It’s true I had been up half the night worrying about our half-finished loft conversion during the worst gales of the winter but even so I should not have dropped off to sleep during Chelsea coach Avram Grant’s news conference this week.

Grant is under fire in the Press after Chelsea surrendered both the Cups they held with poor performances against Tottenham Hotspur last month and lower division Barnsley on Saturday.

One might have expected a few fireworks, a bit of tension, emotion — something. My tabloid colleagues tried hard but the Israeli’s expression hardly flickered. It was during another repetition of how disappointed the players were and but how determined nevertheless to win something this season that my elbow slid off the arm-rest and I was jolted awake.

The trouble is Chelsea watchers were spoilt by three seasons of Jose Mourinho. Six months after he and Chelsea parted company we are filled with nostalgia for the apt quote, the off-the-wall metaphor, the acid aside, the humour, the controversy, the fun. There was always a sense of anticipation before the presser and usually a frantic scramble afterwards to try to fit all the good bits into a 500 word story.

No longer. Chelsea are apparently happy that after the Mourinho years the club is, as one insider put it, “under the radar”. I thought, however, that football was an entertainment industry. Whatever he produced on the pitch (winning two championships and three Cups) Mourinho certainly entertained us off it. He must also have done a lot to raise the club’s profile at a time when they were looking for new worldwide markets for the brand. Grant can scarcely be doing that.

Meanwhile Jose, a lot richer after Roman Abramovich’s payoff and well rested after wintering at home in Portugal, is lining up a new job. We can only look enviously to our colleagues in Italy or Spain (assuming the idea of him coming back to Chelsea, raised by Blue Champions, is a non-starter). Wherever he pitches up they will have some good quotes.

PHOTO: Grant is pictured during a news conference in Gelsenkirchen, November 5, 2007. REUTERS/Ina Fassbender

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

After 14 contests in the three years they have been working in England, you might have thought that Liverpool boss Rafael Benitez and his Chelsea counterpart Jose Mourinho would have tired of what newspapers describe as “mind games”.

Far from it. In the run-up to and the aftermath of Wednesday’s Champions League semi-final first leg, the niggling between Benitez and Mourinho has gone on and on.

Among the taunts from Benitez is that Chelsea have got where they are only because of Roman Abramovich’s millions and among those from Mourinho that Liverpool are not good enough to fight for more than one trophy.

Mourinho’s complaint — and he has a good line in lost penalty complaints — about a handball not given at Stamford Bridge was met with the sarcastic retort, “If he says it’s a penalty then it MUST be a penalty,” from Benitez.

Spanish and Portuguese rivalry goes back hundreds of years and there was bound to be keen competition between two men arriving from the Iberian peninsula to make their mark in a foreign league.

Tabloid newspapers lap it up, of course, asking leading questions and often being extremely selective in their reporting to make the sniping appear even more keen.

But are the public really that interested? Two such obviously talented, sophisticated and intelligent football managers should surely be able to capture the imagination of the fans in more edifying and elegant ways.

Clare Lovell is a Reuters sports reporter based in London