Once might have been an accident. Twice, perhaps, would just be carelessness, or bad luck. Three times is something different. Three times is a pattern. Three times makes you wonder. It is a question there may not be an answer to, but it feels now as though it had better be asked. Just why does Jose Mourinho keep baiting Chelsea's fans?
This is a sufficiently delicate subject that it is worth approaching cautiously. To recap: after Chelsea beat Queens Park Rangers 2-1 in November, Mourinho claimed that playing at Stamford Bridge was akin to "playing in front of an empty stadium." He suggested that, of all the teams in the Premier League, Chelsea "get the least support at home."
Chelsea's supporters handled the situation well. The hardy band of 640 who made the trip to Maribor that week sang "Jose, Jose give us a song" during their Champions League game. It was just the right sort of response -- good-humoured, not at all vitriolic, but carrying a little warning that it is not for their manager, no matter how much they adore him, to tell them how to support their club.
That was it. The whole farrago lasted three days. Mourinho declared the subject no longer on the table.
Last week, Mourinho revisited the subject. After watching his side swat aside Swansea and facing a trip to Anfield for the Capital One Cup semifinal, the Portuguese admitted he "does not like" the song commemorating Steven Gerrard's slip that has become so beloved of Chelsea's supporters (among others). "I think when we have so many songs, we do not need that one," he said.
Again, it seemed a little discordant. In the past, managers have petitioned their supporters to give up a particular chant, but ordinarily such requests are reserved for songs that are particularly offensive: accusing someone of a serious crime, for example, or mocking the deaths of fans or players. The Gerrard song might deride a player Mourinho believes is worthy of respect, but compared to a lot of what is heard in football stadiums, it is positively tame.
It was no surprise, then, that the first chant the travelling support at Anfield offered was the very one Mourinho had requested be struck from the song-book. Once more, Chelsea's fans were reminding their manager, happily but pointedly, that he is in charge of the players, not of the supporters.
This brings us on to incident number three and back, full circle, to where we were in November. After the Capital One Cup semifinal on Tuesday, Mourinho repeated his plea for a noisy Stamford Bridge asking for "25 percent of the emotion Anfield gives Liverpool" to help his side progress. On its own, it was a fairly anodyne comment. In the context, it felt like yet another little swipe.
Now, before we attempt to analyse what is happening, a caveat: On several previous occasions in this space, I've noted that football is becoming ever more like a soap opera. It comes complete with feuds and rivalries and storylines about referees. It borrows, far more heavily than anyone would ever want to acknowledge, from the themes of professional wrestling.
As a result, this twists our perceptions of what people say. Because we approach football as a drama, we treat the words of players and managers as though they have come from a script. We look for allusions, references and subtext. This, you will note, is what has given rise to the concept of "mind games."
There is nobody who is subject to this process more than Mourinho. Every word he utters is treated as though it has been said for some purpose, as though it has been written by an expert script-writer and when the season concludes and we watch it all again as a box set, we will see that he was giving us clues all along.
The reality, of course, is very different. Yes, Mourinho is a fiercely intelligent man and sometimes he does say things that come complete with subtext and double meaning and all of that jazz. But he is not a super-villain from a Colombian telenovela. Sometimes, like everyone, Mourinho just says stuff.
That was my personal interpretation of the first incident described above, his remarks after the QPR game. He first made his criticism in a radio interview, and then repeated it again in the full news conference. When he was quizzed on it for a third time in a mixed-zone chat with the daily newspaper journalists, he clammed up. He did not even want to get into a discussion of whether it was a social issue, one that applied to all clubs, one that was linked to ticket prices and the gentrification of the game. He just stood there, shrugging.
From my perspective, it looked as though he had mentioned how quiet the ground was partly to distract from a disappointing performance from his team and partly because, well, it had been very quiet and it probably had not helped lift his players in what was supposed to be a derby.
With the benefit of hindsight, you wonder. Mourinho wanted to move on pretty quickly after the incident in Maribor. He seemed to have been, if not wounded, then maybe a little grazed by the incident, a little test of strength that he had lost. He seemed to have learned that, ultimately, no matter who you are, if you take on the fans of any club, you lose.
That he has returned to the subject counts as curious. Mourinho is too smart to make the same mistake twice, let alone three times. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that there is, after all, a message he is trying to get out.
It might be very simple. It might be that he knew, if he asked the Chelsea fans not to sing the Gerrard song at Anfield, they would do so louder than ever. Perhaps he is trying to harness their defiance. It might be that he is doing what he can to ensure a better atmosphere at Stamford Bridge in the long run by much the same process (though the lack of atmosphere is not just a problem at Chelsea, and it is not one he can solve).
Perhaps it is more complex than that. Perhaps he wanted to praise Gerrard's loyalty to Liverpool -- the context in which he discussed the song in question -- to get at Frank Lampard, and decided that annoying his own fans, briefly, was a price worth paying.
Or perhaps -- and this is my working hypothesis, as things stand -- Mourinho does not like it when it is quiet. Not in terms of the stadium, but in terms of the club. Those around Chelsea say they cannot remember a time when the place has been so calm. Everyone is pulling in the same direction, working together. It is a place, for once, of harmony.
That is great, except Mourinho does not really do harmony. He is at his best when he has someone to fight. He had plenty of that in his first spell in England -- Arsene Wenger, Rafa Benitez -- and it was served on a plate in Spain when he managed Real Madrid.
When he was at Inter, though, serious foes were harder to come by, so he triggered feuds with whomever he could. His spat with Catania, for example, was a pretty clear example of a man spoiling for a fight.
It is the same at Chelsea now. He likes Louis van Gaal and knows Brendan Rodgers well. There is still Wenger, but it lacks its old punch; Manuel Pellegrini makes a most unsatisfactory opponent, because he won't give anything back.
Yet Mourinho needs a battle to be at his best. That is always the way he has worked. He cannot find anyone worth his time, so he has started to build a bit of tension with his own fans. Nothing too serious, but enough to get him the edge he needs.
That is Mourinho's secret: he is not just part of the soap opera's cast. He likes to write it, too.