In my post on Jan 12th, I commented that being a smallish club who usually managed to come about fourth or fifth in the table, occasionally winning a league or FA Cup and doing passing well in Europe was not a bad thing to be. After the past few days, this might well be the most we can hope for. In a spectacularly inept way, our owner, aided and abetted by the three stooges Kenyon, Buck and Tennebaum, have got rid of one manager and replaced him with someone who's only real plus point (as far as Roman is concerned) is that he doesn't argue with Roman.
I'm sorry to say, but after a pretty good start, Roman is proving to be the problem with Chelsea. He doesn't know enough about football to know that he knows nothing. He wants all the trophies, all the time and he wants them won with attractive football and he wants them now. I can imagine that having stumped up an extraordinary amount of money, he feels he has the right to demand this, but it just underlines that he knows nothing.
Fergie has spent a considerable amount of time and money at Manure trying to get this right and has occasionally achieved it, but not consistently. In 1999, they swept all before them; in subsequent seasons they have done much worse in Europe and have had seasons without any silverware at all. Wenger, whilst having mixed fortunes in Europe, had created the team that gave Manure a run for their money, playing the sort of football that put lie to the "boring boring" tag of the early 90s; post-Viera and now post-Henry, he has to reforge his team anew - the attractive football is there, hopefully the results will follow. So it should be possible to see that you can't just throw money at a team and expect instant and consistent results.
And so to Jose. The most successful manager in Chelsea's history, bar none. With him in charge, the team averaged 2.33 points per game. They haven't been beaten at home for close to 70 games. They managed to win their first league title for 50 years by the biggest points margin ever with the least goals conceded ever. They've got through to the knock-out stages of the Champions League for the past three years and the semi finals for two of them. But this was not enough for Roman; he wanted pretty football, the sort of football that makes people go "blimey, I've not seen football that good since the Ajax team of the early 70s", the sort that would win him the European Cup year in year out.
Its been this clash of realities that have led us to the situation we are in now. He's surrounded himself with yes men, the sort of executive that panders to his desire to go down in the history books as having paid the most money for a player, even if that player is a spent force. Again, back to him knowing nothing; he doesn't realise that by adding £20m to a player's value doesn't make them worth £20m more. But instead of being intelligent about it and admitting he's bought a pup, he believes that it's the manager's fault that the player isn't playing as well as he did for Milan. And the yes men go "you're absolutely right", and nothing is solved. How many managers will go through the door before he accepts he was wrong?
So Jose has gone. And instead of doing the sensible thing and saying "well, we've got a Director of Football who can hold the fort until we get someone in permanently", they make him manager on a permanent basis. Partly, this strikes me as panic - Avram Grant doesn't even have the necessary UEFA coaching qualifications to do the job, let alone any real experience. But on the other hand, Frank Arnesen has both of these things - surely he'd have been better suited to take over for an interim period. If the Director of Football/Head Coach relationship had worked as it does on the continent, Grant as interim coach would have been a fine and seamless step to take; but instead, he was one of the yes men brought in to diminish Jose's authority within the club, so there was no real relationship to talk of. And he's here permanently. Does that mean that Roman wants only managers who will do his bidding, who won't argue, who won't walk out when the owner tries to impose his novice view over their years of hard-won nous?
One of the things about a club like Chelsea that is stuffed with world class players is that they need someone in charge that they can respect. Avram Grant is probably a really nice chap, but he's not going to have the respect of the sort of players like Lampard, Drogba, Makalele et al. Capello, Lippi and Sacchi are all out of work at the moment; any one of them would be better suited to this job than someone who's crowning achievement thus far has been to fail to lead Israel to qualification for the World Cup in 2002. This is why I think Grant has been appointed as an antidote to Jose; someone whose profile isn't higher than the owner's, someone who will listen politely and do as he's told when the owner asks him to play Shevchenko. But does that mean that when Grant goes (as he surely will, by the end of the season at the latest), any replacement manager will be ousted the moment he does not agree with Roman; are we about to embark upon the sort of managerial revolving door that exists in Real Madrid?
Today's game was not as bad as it could have been. We put up a fight, but we were completely lacking in bite in the final third - I don't think Van Der Saar was troubled once during the entire game. Had Manure been any better (and they weren't fantastic), the deficit would have been greater. It has to be said that we weren't helped by the referee at all; Mike Dean was appalling, one of the worst reffing displays I've seen for some time. I'm not saying that had Jose been still with us the result would have been different, but he would almost certainly have been bringing Dean's performance to the forefront as a matter for discussion. Grant has probably been talking a good game to Roman for some time now, but spent most of the game looking isolated and with the worried expression of someone that's just been found out.
Its early days yet; I'd like to see the full team performing for Grant, when Lamps and Drogba are back from injury. Both those players will improve our scoring ability immeasurably. But I can't see our season being anything more than a silverware-free zone where our main players leave, and Roman tries to find a big name manager who will deliver the goods. I hope I'm wrong, I really do. Apart from a suspicion that Grant might well have been a major part of the clique that led to Jose's downfall, I don't want to see him crash and burn; because that would be Chelsea crashing and burning - and that's really unacceptable.
So, can we have a time machine please? Back to a time where we had no money to buy players, where our manager was pleasingly eccentric and we loathed the club owner..... hmm, that last one sounds familiar.
