The Champions League cup is big but it cannot hold the ashes of six million Jews

There’s an old Yiddish proverb that says, ‘The entire world rests on the tip of the tongue.’ Of course, there’s another one that says, ‘A fool is his own informer.’

Anyway, a long time ago Dutch football star Ruud Gullit dedicated some prize he had won to Nelson Mandela. At the time, I found that somewhat bizarre - to the point of being rude and belittling even, if it hadn’t been for Gullit’s obvious sincerity.

Still, at that time Mandela was already out of prison and elected president of his country. Plus, Mandela was a self-professed football fan, so I thought we could all pass this thing off as a bit of nonsense; well-meant nonsense even.

There is of course, in our sports and film stars and other celebs this nauseating tendency to see themselves as the centre of the universe, and as a kind of arbiters of all matters, from the merely frivolous to the world’s most important political and environmental issues. I suppose it’s all part of a solipsist and narcissistic pathology: to think no thing and no cause is real unless and until the Big Star has given his or her blessings or condemnation to it.

Most of the time, this is merely annoying, sometimes grotesquely so, as when Sharon Stone announced she was prepared to kiss everyone if it brought peace to the Middle East. Sometimes though, the self-centredness of our stars can become absolutely monstrous.

I started with Gullit and his Mandela moment and so now we’ll return to the strange world of professional football: a very self-obsessed world indeed, with very strange ideas about morals and values.

I’m sure that Chelsea’s manager Avram Grant didn’t mean to be as fantastically and grossly disrespectful to the millions of Jews who were killed in the holocaust but he was. I’m not sure how terribly mentally ill someone must be before he decides that his having taken his team to the final of some sporting event is, in the light of the Holocaust, a true victory - and I’m not sure anyone can recover from such a grotesque maladie:

The newspaper Ma’ariv also carried a letter from the Chelsea manager in which, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, he dedicated victory to his fellow Jews.

“The fact that I led a great team like Chelsea in a very important match in the Champions League 65 years exactly after the terrible holocaust is the true victory,” he wrote in a piece timed to coincide with yesterday’s visit to Auschwitz.

I don’t wish the man ill but really, mister Grant, shame on you. You seem to have forgotten the name of your fathers, the honour of your children and the house of your God.