Jose Mourinho press conference after Eva Carneiro row: An awkward, incoherent and petulant performance by manager

Mourinho offered no coherent reason why Eva Carneiro and Jon Fearn should be banished from the bench

The many faces of Jose Mourinho during yesterday’s press conference (Reuters; EPA)

He had threatened a walkout minutes earlier but when at last Jose Mourinho did decide to storm out of his own press conference, he made it as far as the door in the Cobham press room before he had second thoughts. The penny dropped that this would, in all likelihood, make matters worse, and in those few awkward moments, arguably the world’s most famous football manager was stood in the corner of a room looking for a way back.

“I play against Manchester City! I play against Manchester City! Who wants to speak about that?” he exclaimed, part in irritation and part in hope that someone might ask him about playing against Manchester City. When the stand-off looked like it might continue with him conducting the press conference with one hand on the door handle, someone stepped in to end his misery.

He got his Manchester City question. He sat back down behind his desk again. Well, he got a question about why it was his own team was so undercooked. It was the kind of enquiry that Mourinho might have curled his lip at in recent weeks but this time he threw himself into the answer as he might the embrace of an old friend.

Even so, it was hard to forget that image of the double Champions League winner stood in front of a closed door and strangely unwilling to step through it. It is not the image that Mourinho seeks to project. He is, after all, fondly imagined to be the kind of perfectionist you could believe would walk out of any institution if the mood took him: expensive restaurants, six-star hotels, Real Madrid.

As press conference walkouts go, this was the equivalent of many of those Mohamed Salah cameos at the end of the 2013-2014 season: lots of early conviction and determination, but notably lacking an end-product.

The afternoon as a whole was not the Chelsea manager’s finest hour and he seemed to know it. Earlier in the week he had demoted two medical professionals for what they did in the closing stages of the game against Swansea on Saturday, and those two have subsequently been vindicated by video evidence, General Medical Council guidelines, the Premier League doctors group and other professional bodies you might not even have heard of before this week.

In response, Mourinho offered no coherent reason why Eva Carneiro and Jon Fearn should be banished from the bench for tomorrow’s game against City, and the longer the questions in his newspaper briefing went on, the longer a dramatic exit must have seemed the best bet.

He insisted that he and his medical department had a close, open relationship in which grievances could be aired. He lavished praise on Paco Biosca, his medical director. He went into detail as to why not everyone could be accommodated on a bench on matchdays. But no one was left any the wiser as to why Carneiro and Fearn had found themselves canned.

There were the usual dark inferences that hinted at deeper factors, notably the handful of references to people, unnamed, for whom “the bench is very important”. We were left to make our own minds up in that regard. He mentioned Carneiro and Fearn by name just once in two separate briefings with the broadcasters and then the newspapers.

The hope will be at Chelsea that this just goes away, and while you can usually rely on the Premier League to throw up a club in crisis after just two weeks of the season, it might not be that Mourinho gets his wish. All the experts, all the guidelines laid out by the medical bodies say that Mourinho got it wrong. The question is whether he accepts that and reinstates the pair of them.

There are other interesting questions that require answers, such as what is Biosca’s role in this? As medical director, a doctor himself, and Carneiro and Fearn’s direct boss, it behoves Biosca to point out that Mourinho has got it wrong when it comes to the treatment of his staff. But Biosca appears very much in favour with Mourinho, judging by yesterday. The only individual in this whom we know for sure has given Mourinho a piece of her mind is Carneiro, because the television footage from the Swansea game showed her doing so.

“I am far from being ruthless,” Mourinho said at one point yesterday. “Far, far. I have a fantastic relationship with almost everyone that works with me. I’m open to mistakes, I’m open to communication, I’m open to dialogue, I’m open to critics. I make mistakes. And as some people in medical staff were saying to me, ‘We work together, we improve together’. [I’m] far from being ruthless.”

That admission over mistakes was a rare one for a man who has a tendency to see the game in his own unique fashion, but for the time being we will have to take his word for it on that regard. Because by his actions this week he seems unwilling to acknowledge that he has made any mistakes at all.