Chelsea owner Roman Abramovitch hasn't been seen around the club's Stamford Bridge HQ much recently, confining his involvement to telling manager Felipe 'Big Phil' Scolari that he hasn't got any money to spend and trying to economise by making the players pay for their own meals at the training ground in Surrey. Roman sought to revolutionise football when, after buying Chelsea five years ago, he hired Porto manager Jose Mourinho and gave him an open cheque book to buy any player in the world. Which Jose promptly did and succeeded in winning the Premiership in his first two seasons although, unluckily, he failed to cap this with the Champion's League. But then Roman interfered, insisting that Chelsea bought over the hill striker Andrei Shevchenko for £33m, against Mourinho's wishes, and trying to rein in the outspoken (and sometimes stupidly difficult, it has to be said) Jose by appointing a director of football above him. Jose was eventually fired, he's now winning the Italian league with Inter Milan, and Abramovitch appointed Avram Grant and then Scolari to do even better without annoying him and his cronies too much. But they didn't, and aren't. In the meantime Roman got divorced and ran headlong into the credit crunch. Like other Russian 'oligarchs' he is thought to have used his stakes in big Russian companies to buy interests in others outside Russia, only to find that the value of the Russian shares (previously supported by stratospheric raw material prices) has fallen in the credit crunch, as have the shares these were used to buy. A double whammy then. Abramovitch, at the last account, had put a mind-boggling £578m into Chelsea, but as a loan not equity or, perish the thought, a gift. God help Chelsea if he ever wants it back.