IT WOULD BE TERRIBLE IF footballers and managers were always bringing the game into some form of repute. Far more entertaining is disrepute.

There is always a lot of mock outrage in the papers whenever anyone does something that is deemed wrong, but there would be very little to debate if referees were flawless, players did not dive and José Mourinho said he was perfectly happy with everything and that he hoped everyone drove safely on the way home.

Mourinho is entertaining. Everybody has an opinion about him. There is no middle ground. He was at it again last week, losing to Fulham and then claiming there was one rule for Chelsea and another for all the rest. As someone with some acting experience, I feel qualified to suggest he is a fully fledged drama queen. It is all an act, I am sure, and I imagine he goes home and laughs about it. “You’ll never guess what I told them today, love . . . ”

He knows precisely what he is doing and I think he is probably just relieving the boredom. That said, I do not think the way he goes on when his side have lost is the most sensible thing. It looks like a lack of class and I think Arsène Wenger is the flipside of the coin, always conducting himself with good grace regardless of how things are going for his side.

I am not sure Mourinho really wants everyone to dislike Chelsea, but that is a necessary evil when you have a Russian billionaire behind you. People dislike Chelsea because of jealousy. Full stop. It is nothing to do with Mourinho. People think they are buying the title and they don’t like it, even though they would all be perfectly happy if the same thing happened at their own club.

I don’t agree that his antics have any negative effect on the players. I think players are far less concerned and knowledgeable about what is in the media than fans are. They will read the papers, but unlike a lot of fans, they won’t believe most of it. And the one thing nobody can say about Mourinho is that he is boring.

Sometimes it is hard for football people. Take Alan Shearer. He has never been one for falling out of nightclubs and is better known for celebrating a league title by creosoting the garden fence rather than painting the town red. He gets called boring because he is always bringing the game into repute. He is a family man who loves his kids. And so, because you can’t hammer him for drunken escapades, he gets hammered for being dull.

From a footballer’s wife’s point of view, I prefer boring, but it comes with its own problems. When I said recently that I had been to only one film premiere in the past few years, it got twisted to sound like I was complaining about that. It’s my choice, why get dressed up to watch a film? I just don’t find it comfortable.

The fact is that Danny and I are happy being boring and not going to premieres. We eat at Pizza Express rather than The Ivy. We don’t go nightclubbing because it is too noisy. Danny plays golf and likes Su Doku. He has also started watching Deal Or No Deal, the Noel Edmonds quiz show. He is quite a fan of that.

Meanwhile, Newcastle’s defeat by Chelsea in midweek means that Shearer will finish his career without a winner’s medal at his home-town club. I think that is sad because he is a great player who is widely respected, but it does not really make too much difference.

Future generations are always going to think of him as a tremendous striker for both club and country. They are not going to say, ‘He’s the bloke who won sod all at Newcastle’. He will go down in history as a legend. That and for being the bloke with the paintbrush.

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