He is a fascinating football man with a long and unfinished — and perhaps unfulfilled — career. Dick Advocaat, the Zenit St Petersburg coach, is well known to Rangers fans as the man who led the club to a glorious treble and double between 1998 and 2000, with a team who played sharp, precise football, often one-touch and at pace.

There were fine European matches, too, for Rangers under Advocaat that supporters in Glasgow still talk about.

The irony of football knows no bounds. He is back with Zenit to face his former club in the Uefa Cup final in Manchester, and it is the same Advocaat: loveable, bullish, in truth quite shy beneath his buoyant exterior and unfulfilled as a coach.

I first met Advocaat in February 1998, when he was coach of PSV Eindhoven, where he had successfully wrested the Dutch seat of power from a fine Ajax team. With Walter Smith in the process of completing his final season (so we thought) at Rangers, David Murray, the club’s chairman, decided to home in on Advocaat.

On that February morning I approached Advocaat at the PSV training complex on the edge of the town. Hours earlier I had phoned Andy Roxburgh at Uefa to pick his brain about this Dutchman and Roxburgh said: “You’ll not miss Dick when you come across him. He’s a determined wee guy whose got that look about him . . . the look that says, ‘Don’t you mess with me, pal.’ ”

At the PSV training complex Advocaat came walking towards me in a bib, with a whistle in his mouth and a ball under his arm. His team’s training was about to start. I approached him as a stranger and he said: “If you wait here for a couple of hours I’ll speak to you after training about Rangers. I’m going there in the summer.”

That moment was the start of a long, eventful and exciting vigil of Advocaat in football. I spent four hectic years covering him in Glasgow, then went to Euro 2004 to follow his chaotic adventure with Holland, where he was issued with a death threat by one Dutch supporter. Then I followed him to Germany at the 2006 World Cup finals, by which point he was in charge of South Korea, whom he nearly guided to the last 16. Now he is with Zenit, but all the while he has hankered for one place: England and the Barclays Premier League.

When we met again for coffee last week I asked Advocaat if he felt fulfilled as a coach. It was a question that he took an hour to answer. He has won titles in three countries — the Netherlands, Scotland and Russia — and led Holland to various championships. There has been hurt, though, as well as success, specifically at Rangers, where in fractious circumstances he felt hounded out of Glasgow in December 2001 — partly by the media — after his exciting team began to wilt before Martin O’Neill’s revived Celtic.

“At Rangers I was so close to men like John Greig and David Murray — I felt it was my club,” Advocaat said. “I think we were a better team to watch than today — we played attacking, exciting football. Wherever I go in the world Rangers fans say to me, ‘Thank you for the great time you gave the team.’ They may have different words for the way it was at the end.

“They remember the good times. I now regret that I quit Rangers in December 2001. David Murray wanted to step down at the time and I felt it might be right for me as well. I was tired. When I work I give everything for the club. I do all the training, watch games and watch DVDs.

“Also, the media was jumping on me about the debt at Rangers [by then it was £80 million-plus] and the team was 14 points behind Celtic. I felt, for me as a coach and a manager, it was unfair; to have two great years but then a poor third year. I couldn’t understand it. I felt I was a good coach, especially in Scotland, but that they were pushing me away. So I eventually left and took over the Dutch national team.”

I asked Advocaat if he felt there had been an injustice about the way he had been forced to step down at Rangers. Did he feel he deserved it?