Of course, the club are spinning the line that it is not adultery per se that is the real problem, but that the alleged assignation took place on “club time”, while the team were on a pre-season tour to the United States.

If nothing else, you have to admire Chelsea’s ingenuity. Are we seriously to believe that players are — and always have been — prohibited from having sex on foreign trips? Or could it be that the Chelsea spinners were desperately scrambling around for a justification, however tenuous, for their shameful double standards?

After all, when John Terry, the Chelsea captain, was alleged to have had extramarital sex (with the ex-girlfriend of a former team-mate, no less), not only did the club offer him “full support”, they also gave him special dispensation to pop off to Dubai in an attempt to rescue his marriage.

As a consequence, Terry missed an FA Cup fifth-round tie, thus compromising his team’s prospects (assuming, as I suppose we must, that Terry is a better centre half than any potential replacement).

But only a fool — or a member of the Chelsea board — would argue that Cole’s antics have damaged his team, given that he is having the best season of his career and is regarded as one of the most accomplished defenders on the planet.

Mourinho, meanwhile, has again demonstrated his ability to catch the English media's attention. Kevin McCarra in the Guardian analyses the Portuguese manager's spell in charge at Chelsea between 2004 and 2007, drawing the conclusion that Mourinho still casts a shadow over the club.

Mourinho announced himself with a 1-0 win over Manchester United on the opening weekend of the season in August 2004. He did benefit from signings such as Claude Makelele and Frank Lampard made by his predecessor, Claudio ­Ranieri. Well over five years have passed, but half a dozen of the players involved that day are still turning out for Chelsea. Of the starting line-up that beat Wolves at the weekend, only Branislav Ivanovic, Yuri Zhirkov, who misses tonight's match through injury, and Nicolas Anelka were bought by Mourinho's successors.

There are honourable reasons for such minor adjustment. It would have been absurd, for example, for Abramovich to go spending at the same excitable rate. Even a billionaire might feel chastened when his determination to splash out £30m on Andriy Shevchenko, who was approaching his 30th birthday in the summer of 2006, led to such ignominy. In terms of strategy, Abramovich is right to feel that his development of the club should ultimately lead to it financing itself. Grown-up considerations of that sort were never strewn in Mourinho's path.

The beginning was the peak. In that first campaign, he could, in theory, flank Didier Drogba with Damien Duff and Arjen Robben, although the Dutchman had injury problems. It was a debilitating system, with the men on the wings having both to attack and to drop back into midfield. Duff and Robben are in action elsewhere now, but the Stamford Bridge demands did take their toll. The exertion could have been even more worthwhile, but Luis García's "ghost goal" beat them in the 2005 Champions League semi-final with Liverpool.