JOSE MOURINHO sparkled; Claudio Ranieri twinkled, and Luiz Felipe Scolari glowered.

Occasionally, the sacked Chelsea boss shouted - from the touchline that is - and did an awful lot of head shaking from the bench as well over the last two months.

Frustration at his players; frustration at refs who had it in for his team (always a sure sign things are not going your way) hung like a grey blanket over the less than approachable Gene Hackman look-a-like.

What amazes me is that he took the job in the first place.

This was the man who ran for cover when the English media first got wind he was up for the England job just over two years ago.

And yet he fetched up in the Stamford Bridge pressure cooker last summer, and is reported to be on the best part of a £7.5m pay-off for overseeing a swaggering Chelsea into a stuttering one.

Maybe it was the language barrier,but after Southend became the latest lowly bunch to find the Bridge less than a bastion in January, Scolari either couldn't make up his mind whether he wanted new players or not in the transfer window,or didn't have the English to express exactly what he did want. "That question's been asked three times now," said a spokesman over the Brazilian's proposed new recruits, and that was because three times, no-one among the media's 70-odd throng could pin down the answer.

One assumes communication was better on the training pitch, but there seemed at least five players who were powder-puff light in failing to knock down Hull's house on Saturday.

I'd forgotten Nicolas Anelka was on the pitch at one stage, and in the same way John Cleese's famous Norwegian Blue parrot was pining for the fjords, it appears Didier Drogba is still pining for Mourinho.