Aston Villa spurs Gross

For some time after he left Tottenham Hotspur in September 1998 the profile of Christian Gross was so low it was widely assumed he was stuck somewhere in the London underground, unable to get back out with the ticket he had so famously brandished on his arrival.

He finally surfaced back in club management with Basle in July 1999, given the task of getting a renowned club back among Switzerland's elite.

With an annual budget of £8.2 million sterling, Basle are one of the wealthiest teams in Switzerland.

They boast gates of up to 30,000, and they have already sold more than 20,000 tickets for tonight's visit of Aston Villa in the first leg of the InterToto Cup final.

As with their opponents, qualification for the InterToto was scant consolation for a disappointing season last time.

And with the current Swiss league season already five games old, Basle have been having problems this year too, and not only with settling into their new St Jakob stadium; three defeats in that time, including an inexplicable 8-1 away trouncing by Sion on the opening day and a 1-0 defeat at Neuchatel Xamax on Saturday, means that Gross is again inviting the kind of ridicule and contempt that poured down from the stands at White Hart Lane, albeit in a milder form.

He has tried to bolster Basle's strike power by buying Christian Gimenez from Lugano for a club-record £1.35 million, but the promising 20-year-old Argentine still awaits his first goal.

In Switzerland the vote of confidence is not the double-edged sword that it is in Gross's old north London stomping ground, so he can take some confidence from the remarks of the club president Rene Jaggi. "We've played five matches and the team is not at its best because of the double burden of InterToto and league games," Jaggi said. "It was logical that the players' minds were already on Tuesday's match."

Tonight Gross comes up against one of his former Spurs in the shape of David Ginola. "I'm looking forward to meeting him again. He's a strong player" was all the Basle manager would say about it at yesterday's press conference. It was a terse assessment from a once expansive man. Many Swiss observers believe his time at Tottenham has scarred Gross's relationship with the press; due respect is important to him and it was not forthcoming in England, at least not on a professional level.

He is tightlipped too about his time at Tottenham and the lessons he may have learnt, but it must furrow his broad brow further that the doubts about his ability to motivate players, which were the beginning of his downfall at Spurs, are emerging again.

For tonight's match he is without his influential South African target man George Koumantarakis as well as the defender Massimo Ceccaroni, both injured, and though the German stopper Oliver Kreuzer will be back to mark Dion Dublin, much will depend on the form in midfield and attack of the Yakin brothers, Murat and Hakan.

"It's fantastic for Basle to play Aston Villa," said Gross yesterday. "It's the most prestigious game yet in the new stadium, and to get into the UEFA Cup we have to win our home leg at least." But for Gross it remains to be seen whether hitting the InterToto jackpot will be enough to allow him to renew his Basel travel pass for another season.