Suave, raffish, handsome and nicely turned out, Mourinho was Portugal’s gift to the women of Britain, apparently.

Oh, how they wailed and moaned, Fleet Street’s terrifying legion of female columnists, having learnt from their menfolk that he was out of a job at Chelsea.

It helped that unlike 90% of his Premier League managerial rivals he was articulate and seemingly possessed of a neat turn of humour. He spoke English with charming, quirky malapropisms the ladies understood and rather liked.

In one of his last press conferences before he was unceremoniously shafted . . . sorry, left Chelsea “by mutual consent” last week, he talked, with that wry, cute, curl of the lip, about how you need class A eggs to make a good omelette and that it was best if the eggs were purchased at Waitrose.

Waitrose, girls! You just know that in the unlikely event that the fat, sweaty, monosyllabic Sam Allardyce (he’s the Newcastle manager) was charged with making an omelette, he would head straight for Budgens or Lidl. And, of course, he wouldn’t think of putting any herbs in it. The women columnists swooned and fawned, much as they have done for the past three years, since Jose was imported from Portugal.

“Brooding, honed and typically solitary,” one panted. “Beauty, charm, glamour and decency,” gasped another – that last adjective presumably occasioned by the fact that Jose was very nice to his pet dog, Leya. Elsewhere he was compared to Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise. He was a “naked sexual challenge”, too, apparently. Ooer. Steady, girl.

Meanwhile, Jose did that unheard of thing and pushed Madeleine McCann off the front pages. The sacking of a mere football manager occasioned the sort of coverage you might expect if a senior politician was caught in congress with a goat. Gordon Brown was even moved to remark upon how English football had lost one of the “great characters of the game”, having been notably quiet about the queues that had formed outside Northern Rock the week before.

The whole business was spun with devilish expertise by Mourinho, intimating dark conspiracies.

In the Chelsea dressing room 23 players were weeping, Mourinho told a Portuguese news team, “and two players hung their heads in shame”. We were invited to infer that those two players were the Ukrainian Andrei Shevchenko and the German Michael Ballack, extravagantly talented footballers who were nonethe-less foisted upon Mourinho by his boss (yes, remember – he had a boss. Jose sometimes forgot this little fact).

To be sure, neither player performed with great verve or vigour for Chelsea and Mourinho let it be known he suspected one or another, or both, of grassing him up to the baleful and distant Roman Abramovich, the club’s billion-aire owner. When Shevchenko, a striker, missed an easy chance to score, which he would do with cheering regularity, the cameras would pan to the Chelsea dugout and Mourinho’s face, wreathed in contempt, a mass of derisive tics and shrugs.

It is here that we see the other side of Mourinho – the case for the prosecution. He arrived telling us that he was “the Special One”, but was he really so remarkable? FIRST, the football bit. The job of a manager is to get the best out of his players and Mourinho singularly failed with Ballack and Shevchenko. Under Mourinho, these two players, ageing but generally agreed to be among the best in the world, and earning, let us not forget, £130,000 a week each for their trouble, were allowed to grow sulky and disconsolate, their confidence ebbing away with every game.

Mourinho reacted to such an adverse situation the way he always did: with a fugue of disinformation, sotto voce allegations and that perpetual insistence that he was the victim of some concealed animus from someone or somewhere.

Even this spinning was spun to Mourinho’s benefit. Defeat in crucial games would be met with some outrageous allegation from Mourinho: the referee had been nobbled by the opposition, he wasn’t allowed to play his chosen team, someone somewhere had cheated but would not be punished because everyone hated Chelsea, etc, etc.

The press, ever kind to a man who gave them entertaining soundbites and a continual spurt of controversy, always claimed that Mourinho’s gamesmanship was a selfless ploy to deflect criticism from his beaten team. Well, maybe. But it was also a useful ploy to deflect criticism from himself.

In the end, Mourinho did not quite do what he was paid £4.5m a year to do: deliver to Abramovich the Champions League trophy and establish Chelsea as the best team in Europe. This despite having at his command unlimited wealth to buy who he wanted when he wanted. Imagine that! To be able, effectively, to choose your team from anyone in the world. Mourinho was in that position, spending nearly £200m in three years – and still Chelsea failed to win the Champions League.

Abramovich reportedly complained last year that his team was playing boring football – and you have a right to expect some thrills for 200m quid plus salaries and a rebuilt stadium, you’d have thought. Only 25,000 or so turned up to see the sterile draw with the hapless Norwegian side Rosenborg in the Champions League last week, Mourinho’s last game in charge.

I suspect that you and I could beat Rosenborg if we put some jumpers down in a local park. Russian oil oligarchs don’t mess about; they are known for a certain unremitting ruth-lessness. The Special One was “let go”. SO farewell, Jose. We will remember with some fondness the articulacy and, particularly, the impishness and the refusal to kowtow to any form of authority, be it his boss or the rather less sinister British bobby.

Mourinho was cautioned, if you remember, in the summer for having taken evasive action when his Yorkshire terrier was targeted for having supposedly contravened quarantine regulations. He badly needs a sense of direction

Jose wasn’t having that and he angrily spirited the beast away somewhere, a two-fingered salute to the authorities, which met with the approval of pretty much everyone in the country apart from Westminster council’s animal officers. We like dogs – and we like people who like dogs.

He wasn’t too keen on being told what to do, Jose. Banned from his usual place in the dugout for a couple of games, for having made spiteful and unfounded allegations about a referee, he allegedly remained in contact with his team via a radio kit concealed under an assistant’s woolly hat. He was supposedly smuggled into his team’s dressing room in a laundry basket at half-time so that he could give them his instructions personally.

As you might imagine, these infantile shenanigans were greeted with great hilarity from the media. What larks! What chutzpah! What derring-do! But we forgot that the blameless referee against whom he had made his foul accusations, Anders Frisk, was forced to retire from the game as a result of the hate mail and death threats he received after Jose had suggested, without a shred of evidence, that he had been “influenced” by an opposing manager at half-time.

That’s the thing with Jose; he has a distinct aversion to being bullied by authority, but is not remotely averse to doling it out. The Special One was also a premier league bully; devious, Machiavellian, totalitarian. A man never happier than when he was dissenting, but who would himself brook no dissent.

He could be peevish too. He was forever being reminded by the Spanish press that he had been merely a translator at the Catalan club Barcelona before his ascent to greatness really began. When one hack did so when Chelsea were playing there he was told: “Yes, and now I’m one of the best managers in the world. But you’re still doing the same job you have always done.”

He was a natural for television and particularly commercials, with those laconic good looks and – what was it again, girls? – the salt’n’pepper hair and that Armani coat slung nonchalantly around the shoulders.

One of his lucrative adverts was predicated upon his apparently uncanny, supernatural ability, to be one step ahead of the rest of the pack, to second guess the entire world (and indeed the elements). It rang a little hollow when he himself was second-guessed by less special managerial rivals – Rafael Benitez of Liverpool (quite often), Frank Rijkaard of Barcelona (at least once), Sir Alex Ferguson of Manchester United (now and again). And whoever the hell the manager is of lowly Rosenborg, the one who finally did for him.

Women say any way, Jose

A nation swoons. Judging by the reaction to his exit from Chelsea last week, Jose Mourinho certainly charmed the women of Britain. Gushing columnists lined up to pay tribute to “the Special One”.

— Jessica Callan of The Independent wrote: “When the pouting Portuguese pitched up at Chelsea, the women of Britain stopped tutting at Match of the Day and started staring dreamily at the screen . . . Jose even looks sexy when he walks his Yorkshire terrier, goddamnit!”

In an unsisterly fashion she also remarked that Tami, Mrs Mourinho, was “no oil painting” and that she didn’t seem to realise how lucky she is.

— In the Daily Mail, Rosie Millard could hardly contain herself: “Mourinho, brooding, honed and (typically) solitary, was basically a naked sexual challenge, out there on the touchline every Saturday afternoon.”

— Alison Kervin, writing in The Daily Telegraph, brought out the wider lessons we learnt from the Portuguese: “His beauty, charm, glamour, decency and inner strength are the very antithesis of the drunken, ill-educated yobbishness we associate with the game.”

It didn’t stop there. She went on: “Will we ever see his like in football again? How will we replace this entertaining, contrary and exhilarating being with his Hollywood good looks and sexy accent? He was beamed down into a world dominated by sheepskin coats, guttural accents, pot bellies and shiny red faces – and now he has left. What a duller place football already seems without him.”

— In The Times, Anne Ashworth showed she understood quite how impressive his managerial achievements were, how he brought the club its first league title in 50 years. “With Mourinho, it always comes back to the clothes,” she wrote. “Even at this week’s lacklustre Champions League match against Rosenborg, Mourinho looked defiantly turned out.”

— Zoe Williams, in a Guardian piece entitled “Seven ages of Mourinho”, used a lyrical expansiveness of which Jose himself would have been proud: “What are those nipple-shaped features under his jumper that look just like nipples? No . . . no, it cannot be . . . he is wearing that cashmere without a vest! Without underthings of any sort. Who’s to say he’s even got pants on?” Crikey!

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