Graham Potter’s task is to put human heart back in West Ham’s gormless machine | Jonathan Liew
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After Hollywood farce of Chelsea and two years out of game, rags-to-riches manager has seized chance to join ‘family club’. Remember Angrygate? For a few surreal days in February 2023, pretty much the entire talking apparatus of English football was engaged – as is its habit – in a fevered, earnest and yet entirely fatuous debate about whether Graham Potter was angry enough to be the Chelsea manager.
![[Jonathan Liew]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2019/11/25/Jonathan_Liew.png?width=180&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
Under an increasingly persistent line of questioning, Potter coped pretty well. He firmly pointed out that you do not go from the ninth tier to one of the biggest clubs in the world without a certain ruthless streak. He subtly rebuked the hypocrisy of the media for demanding greater touchline theatrics from Premier League managers and then pontificating about the culture of abuse towards grassroots referees. So subtly, in fact, that the media blissfully ignored that bit.
![[Graham Potter and Todd Boehly at Chelsea.]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/794259c51f7122656bc73bafa74ba243cfa655d2/0_340_5568_3341/master/5568.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
The irony, as would become apparent in Potter’s later interviews, was that he really was angry. And frustrated, and embittered, and ultimately humiliated, as a coach hired for a world-record compensation fee was sacked after six months of pure, reckless chaos. A packed schedule. A winter World Cup. New signings being forced to sit on the floor and change in corridors. Rookie owners prone to giving dressing-room speeches or occasionally forgetting the number of players in a football team.
![[Graham Potter fist bumps Alexis Mac Allister at Brighton.]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/eb0a7552ca954b9a981eb31f763405d2b3edb1d4/0_121_2078_1247/master/2078.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
It has taken Potter 21 months to return to coaching, and by all accounts he’s had an absolute blast. He learned Spanish. He visited the Falkland Islands. He did a spot of punditry. Last summer, at the height of Euros fever, he went to watch Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour at Wembley Stadium, disguising himself amid the crowds by wearing a pair of white love-heart sunglasses. This is the Potter we know and occasionally adore: a recognisably regular guy, mending his heart just so he can get it broken all over again. And the burning question, as he climbs back on to the management bronco at the wildly mismanaged West Ham, is not so much whether he has learned anything from his Chelsea experience, but whether there is anything that usefully can be learned beyond, well … “Don’t do that again!”.
