Abramovich and the Deathly Hallows, part 1

TO lose one of the world’s great managers may be regarded as a misfortune.

To lose two looks like carelessness.

But if the divine Oscar Wilde had been around today, rather than reincarnated in a lesser form as Twitter junkie Stephen Fry, what would he make of a trio of mishaps?

In the past six years, Chelsea FC, under the enlightened guidance of Roman Abramovich, have managed to part company with José Mourinho, failed to persuade Guüs Hiddink to extend his stay despite a triumphant rescue operation, and now look odds-on to separate from the phlegmatic and highly popular Carlo Ancelotti — a man who lost his beloved father only a few weeks ago — at the end of the season, or even before.

That will be three men who between them as managers have won five Champions Leagues, 13 domestic titles in England, Italy, Holland and Portugal and a host of cup and league cup competitions which space and the risk of reader fatigue prevents me from mentioning. And, in the case of Ancelotti, picked up a winner’s medal in Europe’s greatest club competition as a player twice. So, not much on the positive side of the balance sheet there.

I had hoped to devote this week’s column to reminding enthusiastic Irish readers that the Ashes series starts tonight in Brisbane, at the delightfully-named Gabba; to speculate on the etymology of the term “sticky dog” — by several miles my favourite sporting expression; to offer some coaching in the correct way to shout “nice one Swanny” at the TV while taking the ring pull from a can of lager and to explain why Lily Allen isn’t the only one who thinks Stuart Broad is the key person in the series.

All consigned to the recycle bin because of a single arch of the Ancelotti eyebrow.

In my life, only two people other than Carlo have been able to use their eyebrows to such dramatic effect. One was Roger Moore in the early 60s version of The Saint. The other was my senior school English teacher, a cool, sardonic, articulate, hugely-intelligent, Cambridge-educated, could-have-been-a-dominatrix, fortysomething influence on an impressionable and shy 17-year-old.

That her name was Mrs Fox (if the leading British rapper Tinie Tempah invented that for a rhyme, people would collapse laughing) only added to the frisson.

But it was that Ancelotti’s facial tic which drove me off message this week, and to speculate why it was that an immensely rich Russian oligarch should go to so much trouble to humiliate a transparently decent man who seems to have brought reasonable success, and even popularity, to a club which barely deserves it in recent times.

So far, so lèse majesté.

People living in Ireland, and even those who regularly visit London from Kerry, Cork, Dublin, Waterford and Belfast, may have only a grasp of the importance, and influence, of Russians in England’s capital city and the degrees of sensitivity they possess.

It’s moved a long way since Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov — that’s Lenin to you and me — would arrive to debate with workers at the Seven Sisters Church in Holloway, a quick jog from the modern Arsenal ground, and rejoice because they were “bursting with socialism”; to meet with Trotsky for the first time at the British Museum; to visit the Old Vic to watch a performance of Hamlet.

Now, more than 300,000 of the former USSR’s wealthiest ex-pats are clustered, not across the metropolis, but in the platinum postcodes of SW1, SW3, W1 and W8.

This is why there are four Russian language newspapers, glossy magazines, a large number of clubs and restaurants, and private airfields devoted to servicing the needs of what has become known as “Moscow-on-Thames.”

A long tail of billionaires and millionaires in their own right, associates, camp followers and acolytes have been attracted to that febrile and acquisitive atmosphere. If you take the case of Abramovich and Chelsea, who since 2004 have been the most visible flourish of the new Russian wealth in the West, then the list is substantial indeed: Eugene Shvidler, German Tkachenko, Pini Zahavi, Piet de Visser, Eugene Tenenbaum, Bobby Campbell, Bruce Buck, Frank Arnesen, Ron Gourlay... and the latest recruit Michael Emenalo who has risen almost without trace to sit alongside one of the best managers in the world.

Hidden among that retinue are the people responsible for all the fun and games at Stamford Bridge. At first pass they might resemble the courtiers of the Duke of Mantua in Verdi’s great opera Rigoletto, some, or all, overeager to please the most powerful man in town. But a closer analogy might be the saga of Harry Potter. Surrounded by Death Eaters, poor Carlo is trying to work out which of them form the inner circle of Dark Wizards who are out to get him. JK Rowling’s masterwork (plot spoiler alert) has a happy ending. But Ancelotti looks more than likely to go the way of Dobby, the house-elf.

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