A popular word among the scribbling classes these days is schadenfreude, the German word for that evil little pleasure we take in someone else’s misfortune. There’s a lot of it going about in the political world, with Democrats delighting in one screw-up after another in the White House’s handling of events in Iraq, just as Republicans rejoiced in the raunchy revelations about Bill Clinton and his favorite intern.

Among spectators of sport there’s never a shortage of schadenfreude, whether secret or openly-displayed, for don’t some fans just love it when an obnoxious athlete gets caught cheating (Barry Bonds comes to mind), or when their envy of a soccer player’s success is soothed by his recurrent injuries that don’t allow him to perform (Beckham comes to mind)? Comeuppance for The Other is great medicine for our own ills.

Just think of poor Jose Mourinho (known to the soccer bloggers of Britain as “Maureen”). A few weeks ago he was near the top of the football world as coach of Chelsea F.C. In a little more than three seasons, he had won two Premier League titles, two League Cups, one FA Cup, one Community Shield and had reached late rounds in the European Championship. Management executives of The Blues (or The Pensioners, as they used to be called) described him as “the most successful manager the club has known”. He had no worries, mate.

Yet by Thursday, September 20, after what he admitted was the “most painful moment of my career”, he was gone. As Monty Python would have said, the coach was not pining, he had passed on, he was no more, he was off the twig, he had run down the curtain, joined the choir of coaches invisible, he was an ex-coach. He left with hard feelings and about twenty million dollars. As is the case in all divorces—and this was the mother of all divorces—Maureen’s relationship with the club-owner Roman Abramovich had broken down irrevocably.

Perhaps now, a mere two weeks later, he may be feeling a little better, because things have not gone too well for his successor as coach, Avran Grant. More to the point, the majority of Chelsea’s players were upset that Mourinho was forced out. Leaving the dressing-room for the last time, he gave hugs to 23 players, but not to John Terry, the captain, who had been an agent provocateur in the scheming and stabbing that went on behind Mourinho, nor to Andriy Shevchenko, the Ukrainian striker and former European footballer of the year, who hadn’t played as much as he thought he should. The captain and the striker got only a handshake that according to one observer “could have frozen a mug of tea”.

The ravenous British football press soon got after Grant, whose only success as a coach has been in Israel’s national league, not exactly a powerhouse in European football. Too much energy spent on war, and not enough on sport, perhaps. But it seems that Grant doesn’t have the coaching credentials required by UEFA for anyone taking over a professional top-flight club. Special dispensation will be needed for him to continue.

Then some of the Chelsea players piled in with remarks that Grant’s coaching techniques were 25 years behind the time, that he was an “idiot” and that his appointment to run the star-bright Chelsea team was a “disgrace”. For by then they had seen the new reality in the Stamford Bridge dressing-room, and they didn’t like what they saw . . .

On Tuesday evening, September 18, after the disappointing 1-1 draw with Rosenborg in the European Championship, but before Mourinho was forced out, a new authority appeared in the dressing-room to give instructions to Michael Essien, probably Africa’s finest midfielder. The man stood there with a clipboard lecturing Essien about the distribution of his passes: too many through the center and not enough to the wings. Though the words came out of the mouth of Shevchenko, acting as interpreter, they originated in the mind of the clipboard coach, the billionaire owner of Chelsea F.C., Roman Arkadyevich Abramovich.

So it is beginning to look as though Avram Grant may be Mourinho’s replacement in name only. Will Roman Abramovich run the team, since as one senior player said, he can push the Israeli around “without a hint of respect”?

The early results after the disappearance of Mourinho were not great, and the former boss could be forgiven for any public display of schadenfreude: defeat in Manchester, a draw with Fulham, a win against Hull of a lower division. The club still has difficulty putting the ball in the net, despite Grant and his playing of Abramovich’s favorite, Shevchenko.

Mourinho knows that running a top team is not easy, and he must be happy that Grant wasn’t able to suddenly revitalize the Blues. The win last Wednesday over Valencia in Spain in the European championship was, however, a good one, for that is the competition where the owner’s greatest ambitions lie. Avram Grant will be happy with that result. It might have saved his job.

Writers do like occasionally to slip an alien word into their texts. Perhaps merely an affectation, to the scribe it signals wordliness, linguistic erudition. Schadenfreude is one popular these days, but in this case it has an even more appropriate English equivalent, originating in the delight of spectators at watching the suffering in gladiatorial contests. It is “Roman Holiday”, like the one recently given to Jose Mourinho by well, you know.