Whoever first described Lester Piggott’s face as looking like a well-kept grave would have to admit that Avram Grant’s often achieves a mausolean splendour of dolefulness.

Of course, wearing a downtrodden expression might be considered a safe bet for a football club manager, since he is unlikely to have to wait long for his work experiences to justify it. While Grant’s lugubrious appearance is presumably more an accident of physiognomy than a definitive reflection of temperament, there is no doubt the events that embroiled him in the past week could have attached an aura of gloom to cheerier characters. Some of the interpretations of his role in Chelsea’s defeat by Tottenham Hotspur in last Sunday’s Carling Cup final were so vehemently negative as to be almost vindictive and he can never have been more urgently in need of a handsome scoreline in his favour than he was of yesterday’s 4-0 at Upton Park.

As he is made growingly aware of the eagerness to predict a short reign for him at Stamford Bridge, Grant can hardly fail to suspect that the antipathy is related to his personality, which is not short of combative strength (as was demonstrated by his voluble defiance of his critics at a press conference on Friday) but hardly conveys a sense of liveliness, let alone flamboyance. He must know there will be a scarcity of sympathetic treatment from journalists resentful of being deprived of the constant supply of headline-fodder provided by his incorrigibly controversial predecessor, Jose Mourinho. Perhaps more importantly, it was always a certainty that the story vacuum created when the Israeli succeeded the Portuguese would be at least partly filled by a swirl of tales and comments emanating from players and from what are called “sources” or “insid-ers” or, for a bit of variety, “inside sources”.

Such briefings - which are usually marked by an element of special pleading, the putting of a point of view or the advancement of an agenda, and tend to hint at the orchestrating influence of footballers’ agents - are common to all clubs but few can rival the productivity of Chelsea. Grant’s insistence that his is a domain where breaches of harmony are rare and trivial is contradicted incessantly from within. Everybody there seems to have plenty to say, whether anonymously or openly. There is frequently the impression of a jostling mass of egos and a debating chamber of self-serving voices. It is a clamour that Grant isn’t ideally equipped to quell. His modest record in the game denies him spontaneous authority and the kind that comes from his friendship with the club owner may not count for much when his back is turned. The weight of Mourinho’s competitive accomplishments and the sheer force of his presence combined to give him the right to regard himself as the biggest star on the Chelsea payroll, and to behave accordingly - at least for a while.

Grant’s sole visible asset when he was appointed 5½ months ago was Roman Abramovich’s enthusiastic patronage, something the Russian oligarch had ostentatiously withdrawn from Mourinho. Admittedly, there were by then clear signs that among the players, too, commitment to the Special One had dwindled. But the crucial decline discernible in a string of disappointing results that blemished the final weeks of Mourinho’s tenure was in the professional standards of the men on the field. It was, for example, extremely difficult to accept that a lack of managerial inspiration was the cause of the Champions League draw at home against Rosen-borg, who subsequently succumbed 4-0 in Norway to a team sent out by Grant.

Didn’t the explanation of that embarrassing 1-1 scoreline have rather more to do with the extent to which the footballers concerned let themselves down on the night? Similarly, is it reasonable to suggest Tottenham’s superiority at Wembley was due to blunders attributed to Grant? He has been accused of morale-damaging clumsiness in the way he broke the news of team selection to the squad, of wrongheaded tactics and of dereliction of duty in delegating the task of lifting the spirits of tired players before the start of extra-time, and all those criticisms probably have a measure of validity. But the Carling Cup final did not strike me as a match settled by tactics or team talks.

The outcome was shaped by the simple fact that one team performed better (individually and collectively) and brought a far better attitude to the contest than the other. In advance, there had seemed to be a dangerous obviousness in imagining Spurs’ years without a trophy would make them decisively the hungrier competitors but the clichéd forecast became blatant reality. Chelsea just weren’t up to the job and the shortcomings that saw them outplayed and outbattled were too basic to be laid at Grant’s door.

He has yet to prove himself a manager outstanding enough to be worthy of his present position but to argue that he has already been exposed as unworthy is as foolish as it is unfair. There is a fundamental absence of conclusiveness about his catalogue of results so far, which shows 25 wins, eight draws and three particularly painful and significant losses inflicted by Manchester United, Arsenal and Spurs. Avram Grant deserves to be given more time to pursue success. I just wish he would stop trying to persuade us that he is the man to put a smile on the face of Chelsea’s football.

Wenger wallows in victimhood

As often happens with Arsène Wenger, the point was in danger of being lost in the paranoia. The Friday rant that presented Arsenal as the isolated, persecuted idealists of English football was not untypical of a great manager who eschews objectivity as if it were a toxin. Wenger’s condemnation of those in the game who cynically employ physically damaging methods to thwart more skilful opponents was instantly weakened by his characteristic insistence on implying that his players suffer to a unique extent from the abuse.

Once he had warmed to his conspiracy theme, he was too blinkered to spare a thought for the possibility that other teams might be as committed as his own to purist principles and thus just as likely to be targeted by the crunching spoilers. Apparently not even Manchester United occurred to him as fellow victims and that turned out to be a serious mistake. His claim that in the past three Premier League seasons more fouls were inflicted on Arsenal than on any of their rivals was quickly corrected by statistics showing the club’s total of 1,449 was lower than United’s 1,467 and Everton’s 1,465. Yet, in spite of the amusing extravagance of his paranoid riffs - one of which had him telling us he expected to be blamed for everything in the country, including the unemployment figures - Wenger was identifying a worrying, if hardly new, problem. It was easy to sympathise when he talked of sitting in press conferences and being told: “Oh, they got in your face today and you did not find an answer.” Everybody knows that teams given credit for getting into Arsenal’s faces have often been more concerned with getting into their limbs with hurtful intent.

Many in football have been disturbed by Wenger’s reluctance to dismiss the shattering of Eduardo da Silva’s leg at St Andrews as nothing more than a horrible accident that made any suggestion of culpability grossly offensive. But in that instance his attitude is not unreasonable. Accepting that Martin Taylor, the Birmingham defender whose lunge produced the injury, is an utterly unmalicious and honourable man does not mean we must regard what he did as permissible. His challenge amounted to reckless endangerment.

Playing the pain game

National Hunt riders take their job’s dangers so lightly that there sometimes seems to be a case for placing them in protective custody. On Thursday an independent specialist, Mr Peter Hamlyn, will tell the perennial champion of jump jockeys, Tony McCoy, whether or not the fractures to vertebrae he suffered seven weeks ago have healed sufficiently to let him perform at the Cheltenham Festival (March 11-14). McCoy has been pounding away at a fitness programme and putting in strenuous shifts of work-riding on the training gallops, so he is probably justified in feeling optimistic about the medical verdict.

The evidence is that he has progressed well enough to preclude any need to attempt some hoodwinking manoeuvres in his examination. But that kind of trickery can never be ruled out where the tough men who accompany horses over hurdles and fences are concerned. McCoy’s main stable connection is with Jonjo O’Neill’s yard at Jackdaws Castle and Jonjo himself was capable of audacious deceptions when the threat of being barred from competition loomed. He once survived a racecourse doctor’s anxieties about a badly injured foot by proffering the sound one for inspection.