Jermaine Jenas reveals ‘cut-throat’ way he was axed by Tottenham and Andre Villas-Boas

Jermaine Jenas has revealed he found out his time at Tottenham was up after being denied access to the training ground.

Chelsea’s new manager, Enzo Maresca, recently admitted plenty of the Blues’ bloated squad are not present in first-team training as a number of stars have been left out of their match day squads.

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talkSPORT understands former first choice left-back Ben Chilwell has been offered to Manchester United, whilst £50million player Raheem Sterling has been stripped of his squad number and left out of Chelsea’s games so far this season.

Former England international Jenas hosted talkSPORT Drive on Thursday and revealed that he’d been in Chilwell and Sterling’s position himself when playing for Spurs.

He told co-host Jermaine Pennant: “Mine [Spurs departure] was bad like that.

“Spurs had built this brand new training facility and I was there for about six months and I thought, ‘this place is absolutely stunning, it’s beautiful’.

“But what it was, when you walked in through reception – so at this point Andre Villas-Boas had just joined the club. I did the whole pre-season.

“My Achilles weren’t great, I’ll be totally honest. So I wasn’t anywhere near my best but obviously thought I’d be given a bit of time to kind of get myself up to speed and maybe around Christmas time I could fight for my place in the team.”

But unfortunately for Jenas, that’s not how things panned out.

He continued: “I literally walked through the door, and we used to have this turnstile type thing where it had a fingerprint ID, so you put your thumb on it, it would spin through and you’d go in.

“And I put my thumb on it and it just went [error sound]. It just went red! So I went ‘oh, wipe my thumb a bit’, it just went red.

“I looked at the people at reception and they put their heads down, everyone just dived for cover. Nobody even spoke to me or pulled me to say, ‘look this is not going to be happening’ or anything like that.

“It was just cut throat as that. But that’s the way it is, unfortunately, in football it’s a business and that’s what happens!”

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“It was just cut throat as that. But that’s the way it is, unfortunately, in football it’s a business and that’s just what happens!”

Jenas signed for Spurs from Newcastle for a initial fee of £7m in 2006.

In 2011 he went on loan to Aston Villa and then, following Villas-Boas’s arrival in the summer of 2012, he went on loan to former club Nottingham Forest.

He was then sold to QPR in January 2013.

He made 202 appearances for Spurs in total, scoring 26 goals and recording 23 assists.