Bosses hit out at 'learner driver' Avram

Howard Wilkinson and Gerard Houllier spoke out against the rules being bent again to allow Grant to join Gareth Southgate in the ranks of unqualified managers at the top level of English football.

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Wilkinson, chairman of the League Managers Association, said: 'If I wanted to employ a driver I would think it not a bad idea to make sure he had the licence before I gave him the job.'

Former Liverpool manager Houllier, technical director of the French Football Federation, added: 'If you don't have a driving licence you cannot drive. If you are a doctor and you don't have the qualifications you can't do it. It is against the law.'

Both stressed it was nothing personal against Grant, who replaced Jose Mourinho last week, but the mood within the managerial community is that standards will not be raised unless the authorities start to police their own rules strictly.

The issue was on the agenda last year when Glenn Roeder was allowed to manage Newcastle without the pro licence qualification. Then he was sacked and the subject forgotten.

Middlesbrough boss Southgate is taking his UEFA A licence and will then start his pro licence. He is on course to be fully qualified by the start of the 2009-10 season, by which time he will have been in the job for three years.

Rules were bent for Roeder because he started his pro licence before suffering a brain tumour. Southgate has been allowed to continue because the FA and Premier League were keen to support a young Englishman, who claimed international football had interfered with his efforts to complete his coaching badges.

Chelsea have 12 weeks to compile their case and it will rely heavily on the fact that Grant has vast experience and the top coaching qualification his native Israel can offer.

But whether this is an equivalent to the FA's own national coaching diploma — an acceptable alternative to the pro licence — will have to be ruled upon.

The Premier League will find themselves under intense pressure. At their coaching symposium, hosted in London this week with the help of the FA, UEFA's technical director Andy Roxburgh insisted the mandatory qualification rule was accepted as the norm in most western European countries.

He said: 'It's part of raising standards because there's no point training coaches if they're not used. What would be the point of that?'

Grant's stride from the shadows of his job as director of football at Chelsea have served to emphasise a new vulnerability for managers.

Wilkinson said: 'I've hardly met a person who really understands what the role of director of football is. It is to protect the interests the club and to ensure the long-term strategy but most people do not employ their director of football to do that.

'The director of football is not necessarily someone who has been a former manager and who is there to scout players. It is a much wider role. Too many directors of football have been appointed without taking the care to identify his role and responsibilities.'

Grant insisted he had not knifed Mourinho in the back but those who assumed his arrival was a precursor to Mourinho's exit have been proved right.

At a glance, the director of football seems to make a perilous existence even worse and there are even allegations that Martin Jol's position at Tottenham has been undermined by director of football Damien Comolli.