Martin Jol still owns a house next to Tottenham Hotspur’s old training ground in Chigwell. He doesn’t really know why, but he cannot cut the ties with the club he started supporting as an eight-year-old and managed for three years.

Now aged 63, Jol has moved back to Holland but it is clear which team he will be supporting when Tottenham face Ajax, a club he also managed, in the semi-finals of the Champions League.

“I was always a Tottenham fan since I was eight with my brother, I had the shirt of Jimmy Greaves from the sixties,” said Jol. “When I was manager, we lived in Chigwell and I was the only one who was left there in the end. Everybody else moved to Enfield, but I stuck with Chigwell. I’ve still got my house there, I don’t know why but I can’t bring myself to sell it. If I have a week off or my little girl has her holidays, we still visit. It’s nice.”

Jol managed Spurs between 2004 and 2007, and speaks with genuine affection for the club he guided to consecutive fifth-placed Premier League finishes at a time when they had been used to bouncing around in mid-table.