WATCHING Sir Bobby Robson as he shuffles in his chair, hands moving as if orchestrating another attack on the opposition goal, feet dancing as if willing him to once more let them lead him to the training pitch, his frustration at leaving a job half finished is self evident.

Sacked by his beloved Newcastle United with the new season barely two weeks old after saving the club from relegation and then going on to re-establish them as a force in both the domestic and European game - the hurt still pains him.

A bereavement he calls it, and while the uninitiated might consider that a little strong, it is clear just from studying his mannerisms that it is an accurate description for someone so in love with the game of football. This son of a North-East pit man clearly misses being at the coal face.

"I went in to see the chairman that morning and being dismissed was the last thing on my mind," he recalls, speaking at Newcastle's Copthorne Hotel on the eve of the launch his autobiography Farewell but not Goodbye.

"We had got off to a bad start but there were so many games still to go and we were in Europe. We had just got to the semi-final (of the UEFA Cup). There were 64 teams in Europe that year - 60 went out and we were in the last four.

"Had I gone with my best side I might have beaten Marseille. But I was missing Woodgate, Jenas, Bellamy, Dyer and Bowyer and so we lost.

"This year they got to the last eight, I got to the last four," he added pointedly.

Robson took the decision of chairman Freddy Shepherd and the Newcastle board with a quiet dignity, keeping a lid on the anger and hurt he felt.

"It was a fait accompli. He (Shepherd) had made up his mind. He gave me a letter which said they were dismissing me and blah, blah, blah so there wasn't much I could say."

When you have past the age of three score years and ten, there is little point in holding grudges, but while the intervening months have seen 72-year-old Robson adopt a more realistic outlook, he chooses his words carefully when asked how he feels now about the manner of his departure.

After a minute's pause he replies: "They are very good questions but I am really not here to tank the chairman as it were.

"It's happened and I have to get over it. I know the job I did there and how I left the club. It still rankles me but it's time to look forward and not look back.

"I was angry at the time but there is no point in being bitter anymore."

For a man who has managed at the highest echelons, both at international and club level, Robson says getting sacked from anywhere else would not have left quite the scars that leaving his own club has.

"It would have been easier. I don't think you would have worn your heart on your sleeve so much," he said. "This is my club and my father's club. I came as a boy, the club I belong to and so it hurts. I couldn't believe I had lost my job but I have to get over it, simple as that."

It had been Robson's intention to help find his replacement at St James' Park when he left.

However, instead of leaving in May of this year events took an altogether different turn and Graeme Souness became the next incumbent of what Robson calls, perhaps not so inadvertently, his seat.

"Somebody has to be my successor so I had no immediate thoughts," he said of Souness' appointment. "I knew he had been at Liverpool, I knew he had been at Glasgow Rangers, at Benfica, Galatasaray.

"I had no special thoughts, I had gone, I had been dismissed, they were going to replace me and all sorts of names had been mentioned - Sam Allardyce was one, Stevie Bruce, obviously a popular choice being a Geordie lad, was another."

Ironically, Robson bumped into Birmingham City boss Bruce quite by chance as the speculation heated up.

"I took my wife abroad and it just happened that Steve Bruce was there as well," he said.

"It was remarkable. All the stories in the press were about the club interviewing Stevie Bruce and he was the man for the job and there's Stevie Bruce with me in the Algarve.

"That day I had lunch with him and he said 'tell me about the club' so I told him. But Graeme got the job."

The one thing that angers Robson almost as much as his sacking was the suggestion that Souness was brought in to restore order at the club following highly publicised off the field incidents involving the likes of Kieron Dyer, Titus Bramble, Craig Bellamy and others.

"The media spotlight is on us at Newcastle but whenever indiscipline occurred we dealt with it," he said. "We did fine players, we did have players in, we did yell at them.

"There is a 72 hour embargo on any player going out and enjoying themselves before a match. Now, if Bill Smith wants to go out on a Sunday night and enjoy himself, I can't do anything about that. But what I expect is that he doesn't go out until 4'o'clock in the morning.

"They are not monks. They are young lads. They earn money, they are good looking, they like a nice time.

"What would you do if you were Rooney earning £65,000 a week?

"But we laid down the law. We said on a Wednesday, Thursday, Friday night you have to be home looking after yourself.

"So we laid into players. I have coached all over the world, Barcelona, England, Ipswich, PSV (Eindhoven). I handled big players. So all that stuff annoys me.

"I bet I had more team meetings than Graeme has had on behaviour, on what's right and on what's very wrong."

Robson also recalls an incident with Bellamy who, while on international duty with Wales, got himself into the headlines after a night out.

"He plays on Saturday, goes off to Wales and then on a Sunday or Monday night in Wales he misbehaves," says Robson before adding with incredulity. "I get the blame for that. That's my lack of discipline, what are they talking about . . . "

Did he feel like a parent at times, "Yes," he confessed. "And a priest."

Bellamy has since left the club after a very public falling out with Souness, which at one point became physical. It is clear that Robson would have handled things differently but he is at pains not to criticise the current manager's handling of the situation.

"All players are different and all managers are different," he said. "I am obviously a different character to Graeme. Part of being a football manager is managing players, not just coaching them.

"I saw in Bellamy a great player. I liked him on Saturday afternoons at 3pm in front of 52,000 people because he won you games.

"Ask Celtic about him, they would have liked to have bought him but couldn't because it was too much money for him and for the club."

Gesturing with his hands as if weighing goods on a set of scales Robson went on: "He was a little irritant here, but here . . . One was bigger than the other. I thought I could handle that. If it had been in reverse and the problem was bigger than I was getting from him there is only one answer.

"I liked him and I got on with him. Graeme, on the other hand, is a different character to me and he is probably confrontational as well.

"He has probably said 'I am not putting up with that, out'. Fine, that is his style of management. You live and die by that, like I lived and died on the other side.

"They felt that it was time that he should move, Graeme wasn't prepared to have that sort of player in the club so they lost a very good player."

Newcastle's loss therefore has become Blackburn manager Mark Hughes' gain, according to Robson.

"If he didn't think he could handle him he wouldn't have signed him, would he," he said. "You are not going to marry the girl you don't love.

"Graeme was not prepared to do that and said 'I want him out, I'll get my own players in' and I think that is right.

"I hope it works out because my love for the club still burns bright."