Be Lucky, Avram

In Israel, Avram Grant is known as a “lucky winner”. I believe this is intended as an insult but, if true, sounds like a pretty useful trait. I am yet to be convinced that he possesses many others.

Avram is the current flavour of the month having guided a team to the FA Cup Final (a feat also achieved in the last ten years by John Gregory, Alan Pardew and Dave Jones). Since the prospect of winning the premier league is the luxury of a privileged few, the rest of us have to make do with dreaming of this lesser silverware. Since Avram gave the Pompey fans a day out at Wembley his managerial stock has risen considerably.

In terms of something more tangible, such as managing a team outside of Israel for an entire season, he comes up a bit short. The positive take on his time at Chelsea was that he took them to within a penalty kick of winning the Champions League. I think it might be more accurate to say that Chelsea took him to within a penalty kick of winning the Champions League. Chelsea fans never took to him and inevitably he was sacked after nine months.

It is hard to be too critical of his tenure at the liquidation-dodgers. If you extrapolate his win ratio across the whole season and add back the points deduction, Portsmouth would have stayed up with 41 points. But let’s say that had actually happened. Let’s say he had been in charge all season and Portsmouth had amassed 41 points. Would anyone really have been that impressed? I suspect not.

What seems to impress people is that he managed to do this against the backdrop of Portsmouth’s off-field problems. Such resilience is perhaps laudable but hardly inspiring, especially since his coping mechanism seemed to chiefly involve visiting a certain Hampshire message parlour. The fact that the he is alleged to have visited the brothel (let’s not beat around the bush) in his Portsmouth training gear does make me question his judgement.

Of course the need to find a new manager was necessitated by the worst season it is possible to have without actually being relegated. The 3-1 defeat to Wolves, last season’s nadir, will remain for ever a benchmark in my mind. “Oh well, it’s not as bad as the Wolves game under Zola”, will be my stock response when the chips are down this season. On the subject of the game (since I cannot eradicate it from my memory), how inevitable of Franco to go and give the scoreline a shred of respectability with a last-minute goal. There are great goalscorers, there are scorers of great goals and then there is Guillermo Franco: scorer of meaningless goals.

Gold and Sullivan (I still haven’t thought of a witty abbreviation for the pair. I might just adopt a random double act, such as Pinky and Perky) have done a good job of putting a positive spin on things since Zola’s departure, contrasting nicely with the negative spin they put on things from the moment of the first press conference. Under-promise, then over-deliver. Textbook stuff.

Looking at the club website you could be forgiven for thinking that the only photo taken at a West Ham game last season was that of Scott Parker euphorically celebrating his crucial goal against Wigan. There is a certain irony in Gold and Sullivan milking this photo on the website for all its worth, given that the shot captures Parker en route to jumping on Zola in a show of defiance against the new owners and their lack of support for him.

While the attitude of West Ham fans towards Zola may have been divided, it certainly was not polarised. Those who wanted him out acknowledged that he was a decent man doing his best, while those who supported him did so in the hope that he might come good, not because they were happy with how he was doing.

It is the prerogative of the football fan to pass comment on the decisions of managers and owners without actually having any real insight into the context and complexities of how their decisions are made. At best, we can only speculate. With that in mind, I am going to ignore the idea that Avram possibly was the least worst option and ask why on earth we did not go for or get Mark Hughes. I really hope it was not down to money. Bert and Ernie have already contradicted themselves on numerous occasions. Days after their first press conference in which they berated the previous regime for the reckless spending on players’ wages they announced they were looking to bring in a big-name striker on £100k/week wages. Surely if you are going to spend extravagantly in one area it should be on the manager.

It may be that Hughes did not want the job, but what do Fulham have that we don’t have (aside from a “neutral” stand). If Bodger and Badger simply did not rate him then I would take issue with their judgement, as I think Hughes’s track record is impressive and I guarantee that, at worst, Fulham will have a solid mid-table season. My conspiracy theory is that they all fell out when Hughes took Robbie Savage from Birmingham to Blackburn. I really hope I’m wrong. The idea that we cannot attract a high-calibre manager because our owners pissed them off would really annoy me.

So Avram it is, and I hope that my reservations prove to be unfounded. At the very least I expect us to avoid relegation. Even Glen “Roeder” Rodent had a decent first season. And after that I am hoping to be proved wrong. Be lucky, Avram.