According to the official word, Sir Bobby Robson is to act as the “international football consultant”, a mentor, to Steve Staunton. Some in Ireland don’t like the idea — too much confusion, too much uncertainty over who calls the shots.
But you could also argue that it’s a compelling use of common sense — a 36-year-old debutant in management given the sounding board of an old stager literally twice his years.
If reports that the idea was Staunton’s are correct, then that is all the better. There is plenty of evidence that he is an eminently sensible man.
And why should it not work? Robson, who will be 73 next month and has almost 40 years of global football management behind him, would have to have forgotten everything — how to manage players as troublesome as Romario — for a start.
Robson cannot live without active participation in the game that has been his lifeblood since he came up from the briefest excursion down the Durham coalmines when he was barely 15. He has been — along his fantastic journey from Canada to Portugal to Holland, Barcelona and then back home to Newcastle — arguably one of the greatest communicators the game has known. He would talk until the lights went out for nothing, let alone the sinecure that the Irish have flattered him with.
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He has forgotten more about the game, about the cunning and the deviousness that lies in international sport, than most men will ever learn. So what if his pensionable mind does not now have a complete grasp that would put names to faces, or a complete will to stand between feckless directors, such as the Newcastle chairman Freddie Shepherd, the agents, and the squabbling players? It is for Staunton, presumably, to listen to the advice, to extract what he can use, and to reject what is past tense. That puts the presumption squarely on the relatively young shoulders of Staunton, and it is for him to judge what is best to act upon when he gleans the advice for which Robson will be paid.
The Irish see in Staunton a player of vast experience from Liverpool and his World Cups with Ireland. He has brought his own assistant Kevin MacDonald, also formerly of Liverpool, and Alan Kelly as goalkeeping coach. That in most football situations would be the complete triumvirate for what is considered by many to be a part-time situation, given that internationals are not played every week. And it is nine years now since Barcelona thanked Robson very much for winning the Spanish title as coach, only to move him sideways and out, effectively sending him on scouting duties for Louis van Gaal.
Van Gaal was not the type of Dutchman who would listen to a Peter Pan elder statesmen and it was manna from heaven for Robson when his home-town club, Newcastle United, asked him home to rescue them from the mismanagement of the boardroom.
He did that job but in the end he signed miscreant characters in Lee Bowyer, Craig Bellamy, Kieron Dyer, Jonathan Woodgate and Patrick Kluivert. Half the team were, therefore, individuals whose reputation for wild nights out exceeded their potential for putting trophies in the boardroom.
Robson, a man from another generation, seemed to believe that he could sort out the errant characters, and extract from them the quality that they undoubtedly had on the pitch.
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It was like a grandfather talking to children who had peed in the street.
Publicly he defended them, insisting he was the manager of young and spirited men, not of monks.
Some of those players spat in his eye, the chairman panicked and sacked him, and that was a year and a half ago.
Robson has not stopped giving his opinion about the game. Now, if Staunton wishes, that knowledge is on tap for him alone.
Robson’s contract will run for the first two years of Staunton’s four-year engagement; it will be fascinating to see how much the old feller can impart to his pupil — and for how long Staunton chooses to go to the well.