Tuesday, January 18
We love you Avram we do?
Well that's been handled really well by the club. The crazy shenanigans of the last few weeks end with the news that the thoroughly undermined Avram Grant is now staying. The Gullivan Brothers and Brady have achieved the impossible — they've got the Irons' fans right behind Grant.
No one likes to see a man treated in this way and now we all feel sorry for AG. And he's finally shut-up those Gooners singing "Sacked in the morning!"
While the Daily Mirror now claims — although the club denies this and is threatening legal action — that Brady texted "various internationals" in Grant’s squad.
The Mirror writes: "One dressing-room source revealed: 'When the texts came in, asking some of us what we thought of Avram and whether we felt he should go, none of us could believe what was happening.
'As far as I know, no one replied to the texts, which seemed to be asking us to go to the owners and ask for a change of manager. But the players who received them showed the texts to the coaching staff and pretty soon everybody knew what had gone on. It simply wasn’t right'."
The relationship between Grant and Brady appears to have completely broken down. If we're stuck with Avram and the text pest stories are true then surely the owners have to act and find a new MD? If they're not then who is the leaker? Politics at WHU is now more complicated than the plot of Orson Welles' The Third Man.
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6 comments:
If, as I suspect, they're not true, the club need to find the source of the continual rumours undermining the management and hang theme out to dry
Here's what may have happened. Members of the board want to make Grant's position untenable, and to get him out without paying compensation - as they tried to do with Zola. So they embark on a series of leaks, culminating with the information that Grant will be sacked after the Arsenal game, and that O'Neill will take over. But Grant is too canny to say anything that might be construed as in breach of contract. And O'Neill looks at the handling of the situation, and decides that this is a club to avoid. So Grant stays.
Nicholas Clee is absolutely right in his analysis. Grant appears to have outmanoeuvred the Board, getting his tactics spot on. If only that were the case on the pitch as well.
Nice analysis Nick. Grant has proved himself a master of office politics and Karren Brady is left embarrassed by the text pest story.
Guess you don't get to work with Abramovich at Chelsea and numerous iffy owners of Portsmouth without knowing how to cover your back.
Interesting contrast at Villa, where Lerner has backed an under pressure manager by backing a huge bid for Darren Bent.
DC comments via email:
"BTW, this is THE most disastrous incompetence and general
fuckwittedness EVER to strike us, isn't it? Sullivan, Gold and Brady
-- they're such stupid, stupid, STUPID people.
Why stick with Avram when he's guaranteed to take us down? Letting
MO'N slip through our hands is so bad, I can't find words to describe
my feelings."
The most disastrous incompetence ever, DC? At most clubs it would be, but we set the bar pretty bigh...Tevezgate, Mannygate, the way we got rid of Billy Bonds as manager, appointing Macari, the ill-fated bond scheme, signing Titi Camara, Terry Brown, the broke Icelandic billionaires...
Still, at least West Ham are committed to catching the mystery leaker and driving him or her out of the club. It may be difficult, but at least we have a vice-chairman who has a column in the best selling national newspaper, took its editor to the Arsenal game, and is never off our television screens - if she can't fund someone at West Ham with good media links, no one can....
Atn
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