Alex Neil was convinced his Norwich City Championship play-off winning captain Russell Martin would follow him into coaching, ahead of their latest reunion.

Neil takes Stoke to Martin’s Swansea on Tuesday, with the Scot looking to edge their duel and guide his Potters away from being sucked into a late season relegation battle.

The duo worked together for three years at Carrow Road, and drew 1-1 when their respective sides met earlier this season in the Potteries.

“I always expected Russell to go into coaching,” said Neil, who is set to face his old club next month. “I’ve got a lot of players I’ve coached now who are managers; Gary O’Neil at Bournemouth, Russell Martin, Dougie Imrie is up at Morton, Canso (Martin Canning), who is with me now, has managed at Hamilton. That makes me feel really old actually.

“If you’d have told me then that Russell was going down a route to be a coach or a manager then I would have seen that, yeah.

“He was always very inquisitive about set-ups, training practices, he was always very clear about how he wanted his teams to play. In terms of the man and the manner in which his sides play, that isn’t really a surprise to me.”

Neil knows what it takes to get second tier promotion, after guiding Norwich to Wembley success in 2015, and believes it is still all to play for in the scrap for the top six.

“Burnley is probably the most consistent team in the league,” he said, speaking at his pre-match press conference. “Middlesbrough have put a consistent run together, Sunderland is on a good run at the moment but if you look across the season, if we had won on Saturday (lost 1-0 at Blackpool) we’d have been two points behind Swansea and people are talking about Norwich competing to get into the play-offs.

“The margins in the league are very, very little. We could have gone up two or three places and that’s where frustration comes from. We could have made progress but we didn’t manage to capitalise on that opportunity.

“But there is very little in the league, very little between teams and if you can put together a good run you can make progress very quickly, as Middlesbrough have shown.”