Pompey, play up!

J.L. Carr, that fine English writer, teacher, sports-lover and eccentric, once wrote a book called How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup. It was about a village team which eventually got through to the Cup Final, beating Glasgow Rangers at Wembley. It sold a couple of thousand copies and was eventually remaindered, though Carr later republished it under his own imprint, the pleasingly named Quince Tree Press. It’s a pity Carr’s not still around to do justice to beleaguered, bankrupt, wrecked Portsmouth’s improbable march to Wembley. 

I was very struck by a remark of Pompey’s much-maligned coach Avram Grant after the semi-final last weekend against Spurs. The players, he said, weren’t fit, and some couldn’t have lasted 120 minutes, but ‘they gave something from their hearts’. And he’s right: it is the heart that wins it, and probably one reason why Manchester United are so strangely uninspiring now without their huge-hearted dray-horse of a hero, Wayne Rooney. 

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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.