Chief sports writer Martin Swain recalls a memorable encounter with football legend Sir Bobby Robson, who has died aged 76.

It was a freezing February night at Villa Park and England had just launched the Sven Goran Eriksson regime with a 3-0 defeat of Spain.

Long after the kick off, I was making my way with a colleague through the bitter cold back to our cars when we spied a familiar figure emerging from the entrance to the Trinity Road stand. It was Bobby Robson.

It was so cold, we could barely summon up the enthusiasm to approach the great man – but this was the first time England had put the national team in charge of a foreigner, Villa Park was the first regional staging post for an England game while Wembley was being rebuilt and the Spanish had just been whipped. There was plenty to talk about.

“Come on,” we told each other, “let’s just see if he’ll give us a quick word.”

I could see the reluctance in his face when he saw us coming and we asked for “a moment of his time.” That wind was icy, he was 68 and already in the grip of the cancer that has finally extinguished his life. But half an hour later, we were still trying to shut him up.

Right down to his toe nails, Robson was a football fanatic. He simply could not stop loving and talking about the game and its characters and as we made our way back to our vehicles that night after the longest quick interview I had ever encountered, myself and my fellow hack marvelled at his stamina and enduring passion.

I should not have been surprised because these qualities marked out this most popular and worthy of footballing knights through the most high profile years of his career, as England manager between 1982 and 1990.

Lest we forget, it was only the final weeks – probably the final few games – of his term of office when the English game truly appreciated the merits of the man leading the nation’s footballers.

Because for all the genuine warmth and affection in which he has been cherished by the football community in his later years, Robson had to endure enormous flak, the first victim of a new age of ferocious tabloid criticism, en route to such esteem.

He was spat on by his own, Newcastle United supporters, when he dropped an ageing Kevin Keegan from his early England squads and became the victim of Diego Maradona’s cheating at the 1986 World Cup.

“It wasn’t the hand of God, it was the hand of a rascal. God had nothing to do with it. That day, Maradona was diminished in my eyes forever,” Robson would later comment and thus establish the core principles of his football philosophy.

Mexico was followed by his failure at the 1988 European Championships, when the Republic of Ireland conjured a fortunate but embarrassing 1-0 victory in the group stages and helped trigger a campaign of such vitriol for his removal it is still a wonder the man survived.

It was at this point that I seized an opportunity to get close to the beleagured Robson for the first time in order to ask him the question dominating one half of Black Country football at the time.

Knowing that his relationship with a hostile Fleet Street was frozen, I called his secretary at Lancaster Gate to suggest setting up a meeting with the major regional newspapers in the hope of conducting a more rational debate about where the England team would go from here.

This was early 1989, many still wanted Robson axed, and the manager pounced on the idea with enthusiasm. A tremendous session was ultimately enjoyed, a session English national managers have repeated since, as Robson got his message out and I got to ask my question: “Bobby, my sports editor is going to kill me if I don’t ask you this but what about this lad at Wolves. Are you going to have a look at him? Does he have a chance.”

I remember his face on hearing the question. It lit up, twinkling eyes, all schoolboy excitement at talking about another topic that tickled his fancy. (And we had already been going an hour or more as other hacks quizzed him on their region’s England candidates.)

“You mean ‘Bully’?” he laughed. “I’ve seen him already. What a scorer eh? You must love him up there. Of course, when a lad gets that weight of goals, you’ve got to have a look . . .” And off he went, dissecting the strengths and weaknesses of the Wolves striker’s game, picking out specific moments he had either seen in the flesh or from TV. We all know where that story eventually took us to, of course. Bully at one of the greatest World Cups and, with his room mate David Platt, in the thick of the great sporting drama that was the Turin semi-final against the Germans, Gazza’s tears and penalty misses leaving Robson a shattered man in the dressing room afterwards.

I have since chuckled at the way so many of his detractors at that time have re-written history and presented Robson as such an admirable figure. My recollection of that trip is one of constant hostility between the manager, his players and the Fourth Estate who had pinned so much credibility at getting him removed before the qualifying campaign began.

It was only as the journey moved out of the group stages and on to the Italian mainland, and Robson’s team gathered shape and momentum under the inspiration of Platt and Lineker’s goals and Gascoigne’s impudence, that the mood softened.

By the time we realised what a gem we had, he was gone. Fed up with the antagonism accompanying the post by this time, Robson had already announced his decision to become PSV Eindhoven’s new boss when Italia 90 was finished.

How he must have laughed at the newspaper headlines imploring him to stay after such a near but gallant miss in Italy.

That was the beginning of a splendid autumn of his career which took him on a grand sweep of European football, tutoring the young Jose Mourinho at Barcelona en route, before returning to make sense of Newcastle, in 1999. Perhaps he was too obviously in love with this game that had entranced him ever since he could remember and that was why even his own mistreated him.