Antonio Conte at Tottenham feels like a relationship slowly fizzling out

F or an insight into the mindset of Antonio Conte, the survival mode that he has adopted during this most traumatic of seasons, look no further than when he was given his gallbladder surgery diagnosis at the end of January.

The Tottenham manager was in excruciating pain and, until he was told what was causing it, his mind ran with dark possibilities. Conte, remember, had recently lost three close friends – Gian Piero Ventrone and Sinisa Mihajlovic to leukaemia; Gianluca Vialli to pancreatic cancer.

“Previously, it happened a lot of sad news … [so] when they said to me that I had only surgery for this reason, I was happy,” Conte said, breaking into laughter. “Because you never know when you are not in a good condition what will happen.”

It could have been worse. It was an emergency operation but this particular one tends to be OK. “I discovered after my surgery that many, many of my friends had the same surgery,” Conte said. “For me, the difference was that I had an emergency surgery, it was not programmed [planned]. For this reason, I needed more time, maybe, to recover well.”

Conte knows this now. But he did not when, having missed the win against Manchester City, he dragged himself back to the dugout for Spurs’ defeat at Leicester and the one at Milan in the Champions League last-16 first leg. He is only now preparing for his second return in the second leg against the Italian champions on Wednesday – Spurs are 1-0 down – having sat out victories against West Ham and Chelsea and defeats at Sheffield United in the FA Cup and Wolves.

Conte wanted to be back against Wolves on Saturday only for his doctor to order him to take a few more days at home in Turin. In other words, he was still too weak. Conte added that the