With Chelsea’s season stuttering to a close after penalty-shootout failure in the Champions League and the loss of their Premier League title to Manchester United, football commentators have gone strangely soft on Jose Mourinho.

By all accounts Mourinho’s job has been on the line since he fell out with billionaire owner Roman Abramovich in January. The pair reached a truce last month when Chelsea were still in the running for a quartet of trophies but now the expensively assembled London side are reduced to the possibility of a couple of domestic cups — they face Manchester United in the FA Cup final on May 19 — his position is again in question.

Newspapers and broadcasters, for whom the garrulous Mourinho has been a boon for the last three seasons, appear to have woken up to the danger of his departure.

From damning his arrogance and querulousness and criticising his team for boring football, back pages have started praising the gallant losers for their never-say-die attitude and Mourinho for the way he has fostered team spirit.

The prospect of the loss of all those column inches of colourful, provocative, teasing quotes and in their place the bland “game of two halves” assertions of other managers, was probably to much to bear. (Soccerlens have a whole page devoted to his best quotes.)

Love him or loathe him, admire or despise him, since he arrived in England the Special One has never been the Boring One.

Clare Lovell is a Reuters sports reporter based in London