Probably best not to say too much about the fall of Avram Grant. The execution was carried out with a swiftness and clarity that can only be interpreted as a sign that the regime is listening. Exercise all possible caution, you who do not wish to share his fate.
He was a manager with the dignity not to play Andriy Shevchenko unless he felt like it, and now he is an ex-manager chillingly at liberty to ignore cell-phone calls from Andriy Shevchenko's agent. I might (walking carefully through the park, not stopping too long at any single bench) privately say that I'll miss him. But further thoughts, if in fact I have them, will have to wait for publication in samizdat form, to be distributed under a cloak of secrecy by friends with illegal jazz collections.
Today the Daily Mirror says that the rumors of ruthlessness and fury were reactionary lies, and that in fact Grant and Abramovich parted on the best of terms—and only after Grant, smiling and expressing his heartfelt support for the existing power structure, turned down Abramovich's offer to double his salary.
I am legitimately terrified at this point.
There are whispers abroad that Mourinho is coming back. Why shouldn't he turn back time, the whisperers ask, now that Abramovich has given him the car from Back to the Future? Personally, I won't know what to think until an 80-word statement on the Chelsea website tells me what to think. But I can say that if I were Mourinho, or Roberto Mancini, or Frank Rijkaard, I would certainly take the job.
Human decency would leave me no choice. A considered examination of the facts would force me to believe that the people's servants at Chelsea have all our best interests at heart.
I have it on excellent authority from a highly reliable source within Stamford Bridge that Mr. Grant does NOT appear in the official team photograph for the 2007-08 season.
Unfortunately, my source, being a bit hard of hearing, was unable to confirm that selected tracks from this fine album http://www.amazon.ca/Russian-F.....B000003WAX were clearly audible at Fulham Broadway on Monday afternoon.
Part of me would hate to subject poor Frankie, who's had enough abuse and stress to last a life time, to even more, but another part of me is very curious to see what the media would make of a studiously uncontroversial nice guy like him, at a club like Chelsea.
What would the nickname be:
1) Hair-related?
2) Suriname-related?
3) A pun on "Rijkaard"?
4) A third-generation derivative of "the Special One"?
By the way, I'm giving myself a vacation from Tuesday Portraits this week. I'm one up from last week, and it's too hot, rainy, and dull here for me to come up with anything good. Too much delivery-truck-door thunder. Not enough interesting news.
"What would the nickname be…?"
I'm not sure tabloid journalists would know what a Suriname is, though I'm sure they have an arsenal of puntastic epithets ready to load, and I'm not clever enough to be able to second-guess that.
Not exactly nicknames, but I reckon we may see the following, patterned after the Sven-Goran Eriksson model:
*If Chelsea are doing well / the reporters like him: Frank
*If Chelsea are doing really well / the hacks love him: Frankie
*If Chelsea draw at Blackburn / the journos are unhappy because he doesn't give good copy: Rijkaard.