• Dutchman plans to take time off after failing at Turkey
• I am always welcome at Cobham, Hiddink claims

Guus Hiddink has revealed he is still in touch with the Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich but the Dutchman has no plans to make a swift return to the game after leaving his post as Turkey coach.

Hiddink had his contract terminated by the Turkish Football Federation by mutual consent last week, after they failed to qualify for Euro 2012, with reports in England speculating that would lead to a return to Stamford Bridge – Hiddink took over from the sacked Luiz Felipe Scolari in February 2009 and led them in a caretaker capacity, winning the FA Cup that year.

Talk intensified following Chelsea’s 2-1 defeat to Liverpool on Sunday, which increased the pressure on the incumbent André Villas-Boas, but the 65-year-old Hiddink’s short-term plan is to take time off.

Asked if he had received an offer from Chelsea, Hiddink, speaking before Sunday’s game, told RT, the Russian English-language news service: “No, I was contracted to the Turkish Federation at the time. The relationship [with Abramovich] was and has been and will be very good. When I go to London I am always welcome at Cobham [Chelsea's training ground] and the stadium.

“We don’t speak every week but every now and then there is contact and I feel very welcome always. I will take some time off and we will see what the future brings.

“I have made a decision to stop the previous job and then one must take some time to reflect and look where there is a prestigious project, not just football but also through other things where I can help somewhere. I haven’t agreed anything with anyone because I was in Turkey. That’s why I will take my time to settle down and reflect on what to do.

“Whether it’s nothing because I am 65 and can retire [I don't know] but I feel I have enough energy to go on and what the future brings, we will see.”

Hiddink has also been linked with a return to Russia – he coached the national team from 2006-10, combining briefly the role with his job at Chelsea – to link up with the big-spending club, Anzhi Makhachkala.

“There is deep affection from my side and frequent contact with all kinds of people in Russia, which I like very much,” Hiddink added. “I have heard it [Anzhi's project] from the outside but it is a prestigious project. I like the project because there must be a good football team. It’s not just football, it’s nice for a region [Dagestan] which is still living in poverty.”

Guus HiddinkChelseaRoman AbramovichTurkeyguardian.co.uk

But the Chelsea owner’s mask slips a little in the witness box at the Royal Courts of Justice

“A win,” the smartly dressed woman solicitor exclaims, greeting her client with a broad smile. She is not indicating optimism about the outcome of the case currently being heard on the third floor of the Rolls Building in London’s Royal Courts of Justice. She means the result of the weekend’s Premier League match involving the client’s football team: Blackburn Rovers 0, Chelsea 1.

In response, Roman Arkadievich Abramovich gives a polite laugh and a small bow. He makes a tiny gesture with his hands, opening them like upturned cups and spreading them apart: the semaphore of self-deprecation. “Yes,” he says, which is about as much English as he has allowed himself over the preceding five days in court.

One of the surprising things about Abramovich, a man of notoriously opaque facial expressions, is that he has such eloquent hands, which are in constant movement to add embellishment to the plainness of his verbal responses. While his left palm is held open and upturned, as if weighing the words he is about to utter in a tone of barely suppressed exasperation, the other hand will be clenched, only the index finger emerging to jab downwards in repeated emphasis. If you did not know that this was a man who made his money from oil and aluminium in the harshest imaginable business environment, you might imagine that they were the hands of an artist.

He turned up in good time for resumption of the case in which his erstwhile friend Boris Berezovsky is seeking compensation for shares in companies which Berezovsky claims they once owned together. Punctuality is the virtue of oligarchs, at least when someone is trying to take a few of their billions away.

Chelsea’s owner was occupying the witness box for the sixth day in a row, answering highly detailed questions about meetings and payments and favours given and received.

This is the longest close-up London has been given of the 45-year-old billionaire who bought Chelsea from Ken Bates in 2003, the first stage of an investment which must now be close to £1bn. That would represent around a tenth of his current fortune, of which Berezovsky is now claiming around half.

The minutiae of the case are mostly boring beyond belief but occasionally revelatory, as when he described the practice of krysha‚ the Russian word for “roof”, used to mean the sort of protection the well-connected Berezovsky provided his younger friend during the days when a small group of Russians were dividing the country’s wealth between them, or the concept of “transfer pricing”, which has nothing to do with Fernando Torres but is the arcane method of sale and repurchase of oil through which, at the expense of the Russian people, Abramovich amassed the fortune that kicked off the Premier League’s current financial arms race.

His friendship with President Putin is what appears to have saved him from the fate endured by Berezovsky, who is in exile in London, or Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was convicted of tax fraud and is currently banged up in Krasnokamensk, close to the Chinese border. Chelsea fans should pray that the relationship remains healthy.

During the breaks in the hearing Abramovich paces the floor outside the courtroom, grabbing a bar of chocolate or a bottle of water, smiling at associates and occasionally exchanging a word or at most two, observed by his trio of English bodyguards. When the day’s proceedings end they arrange themselves outside, scanning the street until he is picked up in a silver Mercedes people carrier, a modest vehicle, albeit armour-plated.

Yesterday’s proceedings were as dry as dust, except for when laughter greeted his remark that he never writes anything down because he usually can’t read his own handwriting, another example of his oft-proclaimed disdain for detail. But if there is any value for the disinterested observer in the proceedings in court 26, it is to demonstrate that the bland, slightly dopey image Abramovich projects from his upholstered seat in the West Stand at Stamford Bridge is very far from the actuality. As if we ever really thought any different.

At last Olympic organisers think inside the box

Thank goodness the London 2012 organisers are now trying to ensure that Box Hill, due to be climbed nine times by Mark Cavendish and his rivals during the Olympic men’s road race next summer, will be open to more than the few hundred spectators allowed on its slopes during the test event earlier this year. With a bit of thought, its ecological value can be safeguarded.

Meanwhile, cyclists experiencing withdrawal symptoms following the end of the road racing season are directed to Mountain High (Quercus, £20), a handsome volume by the photographer Pete Goding and the writer Daniel Friebe, who examine 50 great European climbs. Taking them in ascending order, they start with the malicious little Koppenberg, a feature of the Tour of Flanders, and end atop the 3,384m summit of the snow-capped Pico de Veleta, where the air is so thin that a rider’s oxygen intake is only 67% of that at sea level.

The Alpe d’Huez and the Stelvio are among the familiar names, but the authors also draw our attention to La Redoute, where Bernard Hinault permanently lost the feeling in two fingers in sub-zero conditions during the 1980 Liège-Bastogne-Liège classic, and the Croce d’Aune, the pass in the Dolomites where a mishap in 1927 inspired Tullio Campagnolo to invent the quick-release wheel, a boon to every subsequent rider. What they can’t solve is the riddle of why the Mont Ventoux should finish 3m higher when approached from the Malaucène side than it does from the more familiar Bédoin flank. But the great mountains like to guard their mysteries.

Florian Albert’s finest day

Florian Albert, the great Hungarian centre-forward, died last week, aged 70. For some of us the abiding memory of the 1966 World Cup will always come from Hungary’s 3-1 victory over Brazil at Goodison Park, and the move, started by a wonderfully perceptive pass from Albert, which climaxed with Janos Farkas volleying Ferenc Bene’s cross past a helpless Gilmar. A masterpiece of lethal fluency, invented by a blacksmith’s son.

Poppy row is a red herring

It is amusing, in a grim sort of way, that the campaign for England’s players to be allowed to override Fifa’s sensible ruling in order to wear the Remembrance Day poppy at Wembley on Saturday should be led by the newspaper that once proclaimed: “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!” Bogus patriotism does the dead no honour.

ChelseaRoman AbramovichRichard Williamsguardian.co.uk

Russian billionaire tells Boris Berezovsky court hearing that luxury lifestyle came after he bought Chelsea football club

The oligarch Roman Abramovich admitted on Tuesday he had “an extravagant lifestyle” and said he had gone on cruises with his former friend and now enemy, Boris Berezovsky.

Giving evidence for the second day in his court battle with Berezovsky, Abramovich conceded he owned a string of luxury properties. They include a multimillion pound chateau in France, once belonging to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor; a 420-acre estate in West Sussex, Fyning Hill; and a “large and expensive central London” home, in Lowndes Square, Knightsbridge.

Berezovsky is suing Abramovich for more than $5bn. He claims the Chelsea FC owner betrayed him when he fell out with the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin in 2000. Berezovsky says he was forced to sell his interests in the Russian oil company Sibneft at a huge undervaluation. Abramovich denies the claim.

In his witness statement Abramovich – whose fortune is put at $13.4bn – says he was surprised at Berezovsky’s “extravagant lifestyle” in the 1990s, asserting he was “never interested in imitating this”. Berezovsky’s barrister, Laurence Rabinowitz QC, suggested Abramovich’s statement was untrue. Asked whether he had an extravagant lifestyle, the billionaire tycoon replied: “Well, yes, possibly. I agree, yes, that one could put it that way.”

He implied this only become a reality after he bought the football club in 2003, turning him into a global celebrity.

“I think that when I bought Chelsea football club, that did impact my way of life significantly. It was a turning point really,” Abramovich, speaking in Russian, told the high court. He denied having an interest in any other football club, including CSKA Moscow, to which he has previously been linked.

Abramovich claims he and Berezovsky were never business partners. Instead, he says, he paid Berezovsky huge sums of money totalling $2.5bn in return for political and lobbying services inside then President Boris Yeltsin’s government. On Tuesday he acknowledged he and Berezovsky had been friends – but not close friends.

Rabinowitz suggested that their relationship went well beyond that of “protector” and “protectee”, and that they were intimate business partners. He said Abramovich’s then wife Irina and Berezovsky’s girlfriend Elena Gorbunova were good friends, and that the two families frequently spent time together.

Abramovich admitted that between 1995 and 1998 – while Berezovsky was still an enormously influential figure, and before he decamped to Britain – they had spent eight holidays together, often involving luxury yachts. There were cruises in Spain (twice), Sardinia and Corsica. There was also a new year break in 1996/1997 in the Caribbean. Rabinowitz also accused Abramovich of an “unjustified smear” against his client by implying that Berezovsky was involved with Chechen gangsters and terrorists. In his statement Abramovich says Berezovsky acted as a “krysha” — the word means roof in Russian – guaranteeing both political and “physical protection”.

The QC reeled off a list of prominent Chechens active in Russian political life. They included Vladislav Surkov, Vladimir Putin’s chief ideologue and powerful eminence grise, whose father is Chechen. “Do you say he is a gangster?” Rabinowitz asked. “No, I wouldn’t call Surkov a gangster,” Abramovich replied.

The case continues.

Roman AbramovichBoris BerezovskyChelseaRussiaLuke Hardingguardian.co.uk