Grant dismissal highlights lack of strategy from Chelsea hierarchy

MOST football pundits and sports journalists have agreed today that yesterday’s sacking of Chelsea manager Avram Grant was inevitable.

While all the talk in the Sunday papers and the electronic press of sympathy for Grant in what was (to quote Phil McNulty of the BBC) “a sign of the cut-throat nature of the modern game” and how it was so obvious that Grant would be making way for a more prestigious manager able to fill Jose Mourinho’s shoes, what should really be highlighted is the ineptitude of Chelsea’s boardroom not specifically due to the sacking of Grant but from a more general accumulation of erratic behaviour that demonstrate a club seriously lacking any long-term strategy for the future.

Being a massive lifelong Chelsea fan I have to say that the way the people high up in the hierarchy at Chelsea have conducted themselves this year has been a great worry for me this year.

However, don’t get me wrong, I do not think that yesterday’s sacking of Grant was a bad decision when considering the future of Chelsea, I feel that Grant never had the ability to take Mourinho’s team to the next level, and not because of his grim look and dour personality – even though these definitely didn’t count towards. Grant was taking over a team very strongly aligned to Mourinho, many of them regarding the sacking of the self-proclaimed ‘Special One’ as a betrayal to the team and their collective effort of the last 3 years. In addition to this, Grant never showed that he had the winning mentality that was the main thing that allowed Jose to break the unbridled success enjoyed by Arsenal and Manchester United. I understand that this may seem like a paradoxical statement coming just a few days after Chelsea lost the Champions League final to the width of a goalpost, an accomplishment that no other manager of the club has ever achieved.

However, Grant never had the winning touch for the big games, very similar to Mourinho’s predecessor Claudio Ranieri. It is no coincidence that Chelsea’s Wembley defeat to Tottenham in the Carling Cup was their first final defeat since Ranieri, Mourinho’s recent undefeated record to Arsenal vanishing in Grant’s first game against the North London club, while the inability to finish off games costing Grant dearly while Jose’s teams always managed to grind out the 1-0 wins that proved so valuable in the back-to-back Championship winning seasons.
(Chelsea conceded 7 goals this season in the last five minutes of a game)

Probably the most important factor for Chelsea’s success in reaching the Champions League had much more to do with the fact of a second leg played at Stamford Bridge instead of Anfield – which however much it pains me to admit – that has played a huge role in the undoing of the Blues in the two previous attempts for Champions League glory and not the effect of either Jose Mourinho or Avram Grant.

So then how on earth can one justify the way Abramovich, Kenyon have reacted to this season? While I could still harp on about mine and most Chelsea fans’ disapproval of Mourinho’s sacking, I am more interested in examining the way they have acted from a more rational and detached perspective.

While most football pundits have claimed since Saturday afternoon that Grant was simply filling a stopgap role as the club were simply waiting for the right man to become available, then how can offering Grant a four year contract be justified? If a manager who was prepared to stay at the helm without the need for a longer term contract –Grant had indicated throughout his tenure that his contract did not concern him in the slightest – then why did the club offer him a long term contract in December that appeared to give the Israeli a vote of confidence for the future only two months into his ultimately short reign as Chelsea boss?

Then this leads to the other point of view, which seems at present to be the only reasonable alternative to why Grant was given the boot, that Grant was sacked due to a slip by captain John Terry that lost the Champions League final. While the phrase that there is a fine line between success and failure may come to mind, if the decision to sack Grant was because of the Champions League final failure, then this was a ridiculous decision.

As I have already said, I never did take to Grant, to the extent that I could not even possibly force myself to applaud him – as many other Chelsea fans did – in the aftermath of the last game of the season at Bolton nor to feel any sympathy for him after the Moscow final.

However, his departure and the events at Chelsea since last September have exposed a great lack of stability at Chelsea and very much a total lack of a long-term strategy in place of a rather blind lust for instant success. While the events of the last five years since Roman Abramovich have raised expectations from the club’s fans and media to an almost ridiculous level, a missed penalty in a Champions League Final should simply not lose you your job.

-NS-