“JOHNNY RINGO!” Doc Holliday declares. “Should I hate him, darlin’?” The two gunmen continue to stare each other down. And Holliday speaks again. “There’s somethin’ about him reminds me of . . . me.”

And he smiles. “Nope, I’m sure of it. I hate him.”

An emotion shared, I suspect, by Sir Alex Ferguson, as fate hurls him once again against José Mourinho in what increasingly looks like terminal conflict. Hate, yes — but hate mingled with all kinds of other things, like respect, fear and a strange kind of love.

There are pretenders and there are kings in waiting. Telling them apart is one of the great skills in sport, and every other area of power-seeking. “The Bruce’s brother, Thomas Fitzgerald, silken knight, Perkin Warbeck, York’s false scion, in breeches of silk of whiterose ivory, wonder of a day, and Lambert Simnel, with a tail of nans and sutlers, a scullion crowned,” Dedalus muses.

But Mourinho, it seems, is no Perkin Warbeck, no Lambert Simnel. He moves not with the swagger and braggadocio of a bluffer, but with the self-certainty of someone who is born to the job. He behaves like a man who expects people to give way to him as a matter of common justice.

Wednesday night’s nonsense was wonderfully typical of the man. He suggested that Ferguson, as manager of Manchester United, influenced the referee in the match against his own club, Chelsea, but did not do so in a frothing, red-faced rage. Rather, it was a matter of a narrow-eyed, insolent cool. He, too, recognises in an opponent something of himself, and he wanted to make it pedantically clear that this is not a matter of pretender against king. It is a great deal more serious.

The remarkable thing about Mourinho’s conduct after the match was that the referee, Neale Barry, seemed to have very little to do with it, an innocent bystander caught in the crossfire. But Mourinho was not discussing referees, he was telling Ferguson that his days are numbered.

I don’t suppose it was premeditated. What the incident tells us is that Mourinho’s entire spirit is concentrated on destabilising English football. The dominant personality in English football is Ferguson, never mind Arsenal’s recent dominance. Naturally, Ferguson is the man that Mourinho is gunning for. Nothing personal, Sir Alex, but you personally.

Mourinho’s manner — cool, relaxed and temperate — might have been purposely designed to upset Ferguson. But Mourinho is not trying to annoy Ferguson; there is bigger game afoot than that. He is seeking to invite the worm of self-doubt into Ferguson’s mind.

Ferguson has thrived for years on his strutting, barking self-certainty, his confidence that there was no one in English football capable of standing up to him. His feuding with Arsène Wenger, manager of Arsenal, has been vastly entertaining, but Mourinho is different. Mourinho is trying to unman him. And that is a great deal more serious.

Mourinho has acquired the knack of imposing himself on Ferguson. He achieved this last season, when he got the better of him in the first knockout round of the European Cup as manager of FC Porto. It was not just the slick organisation and self-belief of his team that mattered. It was also the fact that Mourinho was frightened of nobody.

It was not the routine fearlessness of the young, the kind that has about it an element of cheek. Mourinho was not seeking to cock a snook at Ferguson. He was not even announcing the beginning of a rivalry. He was announcing the beginning of the end.

The torch, he was saying, is coming to me. The crown and the sceptre with it. The transition is not complete — it will not happen at all if Ferguson can help it — but both Mourinho and Ferguson know that Mourinho is no pretender.