”Politics is a shitty world,” opined Andriy Shevchenko last weekend. ”I want to stay well away from it.” In which case, I can’t help feeling the vaguest misgivings about his choice of club. If anything is clear about recent developments in English football — and not an awful lot is — it is that the Premiership appears to have made the cheering step up from football league to geopolitical pawn.
With Russian oligarchs apparently keen to strike ever more Byzantine deals for a piece of it, traditional forms of speculation about the national game already seem wildly outdated.
Asking whether someone will fancy it on a wet Wednesday away to Bolton looks jejune in the extreme. Today’s key questions are: when will West Ham start their uranium enrichment programme? How long before Chelsea acquire long-range ballistic missiles and purchase their own defence shield?
”It is intriguing,” as West Ham ”manager” Alan Pardew said when he unwrapped his surprise consignment of superstar Argentinians. ”It’s intriguing to me, but to be honest, I don’t care.”
Well, quite. As with all unbelievable bargains from unconventional retailers, it’s probably best not to ask too many questions.
Fortunately, Pardew appears to be a chap who can hold contradictory thoughts with perfect ease. On the one hand, he is not a manager who regards the imposition of two players by unseen forces — in a deal he self-confessedly neither understands nor had an inkling of until hours before it happened — as a resigning matter.
On the other, he is keen to stress he is a manager with total autonomy. ”Some of the reports I have seen suggest that I am going to be forced to play [Tévez and Mascherano] — that will never happen with me, and if it does happen, I won’t be here.”
What a relevant point that seems, and one we shall be able to put to the test the second Carlos Tévez is benched while some nice lad from the youth team is given the chance to develop his game.
Elsewhere, one of the most intriguing — to borrow Pardew’s faintly inadequate euphemism — aspects of the New Premiership is the emergence of Peter Kenyon as a latter-day Rasputin.
Guus Hiddink has said that it was Roman Abramovich who approached him with the offer of the Russian manager’s job, in a series of meetings also attended by the Chelsea chief executive.
Perhaps we shouldn’t read too much into this. After all, Kenyon’s amazing gift for coincidental encounters saw him sitting down in two London restaurants with Rio Ferdinand on a single evening last March, and there was a time he could barely leave the house without bumping into Sven-Goran Eriksson or Ashley Cole.
If, however, the Russian summit was not just one of those dazzling instances of synchronicity to which Kenyon is prone, then it seems reasonable to conclude that in some capacity — formal or otherwise — he is operating as an adviser to the no doubt deeply Kremlin-independent Russian Football Union along with his boss, whose quid-pro-quo arrangement with Vladimir Putin remains tantalisingly obscure.
Searching for Kenyon’s analogous figure in public life, the eye alights on Lord Levy, the prime ministerial tennis partner who managed to parlay obsequious double-faulting into a role as Blair’s special envoy to the Middle East.
Clearly, it is enormously encouraging that the man who handled the Ashley Cole transfer is being drawn closer into the Putin Kremlin’s alluring orbit. At this rate it will only be a couple of decades before Chelsea are perceived as a kind of state without borders, with enough clout to demand membership of the group of eight, or at least an office at United Nations HQ. — Â