Quintin Jardine's blog

I watched a very strange football match on telly last night. West Ham were playing Arsenal, and they were thumped. ‘What’s strange about that?’ you ask. Of itself, nothing, but the match was played against the extraordinary background of that morning’s newspapers, announcing that the Hammers’ manager, the experienced and well-liked Avram Grant, would be fired after the game, and replaced by Martin O’Neill, who walked out on his last club in the summer in an apparent dispute over transfer policy. The rumours of the change were so strong that they could only have come from a source within the football club itself. They could have been dispelled by a strong statement by the club’s owners, but they weren’t. Instead the match went ahead with the TV cameras spending more time looking at the technical areas than at the pitch, and at the end, Avram threw his club scarf into the crowd, a gesture that was interpreted as one of farewell. This morning there are suggestions that  Martin O’Neill isn’t too keen on the job after all. Who could blame him? Would you want to work for people like that?