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Martin Jol exclusive interview: I love Tottenham - it will always be my club
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.
Personally I think we should have had more patience with him...and given him a longer reign...it was poor judgement how he was sacked!
“You know I will never say anything negative about Spurs,” he explained. “It was like a rose garden and you never spit in your own garden.”
Jol knows only too well how important a Champions League semi-final will be to Tottenham and chairman Daniel Levy. The club were in crisis when Jacques Santini quit after just 13 games, but Jol steered Spurs to the brink of European qualification before taking them into the Uefa Cup twice in succession in 2006 and 2007.
He was rewarded with a Porsche 911 by Levy, which he secretly sold, but was also fully aware that the Champions League was the Holy Grail.
“Daniel and his vice-chairman Paul Kemsley were obsessed with the Champions League,” said Jol. “Paul told me ‘if you play in Europe, I will give you a BMW’, so when we were in the Uefa Cup I was waiting for it and I think I got a watch from his driver instead. It was a nice watch, but I gave it to my nephew and I never asked about the BMW.
“Paul never turned up with the BMW, but maybe a year later when we qualified for Europe again, Daniel gave me a Porsche 911. That was nice, but the thing was I already had the same Porsche, so secretly I sold it a couple of months later. It didn’t come with any of the papers, so I had to make an excuse to ask for them so I could sell it!”
The closest Jol got to achieving Levy’s dream was in 2006, when Tottenham had spent the majority of the season in the top four, but slipped to fifth on the final day thanks to a defeat against West Ham United after a number of players had fallen ill with food-poisoning.
Asked for his version of events of what was dubbed lasagne-gate, Jol said: “On the morning of the game, at 4.30am, the doctor phoned me and said ‘we’ve got a problem, the players are ill’.
“It was obvious something went off. People were going to the doctor and all sorts, it was very strange, but I don’t want to blame anything like that. It was never easy to go to West Ham, so I don’t want to look for an excuse. I can remember Michael Carrick was ill and he still played, but it’s too long ago to worry about. We were the best of the rest at the time and that was good.”
It was during half-time of a Uefa Cup defeat to Getafe that
news of Jol’s sacking spread around White Hart Lane, but the former West Bromwich Albion midfielder holds no grudge over his exit.
He speaks warmly of Levy and accepted an apology from former club secretary John Alexander, who had been pictured with Kemsley and Juande Ramos a few months before the Spaniard replaced Jol.
Describing how he got the top job at Spurs after Santini quit, Jol said: “When Daniel made the offer to me and my manager, Mino Raiola, he said ‘you will have to take it or leave it because we have five managers at the gate waiting to be manager’.
“Mino said ‘ok, we take it’. Five months later, I went to speak to Freddy Shepherd’s son about Saudi Sportswashing Machine and Paul Kemsley was in the room next to us at the Dorchester Hotel.
“Kemsley probably thought ‘what the f--- is Martin doing, he’s talking to Saudi Sportswashing Machine’ because Shepherd was his friend. So then they had to give me a better contract, so Mino was right. Daniel had to give me what I wanted in the end. That was nice.”
But Damien Comolli, who was appointed director of football to work with Jol at Tottenham, is not remembered so fondly.
“This Damien Comolli was very young and I couldn’t get on with him,” said Jol. “He came into my dressing-room before games and stood against the wall in team meetings. I would say ‘what are you doing? F--- off’, so he had to leave the room. It wasn’t a great relationship.
“Comolli was a smooth talker, I was a lot older and it was not easy. But Daniel believed in that structure and he had to take a decision. He eventually said to me ‘let’s call it a day’ and I had felt it coming, so I don’t feel badly towards him.”
Jol spent a successful season in Germany with Hamburg before, in 2009, taking over at Ajax, where he had a big hand in the development of three of Tottenham’s best players under current manager Mauricio Pochettino.
“Jan Vertonghen is my player,” said Jol. “I converted him from a left-back and midfielder into a centre-back at Ajax. Toby Alderweireld, I put him in the team as a regular. Toby and Jan played together for me, one was 20 and the other was 21. We had an unbelievable season, we only conceded four goals in the whole season at home.
Jol returned to England with Fulham eight years ago and revealed how he accused Levy of leaving him no chance to improve on an encouraging first season after the Cottagers had finished ninth.
“Clint Dempsey was scoring my goals and Mousa Dembele was my best player,” said Jol. “Tottenham came in and I phoned Daniel and said ‘are you f------ me over for the second time now?’ But Daniel never loses his temper and just said ‘it’s business’. It’s funny now, but at the time I was… do you know a better word for it than f-----?”
Jol had to turn down an invite from Tottenham to Tuesday night’s first leg because “it’s my missus’ birthday” but plans to visit the new stadium soon – even though he has already seen most of it.
“I haven’t been yet, but I still have friends at the club and they send me all the pictures secretly from the inside! I love the people at Spurs. It’s my club.”
