The Anti-Semitic Referee and Others

One of the more bizarre follow-ups to the victory over Chelsea was seen in their manager's homeland. In the Maariv newspaper Gady Carmeli, an assistant coach at an Israeli club and a friend and adviser to Grant, wrote: "What the anti-semitic referee did [at Old Trafford] yesterday was worse than injustice. Everybody agrees, Chelsea played its best half an hour of football this season at the start of the game. Avram was at his best preparing the tactics but no British pundit could understand it." (Shaul Adar, September 25, 2007 The Guardian)

This is, of course, a classic example of the tactical paranoia commonly adopted by certain factions in Israel and their support lobby. Any opposition is automatically categorised as "anti-semitic".

But it seems it may also go deeper. Abramovich has long positioned himself as Jewish, rather than Russian, and has been giving financial support to Israeli football, which was how he met Grant in the first place.

A piece in the Daily Mirror noted 'Chelsea were in danger of letting their paranoia take over last night as anti-Tottenham jibes by Blues fans were being seen as a dig at Roman Abramovich...one chant, of "We hate Tottenham", was being seen in the upper echelons of Stamford Bridge as a potentially anti-Semitic statement aimed directly at Abramovich, who has never hidden his Jewish faith.'

Perhaps nobody at Chelsea has ever bothered to tell Abramovich about the traditions of anti-semitism already rooted deeply in their fan-base, elements of which always used to greet Spurs fans with what were supposed to be impressions of the noise a gas chamber makes.

Whether opposition from fans to Grant and Abramovich will indeed express itself as anti-semitism remains to be seen, but I doubt those particular fans will be subtle enough to bother couching it as opposition to Spurs.