It's hard to know this morning whether to feel sorry or relieved for Avram Grant. On the one hand he will wake up, look at the five million Euro cheque propped on his bedside table, and remember he doesn't have to go to work with a bunch of overpaid mercenaries and prima donnas. I dare say the majority of us would regard that as a satisfactory outcome for being the second best people in Europe at our jobs. On the other hand, the man who came second in everything will be forever branded a loser, the graceless epithet formerly reserved for those who came last. Silver medallists were traditionally lauded as runners up, in a tacit recognition that not everybody can actually win.

So distorted have football values become that the old maxim "winning is everything" seems a bit lightweight to cope with the prevailing madness. Winning isn't so much everything these days as the only thing. In the black and white world inhabited by people such as Roman Abramovitch, for whom the price of failure as a youth may literally have been death, there are no degrees of success. This is obviously a view shared by Abramovitch's former employee Jose Mourinho. Interviewed in Sunday's Observer newspaper the Special One came up with some special phrases to describe his successor. "In my philosophy it was a very bad one" he said of Chelsea's season. "After two titles per season for the last three years there were zero titles this season, which in my philosophy means a really bad season" he continued, declining as usual to play down his own achievements. "Maybe in the philosophy of a loser this was a great season." There was little doubt which loser he had in mind.


The smart money is on a swift return to Stamford Bridge for Mourinho. He has apparently been in regular contact with not just his former players and coaching staff, but with the boss. Although there was little love lost between the two towards the end of Mourinho's reign, it turns out that Abramovitch treated the Coated One to a £2million Ferrari in the days that followed Chelsea's defeat by Spurs in the Carling Cup final. Presumably this magnificent gesture of reconciliation tells us that, even then, the writing was on the wall for Grant.