Published: 6 June, 2013
by RICHARD OSLEY

PEOPLE don’t watch snooker any more, the story goes, because there are no characters in the game.

Regardless of what Ronnie O’Sullivan does people need to be kept amused at all times by having a player with funny glasses, a player who wears a different-coloured waistcoat from the rest, a bald one, a fat one, and one that drinks too much.

They were all supposedly so hilarious we were willing to stay up late to see the end of the world championship final.

There is the same charge in tennis where people say it’s all become dull because nobody argues with the umpire now a computer can say whether a shot is in or out, and nobody has a jheri curl perm or a supersize sweatband.

Cricket has no characters, either, because nobody has been so brilliant or belligerent as Sir Ian Botham since Ian Botham.

Everybody in sport is cast as dull, apart from two people: 1. Mo Farah, on the basis that he not only lit up the Olympics but the wacky fool could also arch his arms together to create an ‘m’ – in 30 years’ time, he’ll be asked on Harper Beckham’s late-night chat show and asked to do it for old times’ sake.

And 2. Jose “he’s a character” Mourinho. All we’ve heard since he returned to Chelsea this week is that he is one of sport’s “‘great characters”. Like salivating seals, sports hacks have hung on every Mourinho word, desperate for him to be brilliantly arrogant for them.

“He does give great quotes though doesn’t he?”, they would have been telling themselves in their daily “agree the line so nobody gets scooped” huddles. And yes he does, even if what we are celebrating here are often displays of ugly petulance. He can be quite mean.

No matter. Being a character means everything and Mourinho trumps his predecessors on that score, besting the witless expressions on Rafa Benitez’s face, the gravelly mumbling of André Villas-Boas and the hopping eyebrow of Carlo Ancelotti.

His character – or the one he allows us to see – can be as outrageous as he likes if he just does it all with a cocking wink.

It’s like the way Simon Cowell can reduce a teenager to tears as long as he does it with a slanted smile.

And if you are a character, remember, it doesn’t matter too much if your Real Madrid team gets munched by Borussia Dortmund in the Champions League. Nor that your whole first stint at Chelsea marked a time when even football’s loyalists began suggesting that “money was ruining it all”.

He won the league, he clearly had the best team in England, so what did he do? He spent suitcases of money on Shevchenko, Ballack and Cole in 2006.

Mourinho was a master of man management and media control, possibly a genius at what he does, but Chelsea’s glorious success had surely been founded back then on a chairman’s chequebook.

Don’t worry about all of that now, football has got its character back.

That’s all that matters. Characters.