Mr Average Grant ain’t so average now. The triumphs of Chelsea this past week, and the prospect of Avram Grant going toe-to-toe with Sir Alex Ferguson with the Premier League and Champions League double at stake, surely affords the Israeli many apologies from the players, media and doubters of Stamford Bridge.

This indeed is a remarkable man. His first season in English club management could be his last. If it is, Grant has done things that nobody before him has, and nobody is likely to emulate.

When he sank to his knees on the wet pitch on Wednesday, almost like a man in prayer, the black armband he wore had two causes. His player, Frank Lampard, had scored the decisive penalty in the week that Lampard buried his mother. The other cause? “I am a little embarrassed by what I did on the pitch,” said Grant. “It is not an easy day for me, and not easy for Lampard. Now, at least in football, it is a little bit happy.”

A happy, sad, extraordinary time. England cannot muster 11 individuals fit for the European Championships, yet now has two sides in Europe’s most coveted club final. Ferguson’s United are there again, courtesy of an exceptional and beautiful goal from Paul Scholes, who two years ago feared that blurred vision would end his career.

Chelsea are there, for the first time, thanks to one goal from a grieving son, and two of awesome power from Didier Drogba, who has spent many weeks brooding over the manager who was sacked to make way for Grant.

Drogba’s rebellion was as loud as others were surreptitious. They whispered that they had lost the Special One and acquired Average Grant. Even so, Grant, working with another man’s squad and having to build a new coaching and support staff, hauled them up from fifth to joint first in the league, and guided them through Europe.

He fought on all fronts. The media’s disrespect for him reminded me of a Frankfurt newspaper on the morning of the 1974 World Cup final. Above a picture of Helmut Schoen, looking miserable in the rain, it asked: “Is this the face of a leader?” Actually, it was. Schoen’s West Germany won the final.

The disparaging of Grant, some of it on appearance and some because he does not deliver the storylines and histrionics that Mourinho did, cut deeper. It bordered on racism. An Israeli, without a coaching badge, how could he manage the richest club on earth?

Darned well, it seems. Grant’s record stands at 35 wins, 11 draws, 5 defeats, statistically better than the Special One. He has not, yet, taken the dourness out of Mourinho’s men, and will not unless he is given the backing from the owner, Roman Abramovich, to recast the team.

All Grant can do, meanwhile, is make decent selections and motivate the players – not one of whom, incidentally, was included in the Premier League players’ choice of their team of the season.

Slowly, slowly, Chelsea realised they have a manager uninterested in stealing the applause and who takes abuse while coming out fighting on their behalf.

His most demonstrative strength was almost concealed until he had to explain what he was doing on hands and knees after the Liverpool match. He said it was because it was the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Here was a man balancing the team needs against his own. On Thursday he was in Auschwitz-Birkenau, leading the March of the Living – the survivors and those who remember the 1.5 million Jews exterminated there by the Nazis.

Grant’s father, now 80, survived the Holocaust, but as a 15-year-old boy had to dig graves with his own hands for his father, mother and sisters. “My father never gave up,” Grant told the 10,000 people who took part in Thursday’s march. “He never lost hope or resolve, and never let fear overcome his belief.

“I remember this place not only for the horror, but for the victory of human determination and hope over impossible odds beyond their control.”

Avram Grant, managing Chelsea over the semi-final line on Wednesday, comforting and applauding Lampard . . . and journeying by night with his young son and his wife to give the Remembrance Day speech at Auschwitz.

Somewhere along the road, he received a call from Abramovich, the man who speaks to none of us and whose whereabouts are a mystery to us. The call, Grant told his press conference on Friday morning, indicated to him that the paymaster is “happy, very happy” with the way things are going.

A stone has lifted. Beneath it we see the extraordinary personality whose mournful expression hides a considerable football man juggling with more human perspectives than is the norm in our blinkered, self-obsessed sporting intensity. How witless the Mr Average jibe now seems.