Roman Abramovich is right ... Claudio Ranieri should be sacked

The away dressing room was in silence as the Chelsea players sat contemplating the lunacy that had been forced on them until one finally eyed the manager and summed up what the rest of the watching world had been asking: "What the f*** was that all about?"

The knife went squarely into Claudio Ranieri's chest, fatally, to accompany the one to the back the manager claimed had been stuck there earlier by his employer.

What was it about? Why did he come over all Jimmy Calderwood, piling on centre-forwards and crying tally-ho, when Chelsea had the game under control against a depleted side? Was it a parting gesture to the board? Or did it graphically illustrate that he doesn't have the head or the nerve for the job?

He has lost the dressing room, he never had the confidence of his new boss and shortly he will lose his job. And deservedly. There's something unsettlingly patronising and faintly racist about the treatment Ranieri is given by the media. He's charming, his eccentric English makes us chuckle, he is palpably nice and honest to boot.

Well, honest up to the point of admitting he cocked-it up, but not to the conclusion of handing in his jotters. It wasn't just the lack of width, the jumble of strikers, the irrational idea of playing a clearly unfit Juan Sebastian Veron on the left of midfield and shunting Scott Parker around before hooking him, it was the crashing realisation that even Roman Abramovich in the stand knew more about football than he did.

He certainly knows more about business. It's a quaint and sentimental nostrum, singularly to be found in football, that an entrepreneur spending upwards of (pounds) 200 million in investment in a new operation should leave the old chief executive in charge. And in a football club the real CEO is the manager.

The health of the business is almost entirely dependent on the ability of the man in the tracksuit to engender success on the field and, thereafter, profitability. Abramovich and his advisers, in planning their coup, obviously concluded that Ranieri, while a coach of ability, could not deliver the results they required. That he was not in the top rank of international coaches. As he clearly is not. Whereas Eriksson, their preferred choice, certainly is.

Abramovich's mistake, if it was that - and even with 20/20 hindsight it does not appear so - was not to wield the axe immediately and, presumably, to drip-feed the distasteful asides which have undermined Ranieri. But this approach is coldly methodical and has proved to be productive. To have immediately removed the coach would have alienated the fans, where it was essential at the time to smooth them and the game's administrators, while giving him time would allow space for the cock-up, which duly occurred. He allowed Ranieri to spend on players, but only approved ones, approved, you could speculate, by the England manager who surreptitiously visited him.

Besides, by adopting the picador approach to Ranieri, goading him with repeated barbs, he might have been persuaded to chuck in his hand and save several millions in severance. Unpleasant, but Abramovich didn't become the richest man in Britain, by way of the Siberian oil fields, by dispensing emotional largess.

Abramovich has a business plan which involves making Chelsea as successful as Manchester United. At least. Ranieri doesn't fit the plan. He has to go.

The rest is cant.

Copyright 2004 SMG Sunday Newspapers Ltd.
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