Whoever sent white powder and anti-Semitic death threats to Avram Grant this week should be made to sit down in the company of the Chelsea first-team coach’s father. Meir Granat will watch his son’s team for the first time in the Carling Cup final at Wembley tomorrow, with his strength in surviving the Holocaust going some way to explaining why his son appears so calm under pressure.

Compared with his father’s experiences, Grant’s struggle to the summit of his profession has been easy. As a Hasidic Jew, Granat fled his native Poland as a 13-year-old in 1941 for the far north of Russia, where he was forced to bury his parents and five siblings as freezing conditions took their toll before finding his way to Palestine at the end of the Second World War.

Grant, who adopted a shortened form of the family name in the Eighties, paid tribute to his father yesterday, appearing close to tears as he showed the human side of a man who remains something of a mystery. “My father was 80 \ so we’re celebrating and he will be at the game,” Grant said. “I don’t know if you know the story of my father, but he is a great man, one of the greatest that I know. He is optimistic like I have never seen in my life and he suffered a lot in the age when he was young.

“He was a survivor of the Holocaust and I have the name of my grandfather that died in the Holocaust. My father gave me a lot in my life and what impressed me about him was he always sees the positive things. Even when I was at school, he saw only the good marks. And even now, he is optimistic. If you speak to him about the past, he says it was in the past but I live the future.”

Not even his father, however, could have envisaged Grant’s journey from being youth-team coach at Hapoel Petach Tikvah, the Israeli side, to managing one of the richest clubs in the world. “I don’t even think my father could have imagined me at Chelsea, but [tomorrow] he will see,” Grant said. “I used his money when I was young to see cup finals — and he was not rich — so I bought him his ticket. I think I can afford it.”