Now, as player-manager of Stafford Rangers, he is intent on driving his home-town team back towards the status they enjoyed when he cheered them from the Wembley terraces as a boy in a black-and-white scarf. Robinson, then 12, would play 500 times for Aston Villa, Wolves, Notts County, Birmingham, Huddersfield, Northampton, Chesterfield and Stoke, yet he never lost touch with the club he leads into today’s FA Cup first-round derby at Third Division Shrewsbury.”I not only supported the Rangers but played in their reserves at 15, so I’ve always had their interests at heart and kept in contact with the club,” Robinson said. A prime example was his role in bringing Collymore to Stafford more than a decade ago. They banked a six-figure sum when he left for Crystal Palace and a life of England caps, lucrative transfers and tabloid notoriety.”Stan and me were released by Wolves at the same time, and when I signed for Notts I told the manager, Neil Warnock, that I couldn’t believe they’d let him go,” Robinson explained.

“He came on trial for a month and I picked Stan up in Cannock every morning. We got on well and I still regard him as a mate.”Anyway, Neil used to play in training games and he’d run around, closing the full-backs down and making tackles Stan took a more laid-back approach. One day Neil stopped play and said to him: ‘I can’t believe this. You’re on trial, yet I’m running past you into the corners’.” Stan just said: ‘Yeah, but I’m scoring the goals, gaffer’.”Collymore did not stay at Meadow Lane, but Robinson phoned a friend at Stafford and persuaded them to take a chance The rest is his story. This summer, however, it was the matchmaker taking and making the calls at Marston Road, by now a Dr Martens League venue.”On my first day in the office it dawned on me that I had just one player on contract,” Robinson recalled “The season was looming and I had a blank sheet of paper.

I spent hours going through my notebooks, scanning lists of released players and ringing contacts. It turned out to be a good thing – it meant I could hand-pick the whole squad.”I decided on a policy of younger players with something to prove, people who’d just dropped out of the League In that respect, the ITV Digital affair did us a favour. I also went for locally based lads because Stafford people respond to them. Now we’ve got no one coming from further than Birmingham or Crewe.”The competition from Midlands rivals like Tamworth and Worcester – two of the three clubs above them in the race for promotion to the Conference – was fierce. Robinson invited would-be recruits to training, confident they would sign once they saw the way he worked and became enthused by his passion for “high-tempo, attacking football”.With an eye on the future, he also set up a youth academy plus junior and reserve sides. The younger element is epitomised by Danny Davidson and Robin Gibson. Davidson, a 6ft 4in trainee accountant, followed the player-manager from Hereford last summer and has scored 10 goals.