It's sink or swim for Avram Grant as Blues dive into Red Sea

It is Grant's onerous fate to be cast as Moses to Roman Abramovich's Lord Almighty, and at Anfield tomorrow night we should receive the clearest sign yet as to whether he can lead the Children of Stamford Bridge out of the Champions League bondage in which Liverpool have held them, and towards the Promised Land of Moscow for the final.

The omens are not good. Where the Passover service reminds us how the Israelites overcame Pharaoh with 10 plagues of ascending brutality, the Israeli's most devastating weapon is struggling with injury. As Chelsea's Angel of Death, Didier Drogba has carried his team for several years, smiting all foes and disguising their creative shortcomings.

He has returned to training but if he misses tomorrow's game, the temptation for Grant will be to play for a goalless draw, relying on the supposedly huge advantage of playing the second leg at home.

This would be a mistake. On this, Jewish teachings could not be clearer. "And Rabbi Eliazar, as it is said, did tell them", to quote a key sourced by leading scholars to the Scroll of Sven: "He who shall seek to win by striving not to lose, verily shall he rend his garments and beat his breast. For this is the road to woe, lamentation and a third Champions League semi-final defeat to the Scousers in four seasons."

Seldom at the highest level of any sport, as Eliazar so sagely understood, does wilful negativity bring a positive outcome. Somehow Chelsea must subdue their Mourinhoid instinct for the grab-a-goal-and-sit-on-it-until-it-hatches philosophy more succinctly known as catenaccio. Whether a Drogba-less Chelsea will have the belief and courage to take the game to Liverpool seems unlikely when they couldn't really manage it a week ago against Wigan.

Yet the Children of Israel didn't cast asunder the bonds of slavery by defending deep and hoping to catch Pharaoh on the break. They did it with sustained, controlled aggression, and that is Grant's best and perhaps only hope of replicating a certain miracle.

Somehow he must find a way through the red sea of fevered Anfield emotion that almost invariably swells into a tidal wave on major European nights, to sweep away the visitors' ambitions.

If he can do that, and depart the Capital of Culture with an away goal and at worst a one-goal deficit, the land of milk and honey will be in view and Grant will be close to slaying the myth of the Special One by becoming the Chosen One himself.

If not, he will soon find himself with nothing but the manna from heaven of a redundancy cheque to sustain him through a long, dismal spell in the managerial wilderness.

Gladiator Wrighty loses his battle of the wits

Here in Shepherds Bush, shockwaves continue to radiate from White City as a traumatised BBC quakes from the defection of Ian Wright.

We all love Wrighty, who can no longer perform the role of "comedy jester", and not just for the ebullience and charm. Who can forget the times this unashamed patriot discharged his international punditry duty by declaring himself speechless with disgust at an England performance?

It isn't all doom and gloom, though, and we will be seeing Wrighty in a TV role more suited to his gravitas. Let's hope BBC head of football Niall Sloane tunes in when Gladiators is revived on Sky One with Wrighty as host; and that the sight and sound of Wrighty joshing with Chlamydia, Polyp and all the other new wielders of mutant cotton buds belatedly alerts him to his folly in failing to recognise Wrighty as football's answer to Professor AJP Taylor.

No White, no colour

There is a poignancy about this year's world snooker championships that makes watching them almost intolerable.

Jimmy White hasn't qualified, and with him has evaporated the last link with the Steve Davis-dominated glory days of the 1980s. You might point out that Steve himself is playing, I suppose, but that's just the sort of pedantry we can all do without.

Moaning about the dearth of "characters" in a sport is the dreariest symptom of desiccated middle age, but with snooker it's also a moral imperative.

And so, I'll be looking to the ESPN Classic channel for faded footage of such fabled scintillators as Doug Mountjoy, Graham Miles, and the human barbiturate Eddie Charlton. And, of course, our most beloved and grievously missed Jimmy White.