Loving life at the coalface

English FA Premiership:Bobby Robson is 70 this month. Michael Walker talks to a man whose incredible thirst for the game is just as strong as it was a half century ago.

The knife and fork in Bobby Robson's hands were set aside. An anguished crease spread across his face and the banter in the restaurant down a cobbled Newcastle back street subsided.

He is a worried man and it is not the visit of Arsenal to St James' Park tomorrow that concerns him. No, a date 10 days away is the problem - February 18th, when he turns 70.

"Yes, you're right," Robson said after the subdued pause. "I am sensitive about it."

A figure whom many see as the grand old man of English football, an honourable Corinthian in a cynical sport, is sufficiently perturbed even to consider retirement because of it.

"I don't know," he said after another pause. "It worries me. I'm concerned what people think of me at 70 still working, acting like a raving lunatic. That more than anything might persuade me to pack it in one day when maybe I don't want to."

His head shook sadly at the prospect of retiring. Then it bounced up again.

"Seventy and still working?" he asked, incredulous. "But I like it. I'm doing what I want to do. I don't want to do anything else. I don't want to retire. I'm trying to build a top-class situation here.

"Don't you think people think, oh, silly old goat?" he said. "I'm conscious of people thinking, he's not going to go on for another year, is he? Why?

"There was an old Austrian coach who died of cancer, I think he died on the touchline. I was thinking, Jesus, what is he doing? That's what worries me, really."

Quickly, however, the knife and fork were back in his big grip. As with the guilt in missing his wife Elsie and their children, Robson's concerns about his age are not greater than his concern for football. He is not about to spend more time with his family.

He may be 70 soon but he has seemingly inexhaustible energy and his rolling contract at Newcastle means there is no termination date in sight.

Any speculation about the future would unsettle the present, as it did to Alex Ferguson at Manchester United last year.

When Robson arrived, in September 1999, Newcastle were 19th in the Premiership, behind Watford.

"I don't want to hurt Ruud Gullit" - Robson has never criticised him publicly - "but Alan \ was out of favour, there were lots of injuries, no one seemed to want to be fit to fight.

"We've made great strides and I think it would top it all if we won the title, considering from where we've come."

That Robson can speak in such terms says much about his Geordie endeavour. The day we met, he was completing the signing of Jonathan Woodgate and trying to find a way to tell Elsie that on February 18th he would be away facing Bayer Leverkusen in the Champions League. "She might have organised a dinner party."

Elsie may have had something planned, but then experience would have told her otherwise. Robson admitted to living their life as a "chauvinist" consumed by a "disease" - football.

"After England, I told her we were going to Holland, I didn't ask her. Then I told her we're going to Portugal. I said I'd accepted a two-year contract [at Sporting Lisbon].

"She said: 'You've done what?' I said: 'It'll be good, it'll be different, just a couple of years and I'll retire.' Then came Porto - she liked it there, made English friends who were into port wine. Then I said we were going to Spain. She said: 'Why?'"

Having not watched a single Barcelona game during Robson's time in Catalonia, Elsie was again disbelieving when he accepted the Newcastle job.

But at 66 he took it because he still had two unfulfilled urges - to manage Newcastle, and to win the title. The first is sated and Arsenal tomorrow will offer a barometer of how close he is to the second.

"I won the title in Portugal and Holland," he said, animated again. "I should have won it in Spain. I almost won it at Ipswich. I lost it - twice - on the last day of the season, 80-81, 81-82. The last match on the last day - twice.

"We were at Middlesbrough and at half-time we were champions. We were winning 1-0 and lost 2-1. Aston Villa lost at Highbury and still won the championship."

Still hurts?

"Oh, very much. Because Alf \ won the championship at Ipswich and I'd love to have matched that. It would have been a fairytale."

Given that Newcastle last won the title in 1927, six years before his birth, he is aware that he is again part of a fairytale, albeit bankrolled.

"I'm very proud at coming home. Winning something is not easy; there are plenty of good teams who don't win something, and we might be one of those. But if I could win something here it would mean a great deal to me.

"I know at some time I've got to stop. I know I've limited time. But I can't see myself stopping. I know I will, I know one day I will get up and say I can't go to work today. But I feel fit, very fit.

"I came back to retire, basically. We'd been away 10 years and I said: 'It's time, Elsie.' But I couldn't see any opportunity. I couldn't see me getting back and my age was against me. Then Ruud dismissed himself.

"It was my father's club, the club I watched as a boy. I can remember coming here and seeing Shackleton, Stubbins, George Robledo. I can remember it vividly.

"My father would have loved it now. I might have got him a ticket for the directors' box. He'd have put his collar and tie on."

Robson's bold eyes always water when he speaks of his father, Philip. A Durham miner, Robson had followed his father down the pit before leaving for Fulham as a teenager. He made his debut in 1950 and won his first England cap seven years later, but the mining memories are powerful for him, too.

When he was manager at Ipswich he took his board down the Derbyshire pit where his brother Tom worked. By the time he returned to the north-east, Thatcher had erased his coal-dust past so he took his players to Beamish Museum instead.

"They didn't like it. I quite liked it. It was a good idea."

Duncan Ferguson apparently disagreed with Robson that day, yet it is Ferguson who belongs in a museum, not Robson.

Although he touched on names ranging from Duncan Edwards, Danny Blanchflower to Romario and Kevin Beattie, Robson is very much here and now - you have to be to survive in football for 53 years.

Nostalgically, he called Bryan Robson his favourite English player, but Romario, he said, taught him: "Don't try and change leopards, because you can't" - a lesson he applies to Laurent Robert. When he spoke of Ronaldo, Robson compared him to Thierry Henry. The past informs his present.

"Henry is sensational, not just his pace, his confidence, his eye for a pass. They tell me he's got to do better in the air, but funnily enough Ronaldo was like that, you know. I had Ronaldo for a year and he scored 38 goals, one in the air."

Talking of Arsenal forwards, Robson said Francis Jeffers had turned down Newcastle to go to Highbury. "We bid £8 million, I think."

Robson went for Craig Bellamy instead. And therein lies some of his appeal. A man who can link Bellamy to Edwards, whose last England international before the Munich air disaster was Robson's first, is unique.

Guardian Service