He takes you back to West Germany, June 1988. His England side have just been beaten 3-1 by Holland, their second defeat of a disastrous Euro '88 tournament and sitting behind a desk in a sweaty stadium room, he's looking out at what, by his reckoning, must be 200 journalists.

He gets hammered from all angles, every question loaded, nobody especially interested in the answers. After a while, he picks out a small tanned man who's had his hand in the air for a while. "Mr Robson, " asks the man precisely and in an English that is clearly not his first tongue. "I would like you to explain please how your team with Lineker and Beardsley and Robson and Hoddle can lose to a team like Holland."

Robson is completely thrown for a moment. For one thing, he's just spent the past 15 minutes trying to explain exactly how his team has lost. For another, he's picked out this guy because he's held his hand politely in the air for so long that Robson thought maybe his question wouldn't be as harsh as those of the the rabid sunburnt dog pack down the front.

"I wasn't sure what to tell him so I bought some time. I asked him who he was and where he was from. And he told me he was from Malta. And I went like [scrunches up face in confusion], "Malta?

Bloody Malta? What the bleedin' hell does somebody from Malta want to. . . ?" I didn't say that but that's what I was thinking. And through all that, I managed to get my bearings back and I explained to him that Holland had Gullit and Van Basten and Rijkaard and Koeman and Van Breukelen and that they were a very good team."

The point of his story . . . and yes, sometimes you really do have to hang in there if you want to find it . . . is that even though you're under pressure, even though people aren't on your side, if you can buy yourself a quiet moment to think, you can work most things out. Not just in football, not just in public but in your life in general. Steve Staunton's looking to learn from him? This is lesson number one.

"I've been talking to the press most of my life and they're just people with jobs to do. They've been rotten to me at times down the years but I never held a grudge against them. They're just doing their jobs. They've got editors who are chasing them to write one thing or another and they have to do it.

"So I'll be helping Steve along with that end of things. He's been around long enough to know anyway but one of the things I'm definitely going to do is after the game on Wednesday night, I'm going to take him aside for five minutes, just me and him, and I'm going to ask him the questions that I know you lot are going to ask him in his press conference. If he goes in there with five or six answers that he knows because we've run through them, he'll do much better."

Robson's enthusiasm and zest for football is as legendary as it is inexplicable.

Here he is at 73, yakking away about it for hours as if he had nothing better to be doing with his time. Seventy-three years old and not a bother on him.

We're sitting in a Newcastle hotel just down a hill and around a corner from St James's Park where on the previous evening, 50,000 people watched the home side play Charlton. It was cold and wet and blustery and neither side could play worth a lick and at home on the television Chelsea and Barcelona were offering much more enticing fare. And still 50,000 Geordies sat through a scratched out scoreless draw.

Maybe that goes some way to explaining a man like Robson. Around here, folk live for football. He sees himself as lucky because he's managed to live his whole adult life through football.

The playing, he loved.

Loved because it took him out of the pits, loved because it took him out of Newcastle to see the rest of his country, loved because he got to play for England and see other parts of the world. But the playing was nothing against the managing. Listen to the majority of managers who were players in their day and they say nothing beats playing. Not Robson.

"I tell you, it's really exciting, what we're about to start out on. I think it's a thrill. And Steve will find out what a thrill it is soon enough as well.

Because I'll tell you this . . . I found more joy winning as a manager than I did winning as a player. When you win as a player, you feel great but you feel great about yourself.

But when you win as a manager, and I've told Steve this, you've done it for everybody.

You've done it for the team, you've done it for the people watching and if you're an international manager, you've done it for your country.

Nothing beats that. Nothing beats bringing joy to the guy who fills your car up with petrol or the girl you takes your cheque in the supermarket. Nothing beats walking out with your team knowing the whole country is watching and relying on you."

He had offers of other jobs but this one appealed mostly because it won't involve much . . . or indeed any . . . hassle for his wife Elsie. "We bought a house just outside Newcastle there recently, a lovely place.

She was saying to me the other day that we've lived in 28 houses together. , She counted them up. So I think it's time to settle down. This way, I've eight to 10 weeks a year when I'm involved and I don't have to move to Edinburgh or Wolverhampton or wherever, like I would if I was to take over a club team."

He sees the task ahead of the Irish squad as not a million miles removed from what had to be done at Ipswich all those years ago. A small pool of players, few resources, a dire need to punch above their collective weight. He knew it could be done then and has no doubts about what's possible now, even in the short snatches of time Staunton will have access to his squad.

"You keep working on the quality, of course, trying to see if you can improve the player technically and get as near to what you're striving for as you can. But I think the other thing you can do is a bit easier and a bit more practical and that's to get the maximum out of a player's attitude and his confidence and the will and the want and the desire to do well. We've got to make sure that we get the maximum amount of potential out of the players and we want to get every last bit of passion out of them in terms of honest endeavour.

That's how a small team beats a big team.

"It's all down to the character of the players. When I was managing club teams, I always wanted to be with good people. I always said we should buy good players by all means because bad players will get you the sack no matter how good they are as people. But if you can buy good players who are good people, then you have a chance.

They're the ones who'll do it for you. And there are still good people in football. I genuinely believe that."

A believer. Maybe even the last of them.