Racism in football? Makelele and Gallas comments show us that Jose Mourinho is no more a fascist than Luis Aragones... but no less a disgrace

Football first.

Jose Mourinho has a particular approach to team motivation. It is an approach honed on his achievements with mediocre players at the highest level. It is about subjugation of personality to team ethos. Because a great team comprised of average players will (and indeed should) always be greater than the sum of its parts. It is also about leadership, about who is boss and following orders. But it is also about individual skill and motivation in the service of shared goals. In many ways this is an applaudable approach, which would be praised in areas of human endeavour far wider than sport; and not least in business and public service.

Every now and again this approach meets a rock in the road like William Gallas. This inevitably happens more often as your club's buying power grows.

Mourinho sticks to the book in such instances - unfortunately the book concerned is the Lord of The Flies, rather than the FIFA rulebook.

For Mourinho is a bully. And like the streetfighting gangster he pretends to be, he must first humiliate those who threaten his authority; before binding their loyalty to him with a kiss and the offer of a position in his family business.

Gallas however declined to kiss the ring, perhaps because he always felt a lingering loyalty to the very different Chelsea manager who brought him to the Club, the disarmingly emotionally open Claudio Ranieri. A man who not only wore his heart on his sleeve but garlanded it with his every human uncertainty.

Ranieri was among the first to express his personal horror and professional distaste for Chelsea's statement alleging that Gallas had threatened to sabotage the team if played against his will. But he was not short of company, whether from Gordon Taylor of the PFA or from the Manager of the French National Team, Raymond Domenech.

When all is said and done Mourinho is above all a cold-eyed tactician to Ranieri's emotionally uncertain Tinkerman. And, while Jose is undoubtedly personally slighted by Gallas' decision to turn his back on the somewhat Mansonian Chelsea 'family' he has created, his main aim in attempting to blacken (sic) Gallas name is to overshadow the victory Arsene Wenger has achieved over him with the acquisition of Gallas (and £5 million) from Chelsea in exchange for Ashley Cole.

Arsenal get a player who has won at the highest level and who can play in any defensive position, if admittedly one who wishes to be played consistently in one of them. Chelsea get a sulky one-trick pony who can play in only one, has won little and who had alienated the fans with his unseemly courtship of Roman Abramovitch's deposit account. Not only this, Arsenal had flourished without Cole last season during his long period of injury.

Mourinho had thought that his acquisition of Cole would be a psychological sucker-punch for Arsenal in a season also likely to see Thierry Henry head to Catalonia's cathedral of football the Camp Nou. But the best laid plans can come to naught and ironically it is Chelsea's discarded striker Eidur Gudjohnssen who now plies his trade for Barca, while Thierry earned himself immortality on the Holloway Road for his almost universally unexpected decision to grace the Emirates with his prescence this season.

Against this background Mourinho saw his best option in attempting to make Gallas appear as sullied a batch of goods to Arsenal as Cole undoubtedly is to Chelsea - for Cole's name is already pretty black among most football neutrals and Chelsea fans must wonder a little at the defensive limitations his prescence underlines.

Then of course there is the small matter of slavery. What? Yes, 'slavery', for that apparently, in Mourinho's manipulative little world, is what the relationship between Raymond Domenech's French national team and Chelsea midfielder Claude Makelele represents, when he is called to play for France after earlier announcing his international retirement.

But should I have read I the Sun yesterday it would have been Gallas I encountered first.

Bizarrely, as the British PM clung to power and UK troops suffered another of the grimmest days of casualties in combat since the 'end' of the (latest) war in Iraq, Sun readers woke to see a front page dominated by Gallas and the word 'Blackmail'.

Now I know (really) that the editor of the Sun is not as racist as this front page might lead you to believe. It is essentially a joke and a good way to fill the front page after Rupert and Tony fell foul of the international dateline and Mr Blair had to find another day to announce his likely departure from what one might call 'frontline' politics.

But with its ironic nod to all those infamous but utterly apocryhphal stories about 'loony lefty' councils banning 'Baa Baa Black Sheep' in the 80s and, more recently, 'political correctness gone mad', the Sun is, like Mourinho, sailing close to the wind and while Gallas might have a job pinning a charge of racism on them, he would certainly get them on what laughing boy Tony and his authoritarian cohorts might call 'a lack of respect'.

First witness for the prosection, Mr Lilian Thuram.