Yet the critics should pause before reaching for the knives, some of which have been only too quick to carve the poor guy’s football carcas apart without really considering just how unrealistic it was to expect him to achieve success last year or this.
Already pilloried for his spell with Chelsea (where he led the club to within an inch of the Champions League trophy), Grant was in a losing position to start with. And then add in the financial problems Portsmouth faced, and he had almost no chance to keep a poor squad with a huge financial deficit in the top flight.
And then at West Ham a similar problem encountered the Israeli. This is a club still recovering (if that’s the right word) from the period in which it was owned by an Icelandic bank, which subsequently was hit by the worst financial crisis since 1929.
Alan Curbishley’s reign coincided with the signings of the likes of Julien Faubert, Lucas Neill and Kieran Dyer; costly errors still affecting the club – yet the loveable cockney is beyond reproach, he is after all affable and personable, and like Harry Redknapp, too nice a guy to come in for any real or meaningful criticism. The management at the time paid to bring in Carlos Tevez, which subsequently cost them not just his high wages, but approximately £21 million in compensation to Sheffield United. And the current board gave Luis Boa Morte a two year contract last summer when his previous deal expired, and then proceeded to pay Wayne Bridge £90,000 a week this season to take him on loan. Did Grant make all of these decisions too?
The Israeli took on a challenge at which few managers could have succeeded. The squad is barely worth £30 million, and they were taking on rivals such as Wolves and Birmingham who had spent twice that building their teams. Lazy journalists claim the squad should have been too good to go down – have they looked at some of the players? Boa Morte looks as if he is constantly fighting with the ball, rather than controlling it. Grant has been forced to rely on Freddie Sears at points, a player who failed at Scunthorpe last year. This is not a Premiership squad. Save for a select few – Parker, Hitzlsperger, Green and Tomkins – who have West Ham got who is seriously Premier League standard? 4 players do not make a team.
Last season West Ham survived in 17th place with 35 points in a league containing Hull and Burnley. Newcastle, West Brom and Blackpool improved the league’s overall quality, yet still West Ham will beat that points tally with a win at home to Sunderland this weekend. Wigan and Wolves had fewer points at the end of last season than they do with a game remaining this time, and they both survived comfortably in the end in 2010. Gianfranco Zola, last season’s manager, wasn’t blamed then for the problems, and rightly not. Similarly, Grant is hardly to blame this time. Neither have been able to motivate or instil tactical discipline into a poor squad, and it has been a remarkable achievement to even compete in such a strong league against opponents packed with considerably more quality.
But that’s the story of Grant’s time in England. At Chelsea, he supposedly did nothing, the players took them to the brink of the Champions League and to within a point of the title, yet the same players then couldn’t be bothered to repeat their antics the next year under Luiz Felipe Scolari, seemingly. At Portsmouth, luck was the cause of their run to the FA Cup final, naturally, the league campaign proving Grant’s ineptitude. And at West Ham it has only been Scott Parker motivating the side, conveniently ignoring the statistic that had West Ham’s games finished at half time, they’d have come 15th. If Parker was that good a motivator, how could the team have played worse after half time than before overall? Grant is said to be passive, which is interesting. A general in the Israeli army in his earlier life, a position impossible to reach with such a persona.
A pundit in the Guardian opined that West Ham should do better with five recent England squad players on the books. Such selective statistical cherry picking is naïve and shows the weakness of the argument; who are these five? Parker and Green make two. Carlton Cole and Matthew Upson, whose form has been so poor as to demand West Ham bring in replacements, are another two. As for the fifth, Wayne Bridge has been a walking calamity for some time. These are not quality players, and being selected for England doesn’t detract from their limitations.
Another journalist pilloried Grant for telling one of his midfielders to work out for himself whether to press Essien and Lampard in a game against Chelsea. Apparently, the players are incapable of thinking for themselves. The greatest teams the world has seen – Ajax, Barcelona – their players don’t adhere to rigid tactical instructions, they are taught from a young age to work things out for themselves, to adjust to the ever changing tactical dilemmas football matches throw up. Against a player like Lampard, who can hold the ball so well, it doesn’t make sense to press him high up the pitch, but once he gets near goal with his ability to shoot, that’s when it’s wise to press him. West Ham’s players, if Premiership standard, should be able to work these things out for themselves. If anything, Grant’s error was trusting his players to do that – they were incapable, not him.
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