Joe Jordan, coach of Spurs, and Paul Ince, embattled manager of Blackburn Rovers, shared a post-game drink on Sunday, a fact which somewhat, but not entirely, contradicted reports that an hour or two earlier they had engaged in a ferocious confrontation in the White Hart Lane tunnel.

The news is not so surprising. Known as Jaws in the prime of his football life in England and Italy, Jordan is still the kind of man you would really want to challenge only from the end of a long distance phone call.

However, the fact that Ince chose a braver course and intruded into a conversation the former Leeds United, Manchester United, Milan and Scotland striker was having with the fourth official says a lot about the pressure he felt after seeing one of his players dismissed in the first half.

It also, maybe, gives a little fresh insight into the huge campaign to install a capital R in the respect due all referees.

Of course we know and value the point of the crusade. Perhaps, though, we should also understand a little more fully that if the R-word is vital so too is the one that begins with A.

Accountability, that is. Accountability for all — and an understanding that when somebody like Jordan raises a question mark, in reasonable terms, he is doing no more than exercising a professional right.

The fact is that at present all post-game assessment of culpability in match-turning incidents is influenced by the insane notion that the only place in football invested with the Papal doctrine of infallibility is the referees’ room.

It was in questioning this principle that Jordan provoked the attention of Ince, who was later quoted as saying, "Joe Jordan was talking to the referee about Andre Oojier and saying that he kicked (Aaron) Lennon two or three times. We’d already had one man sent off and he was trying to get another sent off."

It wasn’t so, says Jordan. The issue raised by Jordan at half-time was that referee Howard Webb had twice warned Oojier for tackles not on the electric Lennon but his former and not entirely fondly remembered team mate David Bentley.

"I said to the fourth official that as I understood it a player was entitled to one warning not two. I wasn’t trying to run the game, I wasn’t challenging authority.

"I have always respected the role of the referee and I see it no differently this season, with the Respect campaign, as I did last season or, come to that, 25 years ago when I was still in the thick of it as a player."

Jordan has always been his own man with his own view of football morality and he surely disarms much incoming cynicism when he declares, "The first thing you have to learn in football is living with the hurt of losing — and be willing to take a good look at yourself from time to time."

For Ince, a driven man who argued so hard and passionately for his chance in big-time management, the chore can rarely have been so difficult. Two months without a win, he knows as well as anyone that already he is fighting for his career at Blackburn.

l As it is with so much that Arsene Wenger currently says and does, there is more than a hint of desperation in his decision to hand the captaincy of Arsenal to 21-year-old Cesc Fabregras.

This would be more of a problem, though, if Fabregas, for all his occasional lurking petulance, was not arguably the most remarkable 21-year-old footballer alive today.

Normally you wouldn’t give a kid the reins in mid-crisis, but then nor would you have expected the same one to go out into the San Siro and cut the reigning European champions into small pieces as he did last season — or inspire a title campaign that but for the injury of Eduardo da Silva might have delivered the most breathtaking title win since the Busby Babes annexed their first in 1956 under the spell of the teenaged Duncan Edwards.

Of course it can be said that Fabregas has already met too much responsibility at the Emirates in the wake of Patrick Vieira and the disappearance of last season’s midfield cohorts Alexander Hleb and Mathieu Flamini, but then where else was Wenger to turn after being obliged to end the captaincy of William Gallas?

Giving it to anyone but Fabregas would have been absurd. When he plays, really plays, Arsenal take on the most brilliant life and now there is another call on his immense pride in his personal performance. Meanwhile, there is a small but rising chorus that Wenger is coming under pressure for his job. Gosh, what a busy time for the white-coats.