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But maybe even Carr is not the right man for Pompey’s story. Surely it needs the Hollywood treatment, like one of those movies about a miserable, washed-up little league baseball team being taken up by an equally washed-up coach, played by Walter Matthau, who steers them to the championships where they overcome the fearsome and loathed Yankees. Grant might not look like conventional Hollywood material, but actually he is charming, bright and cool (look how well he brushed aside all the sanctimonious hoo-ha about his preferred methods of relaxation recently). He is the son of a Holocaust survivor and a devoted supporter of Jewish causes. He also has an exceptionally game wife: ‘What’s wrong with a Thai massage?’ she remarked sagely about her husband’s treatment schedule. And don’t forget he came within a John Terry miss-kick of making you warm to Chelsea on that Champion’s League night in Moscow two years ago.
Anyway, Portsmouth needs a leg-up. It’s a bracing sort of place: the best description of it came from a British officer stationed in Umqasr, the port outside Basra, in the very early days of the Iraq war in 2003. He was being interviewed by a bright young TV reporter, who asked keenly: ‘So what’s it like here? A bit like Southampton?’ The soldier looked blank. ‘Southampton? The beer’s terrible, it’s full of prostitutes, and everyone is trying to kill you. It’s more like Portsmouth.’
Chelsea fans apart, you would need to have a heart of stone not to be willing David James to lift the Cup in May, rather than John Terry. It’s now a toss-up as to who is the least likable of sporting superstars, Terry or Tiger Woods (unless you’re a Las Vegas cocktail waitress of course). Woods’s scowling grouchiness in the final rounds of the Augusta Masters was wholly bizarre given the mind-numbing Buddhist therapy-speak he had been droning on about for weeks. What is it with the guy?
Some curmudgeonly souls can be a tad cynical about the emotional manipulation of golf. But I’m not one of them. And if it’s too easy to contrast flinty-eyed, club-banging, home-wrecking, gym-honed Woods with the laid-back, lolloping, cap-doffing family man Phil Mickelson then so be it. At the end, as Mickelson embraced his wife Amy, who has been suffering from breast cancer and had only just felt well enough to go to the course that Sunday, a tear rolled slowly down his cheek, and I imagine most of the watching millions were having a quiet blub as well. I certainly was, though that was probably tinged by the fact that I had taken third-placed Anthony Kim that morning at an appealing 100-1. Oh well, there’s always next year.
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