PREMIER LEAGUE:IN A way, we should have expected the news that Sulamain al Fahim has been diagnosed with kidney stones, working on the basis that if Portsmouth's players are so utterly hopeless at passing, there is no reason why their owner should be any different, writes ANDREW FIFIELD
Now, far be it from me to suggest a victory against Wolves is not the start of a startling recovery, but it is probably prudent to regard Pompey’s victory at Fortress Molineux on Saturday – their first of the season – as the equivalent of putting a sticking plaster on an amputated leg.
A proud club remains broke and beleaguered, still marooned at the foot of the Premier League. Officials insist new investment is imminent and that al Fahim’s short tenure will soon be nothing but a bad dream but, given recent history, those assurances carry all the authority of a Newcastle United press release.
Having chased the dream of rising above their station, Portsmouth are now paying the price – less Mickey Mouse and more Wile E Coyote, whose forlorn pursuit of Roadrunner would invariably end with the hapless dawg pelting off a cliff. Pompey, too, are running on thin air: now we’re just waiting for the clouds to disperse and the inevitable plummet.
Portsmouth have always been a magnet for incompetence, and occasionally far worse. The club’s last major crisis came when they were under the control of a certain Terence Venables, a fact which tends to be overlooked whenever the venerated former England manager is wheeled out to provide one of his cheeky chappie opinions.
Venables lasted just over a year in a variety of roles at Fratton Park, taking Pompey to the brink of bankruptcy and the bottom of the Championship before, using the kind of logic that would make a banker blush, he awarded himself a €330,000 performance bonus.
Pompey’s plight in 1998 was just as grave as now but while the former prompted a particularly spiky defiance, the latter has been greeted with little more than meek resignation.
An example to underline the point. Eight months after Venables departed Fratton Park, Pompey travelled to Crystal Palace, his next (inevitably brief) port of call. They were duly crushed 4-1 but the travelling contingent wasn’t going to let that interfere with their primary objective of inventing all sorts of deliciously libelous chants to hurl in Venables’s direction.
Half-an-hour after the final whistle, not a single away fan had vacated the stadium, forcing the manager, Alan Ball, to squeak a personal plea for them to go home over the PA system. It was stirring stuff – a reminder that, while a club can be easily stripped of its assets, it takes rather more to bankrupt its soul.
You might have thought this latest catastrophe would once again have prompted Portsmouth’s finest to rally around in defiance, and yet their energy seems to have drained away with the Solent tide. Crowds are down, the decibel levels have dropped and Fratton Park, once a arena of fire and brimstone, now has a chilly, chastened air.
It doesn’t help that there is no one obvious target for their fury. Venables, with his fly-by-night mentality and a past patchier than a hobo’s trench-coat, was an easy target but the creators of the farce now running at Fratton Park are legion.
There is Harry Redknapp, the manager who signed a clutch of ageing players on vast contracts and then walked out when offered a plum job last autumn, and the chief executive Peter Storrie, whose constant reminders that he is fighting fires for his beloved club have curiously neglected to include an offer to reduce his gargantuan €1.4 million-a-year salary.
And, of course, we should not forget al Fahim, a businessman ill-equipped to sell timeshares to drunken tourists in Magaluf, let alone run a football club.
How somebody who falsely claimed to possess a PhD in real estate investment at an American business school (no such course exists) and whose proposed development of an “eco-village” in his native Abu Dhabi has been postponed amid speculation he does not have the funds to finish the build can pass the Premier League’s supposedly tougher fit-and-proper persons test is anyone’s guess.
If all these figures are partly to blame for the chaos engulfing Portsmouth, having so many culprits serves only to blur the focus of supporter anger. Ironically, the man who is perhaps least culpable, Paul Hart, the current manager, is the only one likely to be forced out any time soon. Maybe the supporters’ apathy stems simply from crisis-fatigue. Worn down by months of doom-laden headlines and preposterous revelations, they have simply lost the energy to dodge the looming iceberg.
There are no words that can balm these wounds, but if there is consolation, it might just be that whoever owns Portsmouth FC a year from now, at least Terry Venables will not be in charge.
