Hal's festive tip to Premiership managers: don't let a cheap punk wind you up

Not really a burning world issue this, but it's near Christmas, I've got some time on my hands and I'm always wound up by the ludicrous, so let's get on with it.

David Moyes became the latest Premiership manager to be riled by Jose "the mouth" Mourihno after Everton's 3-2 loss to Chelsea. Most managers have a whine and a bitch about the referee, the opposition, or the supporters when they lose, or sometimes, when they draw. Mourinho is unusual in that he has a moan even when Chelsea win. This time, he accused Everton striker Andrew Johnson of being an "intelligent" player (the context in which it was said made it clear that the implication was that Johnson was a cheat and a diver.) Everton and David Moyes have submitted a formal complaint to the FA. Fat lot of good that'll do then. But the wider problem with this kind of knee-jerk response to Mourinho is that it just feeds his persecution complex and his ego, which makes it all the more likely that he'll do it again to the next hapless manager his team plays against. Instead, Moyes, and all the managers of the teams who play Chelsea, should issue the following generic press release after the game:

Jose Mourinho is a cheap punk with a very expensive team. The only reason he has been able to win more than a handful of games since taking over in 2004 is because he has had an unlimited sum of money to spend on players. His team is bankrolled by a criminal Russian oligarch who has stolen his wealth from the citizens of Russia. If you measure Jose Mourinho's real success by divide the number of points Chelsea have accumulated in the premiership this year by the amount their team cost, you will find that Chelsea are the least successful premiership team in history. We express our sympathies to Mr Mourinho's family and players for his incompetence, arrogance and poor sense of humour and look forward to dealing with a similar torrent of simple-minded and inaccurate abuse from him at our next meeting.

A straight-bat response like this, across the board, would deflate a lot of the Mourinho bubble. It won't of course deal with the crisis in football caused by the fact that how rich your club's backers are is now much more important than the skills of the players or managers, or the commitment of the fans, but that is a much tougher nut to crack... and would require the frankly unlikely scenario of a general strike by the fans to sort out. But that is perhaps a post for next week, after the general pre-Christmas rush has died down. Keep your hair on, Jose...