally, he made little effort to introduce himself to the world at large: questions about his life outside Stamford Bridge were routinely batted away and even those concerning football drew little more than stock, one-sentence replies.
And then, on the rare occasions he did garner some positive publicity — such as his emotional trip to the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he delivered a moving speech based on his own family’s sufferings at the hands of the Nazis — fate intervened once again. Days later, Grant’s side were beaten by Tottenham Hotspur in the Carling Cup final and all the old critics resurfaced to spout their bile from the sidelines. There were to be no second chances.
As it is, Grant is the manager Chelsea never had, the man reduced to making public appeals for work on Israeli television and whose history now serves as little more than a spook story for young managers who expect their careers to be lifted from the pages of a fairytale.
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