JOSE FACES NEW ‘ABUSE’ HEARING AS FA APPEAL

THE FA have taken the extraordinary step of appealing against an independent disciplinary committee’s decision to clear Jose Mourinho of misconduct. English football’s governing body lost the case against the Manchester United manager last week but decided to fight on after viewing the commission’s report yesterday. A new three-man panel will hear the case again at the end of next week or the following week, leaving Mourinho free to be on the touchline for Sunday’s Manchester derby at the Etihad. The 55-year-old was alleged to have mouthed obscenities in Portuguese into a television camera following United’s comeback win over Newcastle at Old Trafford a month ago, but the commission found the case not proven. The FA hired a lip-reading expert who asserted that Mourinho said: ‘F*** off you sons of b ***** s’ as he left the pitch after a 3-2 win. However, Mourinho used his own expert witness, an assistant professor at the University of Lisbon — to argue successfully that the comments had been taken out of context and a more accurate translation would be ‘F*** yeah!’ or ‘Hell yeah!’ The commission accepted the latter point of view after deciding that some of the FA expert’s evidence lacked context and was contradictory because he admitted that Mourinho’s words ‘can occur as a joke or a teaser’ among Portuguese males. The commission ruled that Mourinho did not shout the comments, some of which were ‘inaudible’, directly into the camera and that his words would have only been picked up by someone with a good knowledge of Portuguese profanities. The report’s conclusion read: ‘A central contention was the relevance of context. The FA could not simply, and boldly, assert that JM’s words were objectively abusive and/or insulting and/or improper without consideration of the context in which they were used. ‘The opinion that the contextual translation of “f*** yeah” or “hell yeah”, spoken in a celebratory manner, was the most accurate for those reasons.’