Embattled Grant could yet have the last laugh

ONE of the Anfield’s favourite chants was conspicuous by its absence on Tuesday night, although its airing would surely never have been more appropriate.

“John Arne Riise, ooh, ah,” they like to sing, “I wanna know how you scored that goal.”

Over the years, the Norwegian has hit a few 30 yard screamers into the top corner — and a good many more into Row Z — but nothing he has ever done in terms of stunning the Kop could come close to matching the impact of his 94th minute intervention on Tuesday night.

From a position where Liverpool would have been mildly annoyed at not having already put the tie out of sight and Chelsea would have been feeling considerable relief at having limited the damage, all was changed in an instant, as Riise inexplicably headed a fairly routine low cross into the roof of his own net.

Of course, there is a time and a place for irony, and the 94th minute — and counting, says Rafa — of a Champions’ League semi-final meets neither criteria. So, instead of the anthem reserved for a Riise special, cue a stunned, disbelieving silence and heads in hands all over the steep hill of the Kop while, at the other end of the ground, the travelling Chelsea support reacted like they’d suddenly discovered a winning lottery ticket they thought they’d thrown in the bin.

All change down in the technical area too, where Avram Grant allowed himself a rare moment of exultation before composing his face again into that now familiar expression of existential angst.

Has any football manager in the history of the game ever looked more uncomfortable with the trappings of success? And who can blame him? So peculiar is Grant’s position at Stamford Bridge, that the words “beleaguered” and “embattled” — terms usually reserved for a gaffer battling the drop —continue to assail a man whose team, lest we forget, is still in with a shout of completing a Premier League and European double.

Grant’s situation is so bizarre that even someone like Brian Little, whose Wrexham side dropped out of the Football League on the same night, might well consider his counterpart’s position unenviable.

“Things could be worse,” Little might be forgiven for musing, as he contemplates life back at Blue Square Premier league, “we could have Roman Abramovich bankrolling the club.”

And there’s the rub. Though Grant is an experienced and capable football man — as Brian Kerr and Raymond Domenach would be quick to acknowledge — the former manager of Israel has swapped the small business of managing a country for the much bigger business of trying to make a billionaire’s dreams come true. And the price of success could turn out to be just as severe as the price of failure. With Abramovich apparently of the view that his coach should operate as an extension of his own will, winning the Champions’ League — the big prize which eluded even The Special One — might not prove enough to keep Grant at the helm. Sure, he wasn’t forced to take the job at the point of a gun but, given the weight of expectation and interference from on high, only the most hard-hearted would not feel some sympathy for him.

Of course, he doesn’t always help his own cause. His baffling insistence that Chelsea play a more expansive game under his control is actually the closest to fantasy football that he or his players come. He deserves credit for the bright, positive start his team made at Anfield but, when the tide turned against them, he struggled to reverse the trend.

Yes, Salaman Kalou was a wise substitution for the ineffectual Joe Cole, but leaving Nicolas Anelka on the bench until the 86th minute — when Didier Drogba was clearly labouring badly as the lone front man — defied logic. Little wonder that Anelka, like everyone else in the ground, was no more than an astonished onlooker as Riise handed Chelsea and their boss the stroke of good fortune their pedestrian efforts on the night scarcely deserved.

Grant’s lack of personal engagement with his own players — Ballack and Cole scarcely even bothered to look at him as they trudged off — appears to lend support to the widespread theory that he has lost the dressing room if, indeed, he ever won it.

He also still has much to do to gain even the grudging respect of the Chelsea fans who were audibly unimpressed with Tuesday’s showing until Riise’s intervention changed everything. And then there’s the dreaded meeja, always on Grant’s case and deeply miffed that, but for that bizarre and unintentionally hilarious post-Everton press conference, the manager refuses to play the role of song and dance or even blues man. Yet, for all that he is like a defendant who goes on trial every time a game kicks off, Grant now finds himself on the brink of achieving great things, if not of achieving greatness itself.

BUT it could still all change as dramatically as it did in the final minute of stoppage time at Anfield. On the road to Moscow, advantage may be Chelsea’s but, with Liverpool now back in their favoured role of underdog, Avram Grant will know that he’s in for another testing night at the Bridge.

And should Chelsea go into it with the domestic silverware already en route to Old Trafford, it might even turnout to be a last hurrah for the ordinary man charged with being an extra-special one.