As well as almost five years of the Eriksson regime, it has taken one new Football Association chief executive, a 13-month, 10-game qualification campaign – not to mention seven friendlies – to reach the point where England will, at last, be placed at the mercy of the World Cup draw. Sven Goran Eriksson says that he will not be nervous when he takes his seat at 7.30pm this evening in the Leipziger Messe hotel to find out the three teams that England must navigate their way past to reach the knock-out stage of the World Cup finals next summer. “He’s one I need to get on-side and get the best out of him,” said Redknapp, who now plans a clear-out and is likely to be joined next week by Southampton coach Kevin Bond. The Football Association is waiting for a detailed response from the Betfair betting exchange before deciding whether to launch an official inquiry into the amount of money, now estimated at more than £16m, traded on whether Redknapp would return to Portsmouth..

This is the subject on which Warren is at his most passionate and eloquent “Think about it,” he says. “In all the years of serious tabloid journalism, not one boxer has ever sold a story saying he threw a fight. Here was an opportunity for the guys sitting on the safe side of ropes to do something.” It is indubitably true that Warren – while making a great deal of money for himself, of course – has in many ways been a force for good in boxing. But to some people that is an oxymoron: they maintain that there cannot be anything good about boxing because boxing is fundamentally wrong And not only wrong, they say, but crooked. “I remember talking to the Board of Control medical officer, Adrian Whiteson, who said, ‘Frank, boxing’s going to go on whether you’re in it or not’ And I thought I could do more good than harm. I did the Michael Watson benefit even though I’d never promoted him, and I paid for his MRI scans for two years Not one other promoter paid a penny towards those MRI scans I find that amazing. Lenny won and that’s how it all started.” There have been times since that night in Finsbury Park when he has fleetingly, and sometimes not so fleetingly, lost his zest for boxing.

Afterwards, Warren wondered whether to find something else to do for a living. For example, he promoted the 1995 super-middleweight fight between Nigel Benn and Gerald McClellan, which ended with McClellan suffering a fatal subdural haematoma. Anyway, he came to see me after one of them and said, ‘Can you make a rematch?’ He was seriously unfit, so I got him a trainer, a guy who’d looked after Chris Finnegan, and made the rematch at the Rainbow, Finsbury Park. One of the biggest bullies you will ever meet, always intimidating people I had a couple of scrapes with him myself “He used to say he’d had 3,000 fights, which was crap He had 15 fights and lost five. “All you can do is try to instil in them a sense of fairness and decency, and I think they have that And it’s been good to give them what I never had I still regret that I didn’t go to university I might still do it I left school at 15 and trundled along But I never went without.