A fortnight ago, an hour into the home game against Southampton, and almost two and half years after he had taken over as Tottenham Hotspur manager, Glenn Hoddle turned to his assistant, John Gorman, and said: 'I'm out of a job.' It was a cruel scene. Southampton had just scored their third goal, without any Spurs reply. A minute before, the still trim figure of the 45-year-old Hoddle had been pacing the touchline in shorts and football boots, as if he wanted to run out and rescue the match himself. Now he looked resigned. He looked fired.
To his right, the Southampton fans sang with gleeful spite: 'You're going to get the sack.' It was payback time. One of the motifs of Hoddle's time in management is the revenge of his enemies. All managers make enemies, but with Hoddle - as opposed to, say, Alex Ferguson - his enemies appear to dislike rather than fear him, and tend to raise their game as a result. A classic example was the 2002 League Cup final, in which Spurs lost to a goal by Andy Cole. When he was England manager, Hoddle dismissed Cole as needing too many scoring opportunities. It was Cole's only chance that day.
Against Southampton, Hoddle was up against the team he had walked out on to join Tottenham. In particular, he was up against James Beattie, a player he had tried to offload at Southampton. 'Hoddle is a great coach,' Beattie was quoted as saying, 'but I know he annoyed some of the senior players. They were irritated by the way he treated them.' Two minutes into the game, Beattie scored from a header. Two minutes before half-time he added another from a 25-yard-free kick.
Hoddle had woken that morning to bleak headlines. One newspaper suggested his career was 'on the edge of oblivion'. Others were less circumspect. He started the season as the bookies' favourite to be first manager of the new campaign to be sacked. Coming on the back of the previous home game, in which Spurs had lost 0-3 to Fulham, even Hoddle, not a man given to self-doubt, could see the writing on the wall.
And how it had changed from his first stint at Tottenham as a player. Back in the Eighties, when Hoddle was the most gifted ball player in England, a graffiti campaign proclaimed: 'Hoddle is God.' Hyperbole is nothing new in the world of sport but, all the same, that was some billing. Over a decade earlier, the same words had been sprayed on the wall about Eric Clapton. The guitarist later became an alcoholic and a heroin addict and withdrew for some time from public performing.
In contrast, the quiet young man from Essex took in his leggy stride the notion that he was the creator of not just exceptional goals, but also the whole universe. Indeed, if anything, he seemed to thrive on the worship of his followers (one Hoddle zealot took to wearing Nazarene robes emblazoned with the diminutive: 'Hod').
When asked by the Spurs sports psychologist John Syer what he felt like on a big match day, Hoddle replied: 'Lord of the Manor.' Syer told him to write the phrase down and put it in his wallet, which is precisely what the player did.
So here was not a man who struggled with the mantle of messiah. If anything, he felt he was not appreciated enough: not only did he possess an unearthly gift for controlling a football, and then striking it with either foot, he also had a message for the masses. And the message was: this world does not understand me.
More precisely, English football did not understand him. Although he won 53 caps for England, he never established himself in the side, never marked out a position that was his. In an era dominated by the stamina and steel of Bryan Robson, Hoddle was deemed a luxury that the national team could only occasionally afford, and rarely when it mattered.
He was accused of lacking heart, guts, balls, arsehole and all the other body parts that made up the typical English player of the Eighties. His critics beyond White Hart Lane called him a Fancy Dan. Brian Clough once said that it took 'moral courage to play the way Hoddle does'. But Tommy Smith, the notorious Liverpool hardman, accused Hoddle of going missing when someone - Smith, for example - got stuck into him. The point of all this was made clear in the nickname that Hoddle was awarded: Glenda.
'People talk about character,' Hoddle complained. 'But what is character? Is it tearing around at 100 miles an hour? It makes me laugh. If I thought defending was that important I could improve my game by 50 per cent. But it isn't.'
This sense of being the lone voice of truth and beauty in a crowd of uncomprehending philistines is vital to understanding Hoddle in his second career. His experiences as a player shaped his opinions as a manager. And those opinions hardened into a kind of religious conviction beyond change when Hoddle left England in 1987.
Believing that a prophet is without honour in his own land, Hoddle joined AC Monaco, then managed by Arsène Wenger. Monaco won the French championship in Hoddle's first year. 'He is the most skilful player I have ever worked with,' Wenger later said. 'His control was superb and he had perfect body balance. His skill in both feet was uncanny... I couldn't understand why he hadn't been appreciated in England. Perhaps he was a star in the wrong period, years ahead of his time.'
Michele Platini famously claimed that had Hoddle been born French 'he would have won 150 caps'. As Jean-Luc Ettori, Monaco's club captain at the time, recently put it: 'For us Glenn was le bon dieu - he was a god. There's nothing else to say.'
With its strong ties to north London's Jewish community, Tottenham Hotspur should probably have been more suspicious about the concept of a second coming. But when Hoddle returned to White Hart Lane in the spring of 2001 there was widespread and inter-denominational agreement that the messiah had at long last returned.
When Hoddle played for Spurs in the 1980s, the club won two FA Cups, a Uefa Cup and finished fourth or higher in the league on four occasions. And they did so in style, often producing football of unpatriotic artistry amid the English game's long-ball slog. In his final season, 1986-7, Hoddle was the midfield architect of a triple challenge for the league (finishing third), the FA Cup (finalists) and the League Cup (semi-finalists).
Since then, the club had slipped into mediocrity. For almost a decade prior to Hoddle's homecoming, only a solitary League Cup decorated the trophy room and the highest finish the team achieved was seventh. Added to which, Hoddle, the former player and lifelong Spurs supporter, replaced George Graham. Despite winning that League Cup, Graham, the ex-Arsenal player and manager, displayed little appreciation for Tottenham's traditional passing game and, still more damningly, the fans believed his heart remained with their bitter, and increasingly better, north London rivals.
Even the most agnostic of observers could see that Hoddle's appointment was a story of salvation rich in Biblical allusion. And no one appreciated the role of saviour more than Hoddle himself.
It has been well documented that Hoddle underwent a kind of spiritual rebirth on a Tottenham visit to Bethlehem in the mid-Eighties. But his first birth took place on 27 October 1957, in the less sacred surroundings of Hayes, Middlesex. Soon after, his family moved to Harlow in Essex.
His father, Derek, was a handy amateur player who never made the grade as a pro. The young Hoddle attended a Catholic primary school where, at the age of seven, he played alongside 11-year-olds in the school team. When he himself turned 11, Hoddle was spotted by Martin Chivers, the beefy Spurs striker with a surprisingly delicate touch. He began training at Tottenham's Cheshunt practice ground, again with boys much older than himself, and signed on as an apprentice in 1973 - at Christmas.
Three years later he made his full debut for the first team, scoring the winning goal. But he failed to get on with Terry Neill, the then Tottenham manager. He told Steve Perryman, later the Spurs captain, that he wanted to leave. 'That was when Steve gave me one of the most valuable pieces of advice to come my way,' wrote Hoddle in his first autobiography, published at the age of 25. 'He told me to take in what I felt was important and let the rest just slide in one ear and out the other.'
This ability to allow criticism to flow through him like wind through grass was a quality, or a handicap, that would come to define Hoddle as a manager. But as a player Hoddle was determined not to let any manager compromise his ideals on how football should be played.
'He knew the game,' says Chris Waddle, a team-mate at both Tottenham and England. 'He had his own beliefs. If he thought something, he'd do it. If a coach said to him do this and he didn't want to do it, he wouldn't do it. In training, other players used to stand and watch. His technique was exceptional. He was two-footed and if he had been blessed with pace, we'd be talking about one of the best players who ever lived.'
Mark Hateley, who was at Monaco with Hoddle, compares him with one of the world's current great players. 'He played off the front foot and could always see options. It was like what I imagine playing with Zidane is like.' Hateley could see in Hoddle qualities that would surface when his playing career was over. 'He was very single-minded. Whether stubborn or whatever, that is part of Glenn's character. To get to the top you have to be selfish and his management style would come from that.'
Not all his team-mates appreciated Hoddle. One renowned Tottenham colleague apparently refused to talk to him off the pitch because he thought he had come to 'believe his own hype'.
Yet Waddle disputes the popular image of Hoddle as arrogant. 'It's not arrogance, it's confidence. I know people a lot larger than Glenn. I think he's down to earth. He's not a centre of attention. He's not Billy Big Time.' Waddle thinks that Hoddle has an inner core of self-belief that protects him from the uncertainties that afflict most other mortals. He cites a Top of the Pops performance of 'Diamond Lights' - the embarrassing pop record the duo made together in 1987 - as a memorable example of Hoddle's sang-froid. 'I was petrified,' says Waddle, 'he was confident. He enjoyed it. He's a positive guy.'
I asked Waddle what he thought was Hoddle's most telling quality as player. 'He released people,' he answered. Strange how even his style of play sounds like a form of spiritual redemption.
Like a lot of footballers, Hoddle was deeply superstitious. He would always undress in the same order, always walked around before a game with his boots untied, and as the good Catholic boy, he always crossed himself twice, once in the tunnel and once when the whistle blew.
When he was 18, he suffered a hamstring strain that he feared would put him out of an upcoming match. His girlfriend introduced him to her mother, a local publican and faith healer called Eileen Drewery. He was too sceptical or shy to allow Drewery to touch his leg but she performed 'absent healing' and the next day, according to Hoddle, the injury was gone and he played.
So began an enduring and, for many people in football, exasperating relationship. Drewery encouraged Hoddle to believe that the meaning of his gifts extended far beyond the confines of a football stadium. Of that first consultation, he would later say: 'I think there were other meanings. I don't think God just wanted me to play in that game on Saturday - it doesn't work like that.'
The other meanings could have only one meaning, the one that deep inside Hoddle had suspected all along: he was chosen.
In a radio interview, while England manager, Hoddle attempted to explain his belief system: 'I have been here before as a spirit - this is just my physical body, it is just an overcoat. And at death, you will take the overcoat off.'
Football managers are known for their fondness for overcoats, but in his previous life as a footballer Hoddle did not look like someone who wanted to slip on the manager's sheepskin. Wenger is rightly credited with encouraging Hoddle to move upstairs. He could identify with the Frenchman's almost priestly model of management.
Solemn analysis was Wenger's trademark and Hoddle adopted it when he became player-manager of Swindon in the summer of 1991. One of his former charges there says that he cannot recall hearing the manager swear. Alone among his previous clubs, Swindon still regard Hoddle with a good deal of respect and affection. Many of the players, in particular the younger ones, were in awe of him. 'We all respected him so much,' one player recalls. 'He was distant, but not aloof.'
He instituted a sweeper system that, with very few exceptions, he has maintained at each of his clubs, including England. The difference being that at Swindon he was the sweeper. Instead of the three centre-backs that are the usual mark of the British version of the system, Swindon had a genuine playmaker, if not a recognised tackler or header, at the heart of their defence.
It is often said that Hoddle has a tendency to blind his players with science, over-analysing to a point where those listening tune out. But Steve White, a striker with Swindon, recalls simple, clear briefings. 'Every player knew absolutely 100 per cent what his job was all over the pitch.'
Mickey Hazard, who played with Hoddle at Spurs and now trains the under-15s at White Hart Lane, was already at Swindon when Hoddle joined. There was rumoured to be tension between them, stemming from their Tottenham days, and things came to a crunch on the training pitch.
As one young player recalls the incident: 'I remember Glenn nutmegging Mickey in a practice match and calling out, as you do, "Nuts". Mickey turned to him and said, "Do that again and I'll break your fucking legs."' Hazard claims to have no memory of the exchange and is unstinting in his praise of Hoddle as player, a manager, and in particular, as a man. 'My mother died recently,' says Hazard, 'and Glenn sat for two hours consoling me. That's the mark of a special man.'
In 1993 Hoddle led Swindon via the promotion play-offs to the Premiership - then left to take over Chelsea. Gorman stayed on to manage Swindon, who went straight back down. It was to be their only managerial estrangement. Hoddle's three seasons at Chelsea were a qualified success, but the qualifications were arguably more telling than the successes.
The season before he joined them, Chelsea had finished in eleventh position. In his first season in charge, Hoddle took the Blues down to fourteenth. In both his next two seasons, the team came eleventh. Hardly a triumph. Against this, he also guided them to an FA Cup Final - their first in decades - in which they were thrashed by Manchester United, which in turn led to a strong campaign in Europe.
Perhaps his signal achievement was the signing of Ruud Gullit, which began the transformation of Chelsea into a multinational squad. But it was a difficult time for Hoddle. The Chelsea chairman, Ken Bates, was locked in battle with one of his directors, Matthew Harding, and as Hoddle grew closer to Harding, Bates became increasingly suspicious of Hoddle.
There was also friction in the changing room. Tony Cascarino described the effect of Hoddle's man management. 'Grown men feel as if they are being treated as children,' he wrote. 'There is a coldness to him... If Chelsea won, it was because of his decisions, and if we lost, it was our fault - never his.'
It was no surprise, then, when he took up the offer from England in 1996. The surprise, rather, was that England made the offer: Hoddle had won nothing as a manager, other than a First Division play-off final. Leaving aside the shortage of other candidates, the appointment seemed to be more about what Hoddle represented than what he had achieved. He stood for technique and flair, and just two years after an England manager, Graham Taylor, had instructed his players to boot the ball out of play from a kick-off, creativity was what the public wanted.
To quote Sir Bert Millichip, the then FA chairman, from Brian Woolnough's Glenn Hoddle: the Man and the Manager: 'The general opinion of the committee was that it was essential that we went for someone with international playing experience, and it was a bonus that Hoddle played abroad. He certainly played the type of skilful football all the committee appreciates and that we need at international level now.'
In other words, they were after Hoddle the player, who had never been central to England when he was a player. Here was Hoddle's chance to refashion the England team in his image, to produce the side that he believed should have been built around him.
The one problem was that Hoddle, at 38, did not have Hoddle to select. The two possible stand-ins were Paul Gascoigne and Matt Le Tissier. Hoddle openly admired Le Tissier, but he dropped him for good after England lost an important World Cup home qualifying match against Italy. Hoddle was ruthless with Le Tissier, more ruthless than Bobby Robson had been with Hoddle, but all he did was end his international career.
With Gascoigne, he ended the only part of his life that offered him hope. The manner in which Hoddle removed Gascoigne from his plans on the eve of the 1998 World Cup is a story that has been told many times: the Kenny G CD, the tears, the broken lamp. More instructive are the differing interpretations of what it did to the rest of the squad.
This is David Beckham, writing in My Side: 'I wasn't the only one upset about the boys who'd been left out and the way they'd had to find out about it. We had a training session the next morning that was just about as bad as any I can remember. The atmosphere was eerie.'
This is Hoddle: 'In hindsight, I honestly feel I was right to handle it the way I did. The reaction of my 22 players the following day reinforced that belief. It was spot on. We had a really bubbly training session - and players like David Beckham and Paul Scholes had come out of their shells.'
What can account for two such contrasting versions of the same session? Either the memory of Beckham or Hoddle is faulty or, perhaps more worrying, Hoddle was unable to gauge the mood of his players.
Hoddle's recollection comes from his notorious World Cup diary, written in collaboration with David Davies of the FA. With its countless hunches, dreams and déjà vus, the book reads like a testament to the occult. He seems so preoccupied with sixth senses that he can't use the other five to see what is happening in front of him. That he wrote the book at all demonstrated a failure to acknowledge a cornerstone of manager-player relations: what is said in the changing room, stays in the changing room.
There is little doubt that he lost the respect of a number of senior players because of the diary. This is David Seaman: 'We thought it was wrong for him to use us as material for his book without our knowledge. None of us like the way the book singled out players and picked on their bad points. It did not help morale at all.'
Hoddle was not a bad England manager. His teams seldom produced the fantasy football that some had expected, but they were well drilled and reasonably effective. He was probably right not to take Gascoigne to France. Even his critics among the players acknowledge his tactical acumen. But his mistakes were not a matter of coaching so much as management.
The way in which he shifted the spotlight of blame for England's defeat on to Beckham after the sending off against Argentina; his tendency to belittle players for their technical limitations; his eagerness to display his own skills - 'If he was chocolate,' one England player observed, 'he would eat himself'; the betrayal of confidences in his diary - all these were about a lack of personnel skills, errors that were made worse by Hoddle's refusal ever to accept that they were errors.
And yet he had reason to feel aggrieved about losing his job as England manager. The cause of the sacking was Hoddle's contention that disabled people were the victims of their own bad karma from a previous life. It was an absurd thing to say. But when it came down to it, he was axed because Tony Blair said he should resign in an interview with Richard and Judy. And that was no less absurd.
At his next port of call, Southampton, Hoddle landed in an environment not dissimilar to Swindon: limited resources, suffering from a recent controversy, and in need of a lift. Matt Le Tissier was heading fast towards retirement and there was no one around of sufficient status to challenge Hoddle's authority.
With just a few games to go of the 2001-2 season, the new manager took Southampton to seventh in the Premiership, pushing at the door of Europe. Then Tottenham phoned. It was the job, he said, that he had always dreamed of having. As he would put it, his destiny.
Sometimes football can resemble first century Palestine, littered with false prophets and mistaken messiahs. Hoddle would have needed to do a lot if he was to live up to his own estimation of himself, let alone that of the fans. He was supposed to save the club, but within two years his task was to save his job.
Once again the first rumblings of discontent were not on the terraces or the boardroom but in the dressing-room. A few games into his first full season in charge, Hoddle found himself giving a half-time talk to a side who were three-nil up against Manchester United, the reigning champions. Apparently he was warned by certain senior players that the team needed reshaping to combat a growing threat down the right flank. Rumour has it that Hoddle ignored the advice. In the second-half United ran out 5-3 winners.
Some observers suggest that Hoddle never regained the full confidence of his players after that game. Whether or not this is true, it is fair to say that he cleared out almost every remnant of the Graham era. Tim Sherwood, Steffen Freund, Matthew Etherington, Ben Thatcher, Neil Sullivan and the £11 million Sergei Rebrov were all sold. Also shown the door were Teddy Sheringham, said to be the leader of the mutiny, and Stephen Clemence.
On leaving, most of them launched well-aimed attacks on Hoddle's management style. He was prone to sulking, they said, and would cold-shoulder anyone who disagreed with him. He would call team meetings, ask for the players' input and then tell them that they were wrong. Tim Sherwood appeared to sum up the feelings of a large part of the squad, when he said: 'No one at Tottenham would shed a single tear if Glenn Hoddle was sacked tomorrow. The dressing room is not together and there is no team spirit. He has absolutely no man-management skills.'
There was also talk of Hoddle's psychological warfare. Beckham has observed that while other managers play mind games with the opposition, Hoddle played them with his own players. He brought in his mentor John Syer, the sports psychologist, who asked players to speak into a pen at team meetings. The Biro was meant to simulate a microphone, and players were asked to vent their true desires as sportsmen. But their true desire as sportsmen was not to talk into a pen.
Yet despite two mediocre seasons, the Tottenham fans stayed loyal to Hoddle. Although only fantasists continued to believe in the dream, the Hoddle myth retained remarkable power from his days as a player. And the manager had few qualms about trading on it.
Before each home game, a medley of the club's greatest moments was shown on the giant screens at either end of the ground. Though meant as a celebration of tradition, the effect was to remind the crowd how distant the glory days had become. However, there was one section - the most prominent - dedicated to someone of relevance to the current side: the one featuring the golden goals of Glenn Hoddle. The soundtrack to this part of the footage was a Chas 'n' Dave rendition of 'The First Noel', with the words changed to the terrace chant from when he was a player: 'Hoddle - born is the king of White Hart Lane.'
The personality cult was doomed to fail, in large part because of its subject's personality. Even Daniel Levy, the Spurs chairman, who cast the deciding vote to retain Hoddle at a summer crisis meeting of the board, was often moved to comment: 'You know Glenn, he is very difficult.'
Behind only Chelsea, Tottenham were the biggest net investors in players this summer. Yet somehow Hoddle managed to buy three strikers - Helder Postiga, Freddie Kanouté and Bobby Zamora - without securing a defensive midfield player. There is not one ball-winning midfielder in the squad. The fact is, any team will struggle if Darren Anderton is the nearest thing it has to a midfield stopper.
A manager under threat might survive players or results going against him but not both. In his last press conference, shortly after the Southampton game, Hoddle called on his players to show 'more character, more bottle'. The following day Levy informed him that his services were no longer required.
A couple of days later, a Spurs player talked of the 'great weight' that had been lifted from the team's shoulders. 'It was like we were listening without hearing.' Many years ago, while in his prime at Tottenham, Hoddle looked forward to what he would do when he finished playing. 'In the end I'd like to be a coach,' he predicted, 'not a manager. I could handle players, but not those football chairmen.'
For once the quasi-psychic was right about the future, albeit for the wrong reason. For all his interest in psychology, he could not handle the players.
Before the following game, a 3-0 victory at Coventry, caretaker manager David Pleat said that there was no future in the past. Yet the travelling fans once more sang that Hoddle was the king of White Hart Lane. The man may have let them down but his legend will never disappoint.
Hoddle's highs and lows
27 October 1957: Born in Hayes, Middlesex.
30 August 1974: League debut for Tottenham coming on as a substitute against Norwich. Makes more than 478 appearances for Spurs, between 1975 and 1987, scoring 110 goals and winning the FA Cup twice and the Uefa Cup.
22 November 1979: Scored on full England debut, a 2-0 home win against Bulgaria. Goes on to win 53 caps and to score eight goals for his country.
1988: Wins the French title under Arsène Wenger at Monaco.
April 1991: Appointed player-manager of Swindon Town, taking them up to the Premiership in his second season.
June 1993: Takes over at Chelsea and wins the FA Cup in the following year.
June 1996: Accepts post as England manager, and takes them to the World Cup finals in France 1998. Knocked out by Argentina in the second round in a game in which David Beckham is sent off.
February 1999: Sacked from the England job following controversial remarks about disabled people. He was condemned by Tony Blair on morning television.
January 2000: Assumes control at Southampton and revives the struggling south coast club.
April 2001: Quits Southampton to return to White Hart Lane as manager of Tottenham Hotspur.
21 September 2003: Sacked by Spurs after two seasons of underachievement.
Hoddle's twaddle
'Michael Owen is not a natural-born goalscorer.'
On disabled people: 'You and I have been physically given two hands and two legs and half-decent brains. Some people have not been born like that for a reason. The karma is working from another lifetime. I have nothing to hide about that. It is not only people with disabilities. What you sow you reap.'
To Trevor McDonald, on ITN News: 'The only reason people are saying I should resign is that they are saying I have come out and said that people disabled and handicapped have been paying for their sins and I have never ever said that. I don't believe that. At this moment in time, if that changes in years to come I don't know, but what happens here today and changes as we go along, that is part of life's learning and part of your inner beliefs. But at this moment in time I did not say them things and I want to put that on record because it has hurt people.'
'At the end of the Argentina game I found myself asking the same question: "Why am I here"?'
'We were going to pretend Southgate was fit when he wasn't. I had no qualms about that. Gareth made me laugh when he said he found it hard to tell lies. I told him they weren't lies.'