It may be a little gratuitous to heap more grief on the Spurs faithful but someone needs to ask Andre Villas-Boas on which planet he currently resides.

One thing at least is certain. It is not a place which insists it is poor form to spit at the hand that has so recently spent approximately £32million on your career and financial advancement.

Perhaps Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich didn’t hand it over with ultimate grace when he dismantled the AVB project and no doubt he had his part to play in the disaster that was repaired so astonishingly by Roberto di Matteo, the experienced professional who was asked to pick up the pieces.

However, it is impossible to say that the oligarch wasn’t reacting to a wider reality than his own perception when he cut short a regime that was not merely failing but also revealing a detachment from some quite basic professional values.

It is in this light that Villas-Boas’s latest self-serving stream of consciousness must be viewed with some alarm at White Hart Lane.

Particularly arresting was this opening onslaught: “He (Abramovich) was the one who was not putting up the things he promised. It is all very well you cut the project short. Chelsea go on to win two trophies and people say how wonderful the squad were but at the beginning nobody believed in that squad when we put them together.”

It is a declaration that demands a short, three-word response: wrong, wrong, wrong.

Didier Drogba believed. Frank Lampard believed. Ashley Cole believed, and it was a conviction that suffused the effort to deliver, however hazardously at the Nou Camp and in Munich, the Champions League title the Russian had craved ever since he made his first giant investment.

Abramovich, at unprecedented expense, invited AVB to engage in the always difficult challenge of re-shaping a team while maintaining it at some reasonably effective level.

He didn’t, however, offer a carte blanche for the imposing of any piece of guaranteed instant disenchantment that might pop into his head, including the one that could only have been authored by someone who had never played the game at a professional level. You know the one, about how Chelsea players, having conspired to score a goal, should never forget to include the coach in their celebrations.

This week AVB also said: “The decision to cut it (the project) short was not mine and for Chelsea to have won the Champions League and the FA Cup was because we were still in those competitions. I had the opportunity to win them cut short. People quit on me.”

This is a truly stunning re-interpretation of events which concluded with Di Matteo taking control on the very basis that, had it been operated upon by Villas-Boas when he arrived at Stamford Bridge, might not have made his eventual failure quite so inevitable.

Villas-Boas had one extremely impressive season at his home-town club Porto. He had enough success to suggest that he might, like his mentor Jose Mourinho, perform the remarkable feat of operating as a successful coach at the highest level without any experience as a professional player.

Unfortunately, it was not the Porto promise but the fact that he had never known how it is to be a professional, vulnerable to the years and the ebb and flow of self-belief that has always been an intrinsic part of the job, which rose so quickly to the surface at Chelsea.

He may have had his problems with the old guard, however he tackled it, but it was at a madcap pace that he appeared to consign the older players to the past. Right from the start, Villas-Boas suggested that this was central to the project he had agreed with Abramovich.

If it was, the wunderkind coach had said yes to football illiteracy. You do not take an axe to a team that may well be heading over the hill. You employ a pruning knife and a little nous. You take a step at a time.

When Di Matteo took over, the team were palpably lurching towards free fall. Now, while many millions richer, Villas-Boas mourns the loss of his opportunity to supervise one of the most amazing resurrections in the history of football. Presumably the fantasy would not have stopped there. Who knows what other unlikely triumphs might have flown into his mind’s eye.

Now, as he announces a new Tottenham challenge for the title, he finds time to reprove his predecessor Harry Redknapp for the inconsistency of saying that one day Spurs had a shot at the title and on another that they didn’t.

Poor old Harry, shot out of a job after four mostly brilliant years, will just have to learn that reality is something that can be made up not only as you go along but also after it has been set in stone.

New genes for Aussie flops

Back when Andrew Strauss’s Ashes team were pounding the life out of the Aussies on their own soil, it was amazing how much anger you stirred up among certain cricket aficionados by suggesting the bottom had fallen out of one of the finest, most combative cultures sport has ever known.

Not now, though, not after the gutless Australian surrender in the one-day series.

They are still, nominally, at the top of the one-day ratings but plainly the foundations of Michael Clarke’s team are in desperate need of reinforcement.

That such strengthening will no doubt be sought in the veteran but still impressive forms of Ricky Ponting and Mike Hussey is still another commentary on the dwindling resources of the Australian game.

It is the saddest of reminders that the value of some things we take most for granted are most apparent only when they disappear.

Among these the old pleasure of beating an authentic Australian team can be recalled only with a growing poignancy — and right up to the moment someone Down Under is energetic enough to find the missing gene.

Switch off this Del Boy

Dereck Chisora tells us — two days before the fight we are told the world is waiting for with barely contained anticipation — we will see the “baddest” and the best of him at Upton Park.

No, we will not — not if we have any lingering respect and feeling for a sport which once sold itself on the back of men like Ali and Robinson, Leonard and Duran and is now so horribly reduced by salesmanship from the gutter.

There are two ways of explaining a trek to the East End tomorrow night and even flicking on the TV switch. One is a morbid interest in the macabre, another is a complete collapse in taste. Chisora behaved along with his opponent tomorrow, David Haye, like a disordered thug in Munich while providing the impetus for this disgusting event.

It is also true that he lost three of his last four fights.

Haye trash-talked his way to a pathetic surrender against Wladimir Klitschko a year ago and before that took some pride in beating Audley Harrison in a fight which seemed at the time to be an unsurpassable insult to the fight public.

Chisora’s nickname is Del Boy, appropriate enough for a salesman whose pitch should be rejected by all but fools and horses.