Quality of the eggs In Blue Revolution, director Richard Attenborough, a regular at Stamford Bridge since 1942 and now Chelsea's lifetime vice-president, whimsically suggests how he might cast a fantasy movie about the club. Attenborough chooses Harrison Ford to play the striker Didier Drogba and John Wayne to play the goalkeeper Petr Cech. For the role of chief executive Peter Kenyon, he picks, after some deliberation, a young Spencer Tracy. And who might portray Mourinho, the self-styled "special one"?

This time there is no deliberation. "Brando, " says Attenborough, firmly. "Josef is a personality you feel could go explosively in almost any direction he chose to go."

These were unwittingly prescient words, revealed on the day Mourinho went explosively in the opposite direction from Stamford Bridge, with his latest reflection on his expensive and currently underachieving Chelsea squad still ringing bewilderingly in the ears of those who heard it.

"Omelette, eggs, no eggs, no omelettes, " he said. "It depends on the quality of the eggs. In the supermarket, you have eggs, class one, class two, class three. Some are more expensive than others, and some give you better omelettes.

When the class-one eggs are in Waitrose and you cannot go there, you have a problem."

The football world in general will miss such bursts of what can only be called eggsistentialism. But Chelsea fans in particular will miss more than that. It is unlikely the famously lachrymose Attenborough watched Mourinho depart with dry eyes, not least because he has seen the compassionate side of a man better known for an almost complete lack of humility.

Shortly after Attenborough lost his daughter and granddaughter in the 2004 tsunami, he spotted Mourinho across a crowded function suite. "He was right at the other side of the room. Without any ostentation, he just made his way across the room . . . I hardly knew him . . . and put his arms around me. I have always found him a man of great charm and a wonderful persona. I mean, he's a star. I think our [Chelsea's] future is very much tied up with him. I think all of them [at the club], even those with whom he's had a spat once or twice, would be devastated if he was not there."

Let the devastation begin.

As for the fantasy movie, while Attenborough's suggestions of Ford and Wayne to play Drogba and Cech are overblown, and while Peter Kenyon evokes the young Frank Spencer more than the young Spencer Tracy, the choice of Marlon Brando as the smouldering Mourinho is spot on. Indeed, Mourinho's complex, charismatic personality is a veritable jigsaw of Brando roles: part Terry Molloy in On the Waterfront, part Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty, part Vito Corleone in The Godfather and part Colonel Walter E Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. But now he has had his last tango as Chelsea manager and Chelsea, despite being bankrolled by one of the richest men in the world in Roman Abramovich, will surely be the poorer for it.

So, for that matter, will London. When Mourinho breezed into town in June 2004, he seemed the personification, despite the slight handicap of being Portuguese, of London's confident new image of itself as the capital of the world. Here was global football's hottest property, a man who as manager of FC Porto had just maximised extremely modest resources to win the massively lucrative Champions League, choosing to ply his trade on the dear old Fulham Road.

It made sense. Whereas someone so upwardly mobile would once have left FC Porto for Madrid, or Barcelona, or Milan, or Rome, for a man of such burning ambition, London now seemed the obvious destination. It was a symbiotic relationship. Like London, Mourinho was brash, arrogant and, on a good day, absurdly goodlooking. He needed London, and London needed him.

In one of the first few weeks of his tenure, on both radio and television I heard "breath of fresh air" in relation to Mourinho used no fewer than 37 times. Well, London is perennially in need of fresh air, and so for that matter is English football. Even supporters of Manchester United and Arsenal, who had most to lose from powerful new competition, hailed him as a Good Thing.

When United manager Alex Ferguson snorted that Abramovich's riches would not buy success for Chelsea, Mourinho's sharp riposte made everyone smile, including Ferguson.

"Ferguson is right, " he said.

"Money does not guarantee success. I showed that last season when my FC Porto team beat Manchester United."

After a while, though, the fresh air dispensed by Mourinho turned fetid. It would be wrong to assert that success . . .in his first season he ended Chelsea's 50-year wait to become league champions, and captured another title the following season . . . went to his head. His self-regard was elephantine from the start. But his tendency to say exactly what he thought began to win more enemies than friends, and his frequent comments at the expense of other clubs' players and managers were deemed not just provocative but downright incendiary.

Grey Armani overcoat A feud developed with the Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger, of whom Mourinho disdainfully said: "I think he is one of these people who is a voyeur. He likes to watch other people. There are some guys who, when they are at home, have a big telescope to see what happens in other families.

He speaks, speaks, speaks about Chelsea." Mourinho, meanwhile, spoke, spoke, spoke about everyone else.

One club, Everton, even threatened to sue him for effectively accusing their expensive new acquisition, the striker Andrew Johnson, of being a habitual cheat. On that occasion, Mourinho apologised. On other occasions, he did not.

The grey Armani overcoat, which had once symbolised his effortless style and flair, started to look like the cloak of a posturing ninny. And in May this year . . . a particularly bad month for Mourinho, who saw Manchester United succeed Chelsea as Premier League champions . . . you could almost touch the schadenfreude when the news broke that he had been arrested after refusing to N1 let police put his pet Yorkshire terrier Leya into quarantine, in contravention of the Rabies Order of 1974. The headlinewriters positively hugged themselves with delight.

And then, almost imperceptibly, the tide turned again.

Shortly before this season began, Mourinho promised to be less confrontational with his fellow managers. More significantly, he had already won the football world's sympathy for his treatment at the hands of Abramovich, who had recruited his fellow Russian Andrei Shevchenko against his manager's wishes. It is true Shevchenko is not exactly Mr Bean on a football field, and some of us would wish such extravagant high-handedness from the chairmen of the clubs we support, but slowly, surely, Mourinho, the proudest of men, who despite owning a Yorkshire terrier, exudes continental machismo from every pore, was being emasculated.

He couldn't even, at least in public, take any pleasure in a series of woeful performances from Shevchenko. It was a dispiriting spectacle, and when in July Abramovich hired the Israeli manager Avram Grant to be Chelsea's director of football, again against Mourinho's wishes, the writing was on the boardroom wall. To nobody's surprise, it is Grant who succeeds the Special One.

Nor should it come as a surprise, at least to those (such as himself) who consider him a form of messiah, that Mourinho's departure from the club at which his job once seemed as safe as the Bank of England should coincide with an unnerving crisis of confidence in London. Just as his arrival in 2004 symbolised the right of Londoners to feel good about themselves and their city, so his departure seems symbolic of their right to feel a little jittery. If there is to be a bonfire of the vanities outside the wine bars on the Fulham Road, the guy on top of it should wear an Armani overcoat. Nevertheless, it is certain the Special One will rise again, perhaps at Barcelona, where he once held a job as manager Bobby Robson's interpreter.

As a player, Mourinho was anything but special, even though his father, Jose Manuel Mourinho Felix, the son of a humble fisherman, was once the Portuguese national goalkeeper. As for his mother, a 2004 biography, O Vencedor . . .

De Setubal a Stamford Bridge ("The Winner . . . from Setubal to Stamford Bridge"), against which he tried and failed to take an injunction, alleged she lived in fear of him, complying with his command not to speak to the media.

Whatever the truth of that, it is known that Mourinho was born in Setubal on 26 January 1963 and that he grew up desperate to become a footballer.

He turned professional with his father's club, Rio Ave, but clearly did not have the talent to succeed, and it doesn't take a psychoanalyst to realise the disappointment of failing as a player propelled his fierce managerial ambition.

His mother enrolled him on a business course, on which he lasted only a day, before switching to physical education. He became a PE teacher, and the PE attendance figures rocketed. "Until he arrived no girls ever wanted to do PE but suddenly nobody was asking for a doctor's sick note, " a (female) former pupil later breathlessly recalled.

In due course Mourinho became youth coach at Portuguese club Vitoria Setubal and from there assistant coach at Estrela da Amadora, hardly the big stage for which he yearned. Then, in 1992, the former England boss Bobby Robson was appointed manager at Sporting Lisbon and asked for a local coach who spoke decent English to help him with coaching. Mourinho got the job, and when Robson moved on to Barcelona, he went with.

Who, folk in Barcelona wanted to know, was this handsome young Portuguese fella always following the venerable Englishman around? Inevitably, a rumour circulated they were lovers (a source of much hilarity to Elsie Robson and Tami Mourinho, mother of Jose's two children). But it wasn't pillow talk Mourinho shared with Robson, it was detailed consideration of how to get the best out of the players.

Making of the manager When Robson left Barcelona, his protege stayed on, and continued to learn the finer points of coaching from Robson's successor, the urbane Louis van Gaal. It was Robson, he has since said, who taught him how to motivate players, but van Gaal who showed him the importance of preparation. Eventually, Mourinho was ready to manage on his own. He went to Benfica, to Uniao de Leiria, and then, in 2002, to FC Porto, where for the first time he found himself directly managing players of real quality, and where he pioneered his own big idea: that football coaching should be a science rather than an art.

This meant a scientific approach not just to the game's tactics, but also to the psychology and motivation of players. His ideas yielded two Portuguese championships, one domestic cup, the Uefa Cup and finally the real pot of gold, the Champions League, which was when Abramovich, unimpressed with the incumbent coach at Chelsea, Claudio Ranieri, came calling.

At Chelsea, Mourinho continued to refine his ideas and was rewarded with similar success (although not the Champions League he craved).

He sent substitutes on to the pitch with diagrammatic notes for the rest of the team. And he made sure his players went out brimming with his own level of self-belief.

"I don't have to control Mr Abramovich, " he once said.

"He has to control me." Well, Abramovich has finally exercised that control in brutal fashion, and might just live to regret it, not quite as those who crossed Vito Corleone did, but perhaps in a form of footballing vengeance. The final of the Champions League, 2008/9 season: Chelsea, managed by Avram Grant, 0; Barcelona, managed by Mourinho, 3. Now that would truly be a horse's head in Abramovich's bed.

MOURINHO THE MOUTH

"I'm not a defender of old or new football managers. I believe in good and bad ones, those that achieve success and those that don't. Please don't call me arrogant, but I'm European champion and I think I'm a special one."

At his first press conference with the British media, June 2004 "There are only two ways for me to leave Chelsea. One way is in June 2010 when I finish my contract and if the club doesn't give me a new onef The second way is for Chelsea to sack me. The way of the manager leaving the club by deciding to walk away, no chance!

I will never do this to Chelsea supporters."

Mourinho's response when asked if success in the Carling Cup final might be the last trophy he would win for Chelsea, February 2007 "The dog is fine in Portugal. That big threat is away . . . you don't have to worry about crime anymore."

After the police questioned him over his pet's health certification, May 2007 "If he helped me out in training, we would be bottom of the league.

And if I had to work in his worldf we would be bankrupt."

On his difficult relationship with Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich (PICTURED), March 2005 "We are on top at the moment, but not because of the club's financial powerf [it is] because of my hard work."

On leading the title race, February 2005 "I don't know why. But it's very difficult for women to get near me."

On being a smartly dressed sex symbol, September 2006