Bobby Robson was the manager of the English team that wonderful day in Stuttgart when Ireland beat them in the first round of the European cup finals.

It was a beautiful day in Ireland and my poor English father was tortured by the 50 or so people squashed into our back garden for a party (my birthday seeing as you asked!)

They persecuted him for hours, chanting, "Who put the goal in the English net, we did, we did," when he came back from the pub predictably despondent. There were some variations with "Houghton, Houghton," but the sentiment was the same.

Just shows you how long ago 1988 was. Today we would have followed the game outside on someone's phone or laptop.

Anyway, Robson ended up helping out with the Irish in later years when Steve Staunton was in charge.

Robson's health was already failing - he found out he had cancer while working for Ireland, but he never complained.

"Football is my drug," he said. "I don't like going to supermarkets on a Saturday afternoon."

And now, yet another of soccer's finest has left us.

Bobby Robson was one of those unpretentious English Northern lads who called it as it was.

Not for him the prawn cocktail lifestyle so wonderfully derided by Ireland's Roy Keane.

Robson was no Ronaldo, no celebrity superstar.

During the 1960s, he famously traveled home by bus after playing for England in Wembley.

In 1961, he had take his shoes off to ease his battered feet and then limped home from the bus stop after scoring against Scotland.

He was gutted when lost his place in the 1962 World Cup to another Bobby, Bobby Moore, after being injured.

To add insult to, well, injury, he was also kept out of the English team which won the World Cup in 1966.

"I confess I gritted my teeth and shook my head," he said after watching Moore lift the trophy. "I was in the top division with Fulham. I felt I could handle anyone. I could have played that day in 1966."

 
He didn't suffer fools gladly. In 1986, when England were put of the World Cup quarter-finals by Argentina, or more specifically, Diego Maradona, Robson was apoplectic at Maradona's so called hand of God.

"It wasn't the Hand of God," Mr. Robson said. "It was the hand of a rascal. God had nothing to do with it."

Robson symbolizes an era of soccer which has nothing to do with what's going on across stadiums across England now.

The absence of the Robsons and the antics of the Ronaldos has a lot to do with why I gave up on Premiership soccer some years back.

Truly, they don't make them like Robson any more.