Antonio Conte had just finished his latest contribution to the most vicious row of the Premier League era when he was invited to start another.
Was there any temptation to pick up the phone and call Jose Mourinho, he was asked.
He looked ready to go again, to add to what had already been an astonishing sequence of comments, when Chelsea’s director of communications stepped in.
Enough had been said, it was explained, and at this point, in surveying the mouth-frothing progression from ‘clown’ to ‘senile’ to ‘match fixing’ to ‘little, little man’, who would disagree?