AS Jose Mourinho did little to calm the growing witch hunt at an extraordinary post-match press conference, celebratory music could be heard blaring out from the nearby Burnley dressing room.

Amid the mayhem the Clarets had secured a draw at the league leaders, but that had quickly been forgotten by everyone apart from those in that dressing room.

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A game that hinged on a red card, the story had become Ashley Barnes, not the result or the dismissed Nemanja Matic.

Complimentary about Burnley when Chelsea won at Turf Moor in August, this time the Clarets had got in the way of Mourinho’s title charge.

He sat with a face of stone - brooding but determined to make his point without making his point.

Never mentioning Barnes by name, Mourinho listed the numbers 30, 33, 43 and 69 like a particularly irritated bingo caller.

They were the minutes of his grievances. Two were highly debatable penalty claims.

In minute 30 he made it clear that he felt Barnes should have been sent off for a challenge on Branislav Ivanovic, before his involvement with Matic in minute 69.

His cryptic words were enough to make the striker the unwanted subject of the newspaper headlines. The code he had laid before the media was not difficult to crack, and it was never intended to be.

All because of a tackle that was not even a tackle, but a pass.

Martin Atkinson did not give a foul when Barnes made contact with Matic’s shin, because it wasn’t one. Almost a horrific accident, yes. A foul, no.

Barnes had the ball, attempted to pass it to a team-mate and after striking the ball his leg carried on to its expected position just off the ground.

There his studs collided with Matic in awful fashion, and the bend in the Serbian’s leg illustrated how close the Chelsea man came to a terrible fracture.

But Barnes did nothing reckless, and certainly nothing deliberate.

The suggestion that he also deserved a red card for at worst a clumsy aerial challenge on Ivanovic in the first half seemed baffling.

But Barnes had been painted as the villain and that was that. He was widely condemned in the media - including by Piers Morgan, with a tweet so strong it is best not repeated here.

Sean Dyche faced a barrage of questions when he followed Mourinho into the media suite.

The managerial head to head had been comical earlier in the day when Burnley fans chanted for the Ginger Mourinho and received a wave back from the real Mourinho, who perhaps mistakenly thought they were singing his name.

But now the duel had taken an unexpected turn.

For a man who had just secured one of the best results of his career, this was arguably one of Dyche’s toughest press conferences.

Journalists grew ever more frustrated by his justifiable reluctance to condemn his own player, and his refusal to watch a six-second video clip on an iPad that was produced.

That video clip looked bad for Barnes, no doubt, and it was that clip that most of the media had seen, myself included.

Only on viewing the full incident again could you properly understand the reasons why Barnes had connected with Matic’s shin.

If there are any fears of retrospective action, there should not be.

The only retrospection should be recognition of the result that Burnley - second in the Premier League fair play table, it should be remembered - achieved on Saturday.

Lilly Wood’s Prayer In C was the song blasting out of the dressing room, after they had been given no prayer at all of a result at the Bridge - 17-0 was the prediction of Blackburn Rovers fan and former World Superbike champion Carl Fogarty.

If defying the odds upsets people, so be it. Burnley are in the Premier League to win points, not friends.