EXCLUSIVE: Pain and humour help Chelsea's Grant to put defeat into context

'You know, there are worse things in life than losing a cup final,' said Meir Gramat and Chelsea's manager thought his father was about to put a crushing defeat into the chilling context of his own experience.

He thought the old man was about to speak of the horrors he endured as a Holocaust victim. The horror of burying his parents and five siblings after watching them die of starvation and cold in Siberia.

Of seeing his three-year-old sister perish because the mushrooms she had eaten in desperation were poisonous.

'My father is such a positive man and he has never dwelled on terrible things he lived through,' said Grant.

'But there I am with my sister and both of us are thinking the same thing. He's 80 and is finally going to talk about something that happened to him when he was 11. We wait for him to speak, and he says: "you could have lost the semi-final".'

Grant's eyes light up as he delivers the punchline, as they do on so many other occasions during an evening that reveals a side few have seen since he took charge at Stamford Bridge last September.

Over dinner at Les Ambassadeurs in Park Lane the Israeli proves quite a raconteur, as well as someone with an encyclopaedic football knowledge acquired on an extraordinary 30-year journey which continues today at home to Middlesbrough.

He talks about 10 days at Liverpool's Melwood training ground as Bob Paisley's guest. Of his time with Brian Clough when the late Nottingham Forest manager was conquering Europe.

'I arrived on the Monday and Clough wasn't there,' recalled Grant. 'They told me he should be in the next day but, again, he didn't show.

'I didn't see him until the Friday and when he turned up he had his dog with him! But he was very kind. People warned me he could be mean but I thought he was a very generous as well as a great man.'

Paisley shared his philosophy with Grant. 'He changed the way Liverpool played the game,' said Grant.

'He wanted them to bring the ball down and pass it. Play a more patient game. In the Seventies in England, he was very forward thinking.

'Coaching was very different then. I remember Harry Redknapp telling me a story he'd heard from Sammy Lee.

'It was the 1984 European Cup final and Liverpool and Roma are standing in the tunnel when Joe Fagan tells Sammy it will be his job to mark their playmaker. "Which one's the playmaker," whispers Sammy. "I don't know," says Fagan, "the one who gets the ball a lot!"'

Grant is a student not only of the game but of sport. He has observed coaching methods at just about every major football club in Europe and has also travelled to the U.S. on numerous occasions.

'I'm fascinated by the NBA and I went to see the Chicago Bulls train when Phil Jackson was in charge,' he said.

'I showed my players at Chelsea a video of Michael Jordan. His professionalism, his commitment and his attitude.

'Jordan was the best player in the NBA, the record points scorer, but he was also the first to get back and defend when the opposition had the ball.'

European football regulations mean Grant is currently studying for his UEFA Pro Licence. But a manager who followed Israeli club football success with a spell as national team coach probably did not need to spend 60 hours on a course at the Israeli FA.

One Israeli newspaper reacted with incredulity: 'Teaching Grant about football is like teaching Tom Hanks about movies.'

And yet the majority remain unconvinced in England, even if last weekend's fine victory over Arsenal went some way to making amends for the disappointment of Wembley and the apparent tactical chaos that followed against Tottenham at White Hart Lane.

Convincing the wider football community that he is a worthy successor to Jose Mourinho has not been easy but Grant likens his rise to power to other, more respected, managers.

He makes the valid point that Fabio Capello was promoted from the coaching staff when he took charge of AC Milan. Ditto Vicente Del Bosque at Real Madrid.

'It was the same when Milan appointed Arrigo Sacchi,' said Grant. 'No one could understand why Silvio Berlusconi wanted this guy from Parma. They said he would have to change now that he had better players. But Berlusconi said if he changed he didn't want him.

'I believe I can be as successful at Chelsea as they were at their clubs but I accept that the success I enjoyed in Israel counts for nothing here. I have not arrived, like Mourinho, as a Champions League winner.

'I have not had the success of Ferguson and Wenger. I have studied the best coaches' methods and the team is making progress. We are second in the Premier League. We are still in the Champions League.'

He appears untroubled by the criticism. Perhaps because, in the context of his own and his father's lives, it probably all seems fairly trivial.

David Gladshtein was Grant's best friend but he was a casualty of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Like Grant, he served in the Israeli army and Grant recalled how David was 'killed by a single bullet'.

'I still feel guilty,' he said. 'When I first went to see his parents afterwards, I felt guilty that I was alive and he was not. His parents came to the Arsenal game and even now I still feel the guilt. I see the way they look at me. I am now a man in my 50s but their son is still 19.'

He has been touched by other tragedies. Shefi Hagai was a young goalkeeper Grant worked with who secured a top job at the World Trade Center.

'When the plane hit he very calmly called his wife, told her he loved her and told her to kiss their children for him,' said Grant. 'I speak to his father almost every day.

'I remember Yitzhak Rabin calling me a few months before he was assassinated. He asked me how I was finding the pressure of management.

'I told him it was OK but that there were six million managers who thought they knew better. "But how can that be?" he said, "there are six million prime ministers, too".'

Paisley, Clough, Jackson, Israeli prime ministers. Perhaps we should take him rather more seriously than we have done. Others certainly do.

Grant recalls a speech he once gave at Auschwitz. 'They wanted me to express bitterness about the Holocaust but I wasn't prepared to because — as I realised with my father — there are two types of survivor,' he said.

'Those who have remained bitter and those who see every new day as a second chance. So I talked about one night when I heard my father screaming in his sleep. I saw him yelling and went to my mother who was in another room because she was unwell.

'She was unconcerned and said he was like that when he was sleeping alone. That you just had to nudge him and he would stop. That he was having nightmares about the War.

'That was what amazed me about him. He might not be able to control his thoughts in his sleep but he's the most positive man I ever met.' As demonstrated at Wembley.