No word from Jose Mourinho was without motive

Jose Mourinho’s press conferences in recent months became increasingly fraught affairs; all sneering condescension, whining self-justification and self-pitying, mixed in with a healthy dose of Stalinist-era rewriting of history.

But if any Manchester journalist tells you this morning that they are glad to see the back of the Portuguese manager’s increasingly brief briefings, rest assured they are lying. I covered perhaps 100 or more such audiences over Mourinho’s two-and-a-half years in charge at Old Trafford and was always struck by two aspects of his public relations philosophy.