I had lunch in Portugal once with Bobby Robson and he ordered for us both. “Trust me,” he said, waving away the offer of a menu. Bobby insisted that the house speciality, a white scabbard fish served free of bones, never disappointed.

“It's all I ever order here now,” he smiled wistfully.

The restaurant was tucked into the side of the old Estadio da Antas, a gaunt, concrete bowl that served at the time as home to FC Porto.

It was maybe three months after his first cancer operation, hence his preference for fish. Bobby's mouth had, essentially, been rebuilt after surgery on a malignant melanoma in his face and the simple process of eating now required a little forethought.

With a European Championship qualifier looming for Ireland in Lisbon two weeks later, he had agreed to meet for a chat about the strengths of Portuguese football.

Over two hours of wonderful anecdote and humour, I found him disarmingly easy company. There wasn't a flicker of ego or self-importance from this man who would, within nine months, become manager of Barcelona.

Before we parted, he did something extraordinary. He removed the pink rubber plug which now held his mouth upright and Bobby Robson's face pretty much collapsed in front of my eyes. Without the plug, to which his false teeth were connected, he could not speak.

The surgery had been life-saving, but utterly brutal. They had to cut from the corner of an eye right down through his top lip, then pin the flap of his face back like a napkin. They removed his teeth and cut through the roof of his mouth.

He described it with almost child-like wonder, this excavation of a poison his surgeon had likened to “black pudding”.

I sat listening, spellbound. The plug was still uncomfortable and had to be taken out and cleaned after every meal.

And like anyone not long out of post-operative radiotherapy, his future couldn't invite a confident prediction.

Yet, Robson told his story with the lovely, moist-eyed smile of a man who saw blessing in his survival, not hardship in his pain.

It has always struck me that Bobby Robson shouldn't really have been possible. Football never seemed to infect him with its sourness.

He spent a lifetime mixing with greedy and chronically selfish people, yet picked up none of the bad stuff.

Here, after all, was a man caught in the propellers of a vicious tabloid war in the late '80s, one exposed to what he himself termed “ridiculous, outrageous and obscene” media treatment after England's failure at the '88 European Championships in Germany.

He decided in advance to leave the England manager's job once ‘Italia '90' was over, then found himself called a national traitor when it was revealed he had signed a contract with PSV Eindhoven.

England missed out on a place in that World Cup final by a dint of a penalty shoot-out against those Garry Kasparovs of penalty-taking, West Germany, and it was as if the media suddenly recognised that this cartoon creature they had so vilified was, after all, a decent football manager.

One newspaper, famously, now took to suggesting that his decision to leave constituted “treachery” which, in a previous age, would have had him sent to the Tower of London.

Football, of course, is full of disappointing people and Robson met his share of them.

Players with the social graces of warthogs, fellow managers who would go through their careers like Bill Sikes through a London terrace, chairmen devoid of scruple, supporters who could see nothing wrong with standing next to children while making depraved gestures at someone taking a corner.

Fame always begets status in his world. Still does. The more unreachable you make yourself, the more society presents itself at your feet, like a puppy panting breathlessly for approval.

Maybe the beauty of Robson was that none of this made sense to him. He loved football for the game only and that love over-rode all else. Often, the game betrayed and wounded him.

He was sacked at his beloved Newcastle just 16 days into the '04/'05 season despite the club finishing fourth, third and fifth in their previous campaigns.

When he asked why, chairman Freddy Shepherd summoned a single-word response. “Results,” he said.

“Results?” gasped Robson with incredulity. “We've got another 60 games to go, chairman.”

In his programme notes for Newcastle's next game, Shepherd wrote of parting on “very good terms” with Robson.

“We remain great friends,” noted the chairman with true Premier League gall. Yet, it would take the club a year to pay up the remainder of Bobby's contract.

His time with the Republic of Ireland is now commonly lampooned. We were certainly shamed by his treatment on RTE's Liveline the day after a miserable 2-1 victory in San Marino two and a half years back.

Through every single second of a 75-minute interrogation from irate callers and a lamentably ignorant host, Robson's grace was a beacon of human dignity.

In the end, cancer came calling five times yet, typically, he took the wretched thing to penalties.

On BBC television last Saturday night, he was quoted thus: “In life, you can't succeed and be spot on and be clever all the time. Life is more complicated than that.”

Well, Bobby Robson sure as hell got close.