Oh, how we’ve missed you Jose Mourinho - but I hope you lose

If tonight's San Siro encounter has the grace to mirror the glories of the pre-fight bitchfest, stand by for a 5-5 draw concluding with the coaches firing Kalashnikovs at one another in the tunnel.

Logic suggests that it won't. As with so many title bouts down the ages, the excitement generated by the action tends to be in direct inverse proportion to the level of queeny melodramatics that preceded it.

Anyway, the first instalment of a Champions League double header between two Italianate sides, built on defensive work rate and designed to punish on the break, has cagey stalemate stamped all over it.

Yet why concern ourselves with peripheral events on the pitch when the meeting of Inter Milan and Chelsea is so captivating off it?

God, but we've missed him. When I say him, I refer of course to that Iberian laureate of narcissism, Jose Mourinho.

And when I say we, I mean not the public, who probably tired of his histrionics long before Roman Abramovich, but we in the media for whom he was such an inexhaustible supply line of cracking quotes and alluring headlines.

The intervening years have not diminished what his admirers see as his impish charms; and what his detractors regard as borderline insanity.

Whether he's crazy like a fox or crazy like a nutter is one for psychiatric professionals. It ill behoves the pop psychologist to determine whether falsely accusing a Swedish referee of colluding with Barcelona officials, hiding in a laundry basket to evade a subsequent UEFA ban and claiming to keep a "dossier" thrice the length of War And Peace on that "voyeur" Arsene Wenger is mischievousness or symptoms more commonly displayed by those on Nurse Ratched's ward.

A while ago, he seemed to align himself with the latter, because (if only in the gags of outmoded club comics) our psychiatric hospitals are packed with men who believe themselves to be the Messiah.

"Even Jesus isn't loved by everybody," Mourinho responded when a TV presenter greeted his arrival at Inter by pointing out that the difference between him and God is that God doesn't think he's Mourinho. Carlo Ancelotti, then his Milanese rival at AC, was quite the Doubting Thomas. "If Mourinho is Jesus, then I am certainly not one of his apostles," he said.

Alright, it wasn't the Algonquin Round Table on Improv Night but it did capture the mutual loathing of a bellicose eternal adolescent whose motivational technique is the artificial creation of the bunker mentality, and a canny, reticent Italian to whom professional controversialism is anathema.

Yesterday this feud was ratcheted up a rung, with Ancelotti claiming that all of non-Inter supporting Italy wants a Chelsea victory because they hate Mourinho so much; and Mourinho — freshly in receipt of a three-match touchline ban for a handcuffs gesture suggesting the ref was shackled by allegiance to his foes — accusing Ancelotti of belonging to a mafiosi coaching "clan" that is — what else? — out to get him.

He further taunted Ancelotti that Chelsea remain his team and here he has a point. With John Terry still in disgrace and that champion dummy-spitter Ashley Cole threatening to flounce off over any fine for his recent naughtiness, the Mourinhesque tone of perpetual farcical chaos persists.

On the field, however, there have been developments to remind us that Roman Abramovich sacked him primarily because that the football he produced was so soporific.

It is the apparent paradox of Mourinho that all his flamboyance is devoted to glorifying himself and the extension of himself that is his side.

The Chelsea of Ancelotti relies on the same reservoir of talent, and retains a form of catenaccio, but is much more aggressive. No longer do Chelsea grind out a lead and sit on it.

These days they are less defensively sound, notably at set pieces, and infinitely less dull to the eye.

Evidence of this may be scant tonight, when Ancelotti's concern will be keeping a clean sheet (a challenge made minimally tougher by the continued absence at left-back of Ashley, to whom keeping the sheets clean has never seemed a priority).

This may be the only thing the coaches agree about because not conceding will be Mourinho's ambition. He will be content to take a scoreless draw to the Bridge in a fortnight.

Such is the way with first legs when the away goal counts double. Seldom do they produce classics even between more carefree teams than the leaders of the English and Italian leagues.

So thank Jose Christ for the chance to fixate on the brusqueness of the post-match handshake and which Chelsea player (JT is the favourite, ahead of Didier Drogba and Frank Lampard) is the first to risk his current boss's wrath by giving his ex-gaffer a hug.

Me, I'm with the Italian Mourinho-haters of Ancelotti's estimation in praying for an Inter defeat and a humiliating one at that. This is partly London loyalty and the feeling that Chelsea richly deserve this trophy after the agonising near misses of recent years.

Mostly, though, it's the conviction that anything to dissuade a Premier League club from hiring Mourinho, who transparently aches to return, is a good thing.

Delectably nostalgic as this refresher course in the Portuguese's apparently paranoid derangement has been, I find a little of that goes an exceedingly long way.