As a rule, I don't have much time for Des Kelly but this article is very good indeed. Apologies to The Mail for lifting it but as they have had a couple of my headlines in the past, I don't feel too guilty! The article is reproduced in full below!
"They gave him a brand new office you know. It had a desk, a chair, some different coloured biros and a fancy laptop gizmo that worked out how far his players had run and how much Kentucky Fried Chicken Benni McCarthy had eaten.
Even then, Avram Grant couldn’t hack it. West Ham handed him all the paper clips his heart desired, yet he was still unable to save the club. Relegation was his fault entirely.
That’s the line chief executive Karren Brady was peddling in her unique take on events this week. Her verdict could essentially be summed up as one long denial. Of everything
Having read her account I could only feel relieved Brady’s attempt to write history is confined to West Ham. If she had been asked to review something more significant, like the assassination of John F Kennedy for instance, she may have blamed JFK for putting his head in the way of the bullet.
Stung by accusations that the Hammers were ‘the worst-run club’, Brady declared everyone in a position of authority at the Boleyn Ground should be exonerated from blame, except the hapless Grant.
She claimed: ‘Avram’s personal needs were met: a driver, a new office and an upgraded, expensive analysis system. He was given every chance, but was sadly unable to deliver.’
Let us leave aside the rather unsettling reference to Grant’s ‘personal needs’, since past reports suggest they might involve a good rub-down at a massage parlour and that is not an image to dwell upon unless you intend to keep the lights on for the rest of your life.
Instead, we will concentrate on the merits of the blame-shifting exercise currently underway. For although managers are often cast as the patsy, sometimes it is the people that put them there who should be called to account.
Without straying too far into territory more familiar to David Gold and David Sullivan, the Hammers board is currently in more denial than a teenage boy caught by their mother with a top-shelf magazine.
Seriously, who cares whether Brady and Co gave Grant an office? The fundamental problem was they gave him a job!
Three supposedly streetwise business operators handed the club they had poured their money into over to a gloomy Gollum of a boss who was always likely to guide them down the plughole. I am not speaking with the benefit of hindsight here. At the start of the season I predicted West Ham would be relegated.
In August, when most were sure they had a squad more than capable of staying up, I warned: ‘West Ham will suffer the consequences of appointing a manager who bows to the bungling interference of the owners.’
And so it came to pass. This is a club hierarchy that loves to say who should and shouldn’t be bought, allowing their favourite agent to pull the strings, only to squeal the Press when the whole enterprise goes boobs up.
We hear tales of one boardroom figure entering the dressing room to tell players how to defeat Stoke and there are reports of how a busy agent boasts he has effectively replaced the sacked chief scout.
West Ham’s triumvirate handed Grant the manager’s job because he was malleable. He didn’t mind agents going direct to members of the board, he kept quiet when know-it-alls stuck an oar in on tactics.
‘We don’t hide our success as businessmen, or that we came from humble beginnings,’ said Brady, with a distinct lack of anything that could be described as humble. But they seem to have been doing a good job of hiding that success as businessmen of late.
Brady took particular exception to descriptions of the Hammers’ £275-a-head, end-of-season bash. She insisted it was ‘certainly not a party’ at all, but a ‘Gala Evening’, which sounded very highfalutin, la-de-dah Gunner Graham. So I looked up the definition of the word gala. It said: ‘A festive occasion, especially a lavish social event or celebration. Characterised by sumptuous social pleasure, as in “the gala life of the very rich”.’ So I think we can say it was a party then, albeit an ill-timed and miserable one.
Brady was not the only boardroom figure talking, however. Gold was interviewed as soon as Sky could dispatch a camera to his house and claimed he always found everything was ‘very professional’ at the training ground. This contrasted somewhat with the view of Lee Dixon, a fine player and a pundit who knows what he’s talking about. When he visited training he used a different word. ‘Shambles’.
There may have been more of the customary stuff from Gold about those ‘humble beginnings’, but I confess I wasn’t listening because I was too busy wondering why his helicopter wasn’t in the back of the shot like it usually is.
Sullivan, the last of the three amigos, offered his alibis to another tabloid and, to be fair, he did say Grant’s appointment was ‘a bad selection by the board’. But then he added: ‘I confidently predict that this time next year, we’ll all be millionaires!’ Apologies, what he actually said was: ‘I confidently predict that this time next year, we’ll be back in the Premier League,’ but for some reason I couldn’t get Del Boy’s version out of my head.
There is little evidence to suggest West Ham’s hope of making an immediate return to the top flight is any more likely to succeed than one of the Trotters’ money-making schemes."
