Roman will get the boss he deserves after ruling out Hughes

David Mellor
4 Jun 2008

Those wonderful people who gave us Avram Grant really are going to mess it up again, you know. Already they have let Jose Mourinho go to Inter Milan, though it's pretty certain that if Chelsea had wanted him back, he would have found the offer irresistible. But, of course, as I predicted last week, expecting our friendly neighbourhood oligarch to admit he was wrong wasn't going to happen.

So Inter end up with a coach who can turn their recent domination of Serie A (with a team of foreigners, please note) into an effective challenger in Europe, something Roberto Mancini never did.

Mancini was one of the early favourites for the Chelsea job, even though he is a total stranger to the Premier League and a coach with everything still to learn about the Champions League.

AC Milan's Carlo Ancelotti was another man in the frame, although last night he ruled himself out. It's encouraging his present employers want to hold on to him, but there was nothing so exceptional about Ancelotti to justify the risk of moving him from an entirely differently-paced league into the fast and furious Premier League.

Even more significantly, Roman Abramovich's lackeys are now cooling on Mark Hughes because, apparently, the Russian doesn't fancy him.

Despite being aware of the huge experience and exceptional footballing insights that lie behind Abramovich's opinion - this, after all, was the man who gave us Grant and Andriy Shevchenko, as good a pair of superannuated lumps as you'd ever see outside the cast of a Clacton pantomime - I beg leave to differ from our proprietor.

Hughes is tough, experienced and imaginative when resources permit, and knows the Premier League. In short, he's a proven winner.

If Abramovich overlooks Hughes and lets him go to Manchester City, Abramovich will probably get the manager he deserves, but what we Chelsea fans don't.

That could still be Frank Rijkaard. The Dutchman has a reputation way beyond his merits. Early on he was successful at Barcelona, when assisted by Chelsea's recently departed first-team coach, Henk ten Cate. After Ten Cate left,
Rijkaard lost his grip of the dressing room and of the results, and he left under a cloud. He sounds just the man for our Roman, who is plainly so bothered at accusations that his bottomless pocket is buying trophies that he is desperate to appoint another questionable coach, as the equivalent to an outstanding racehorse having a stone of lead in its saddlebag.

Meanwhile, what of Avram? I am sure his many fans, especially in his home country, who used to berate me for my opinion of the great man, must be waiting tense with expectation for another Premier League club to make him an offer he can't refuse.

Well, Mystic Mellor confidently predicts, it will be a long wait, chums. In fact I will be astonished if he ever works in English football again.