London's football tribes, originally developed like others throughout the nation on territorial grounds, have naturally become more fluid over the past 50 years as the capital has become less a collection of distinct towns and boroughs, each with its own identity and sense of civic pride, and more of a homogeneous sprawl. Tottenham and Chelsea, like West Ham and Chelsea, are not adjacent but the distance between their heartlands, or 'manors' as some of their supporters would prefer, is negligible compared with most local rivalries elsewhere in England.

So, the notion that Spurs and Chelsea, who meet for the 138th time in a league match on Wednesday night, are somehow phoney adversaries is facile. It is true enough that Tottenham have a more long-standing antagonism with Arsenal and matches between Fulham and Chelsea between the wars and in the late Forties drew bumper crowds to Stamford Bridge but as early as the 1959-60 season, the attendance for Chelsea v Tottenham was 67,819, 31,000 more than had paid to see Chelsea's so-called historic rivals Fulham at the Bridge the same year.

Towards the end of the following season, Chelsea were ready to cash in on their great England forward Jimmy Greaves. In four seasons he had scored 124 goals in 157 appearances but felt frustrated by the club's reluctance to strengthen a squad that left it struggling in 11th, 14th, 18th and 12th despite his prolific contribution. Greaves was only 21 but Joe Mears, the parsimonious chairman, thought it wiser to let him go than commit to funding the investment required to convince him to stay.

But when Tottenham, who would go on to win the Double in May, made their interest known Mears was intransigent. "If I agree to you moving to Spurs," the owner told Greaves, "the supporters will want to lynch me. So there's no way I'm going to put my head on the block." Greaves was sold instead to AC Milan but joined Tottenham after five unhappy months in Italy and scored his 200th career goal on his return to the Bridge to stymie the boos and what The Telegraph’s David Miller called “well-phrased insults” from The Shed in a 2-0 victory on Boxing Day 1961.

The relationship was not as toxic at the start of that decade as it became by the middle of the next one but a sense of needle between the two grew as they established themselves as vibrant and, in Chelsea's case, youthful paragons of vivacious, attacking football. There was a contrast too in their styles, Tottenham suave, steely but modest, the latter reflecting their manager, Bill Nicholson; Chelsea with more of the swagger and impudence of theirs, Tommy Docherty.