BRIGHTON’S relegation from the top flight in 1983 marked the end of Michael Robinson’s three seasons with the club.

An old school centre-forward, Robinson’s time with the Seagulls had certainly restored a goalscoring reputation that had been tarnished during a season at Manchester City, although, as  I described in a 2018 blog post, his time in Sussex was often controversial.

While the Albion began a three decades long exile from the top tier of English football, Robinson didn’t need much persuading to join Liverpool on a three-year deal, having watched them from the Kop as a schoolboy.

He’d first gone to Anfield as a six-year-old, and he recalled in a lengthy interview with journalist Simon Hughes, recorded over a boozy lunch in Madrid in 2017: “It was 1963 and Liverpool played Burnley. I remember a near-post header from (Ian) St John, which flew into the net. It sounds romantic, but my dad tells me that I’d fallen in love with football before the teams came out.

“We stood on the Kop and the crowd were singing, ‘We love you, yeah, yeah, yeah – with a team like that, you know you can’t be bad’. My dad says I was totally enveloped by the atmosphere and ten minutes before the kick-off I told him I wanted to be a footballer.”

Robinson honed his fledgling football skills on the sandy beaches of Blackpool where his parents ran a boarding house and he admitted: “All of my inspiration for games on the yard or the beach came from Anfield.

“I was desperate to one day be one of those protagonists that walked out of the tunnel and receive the adulation of the supporters who pledged their lives to the greatness of the club. It sounds romantic, but when it later happened it was no less romantic than I ever envisaged it to be.”

Robinson, who died of cancer aged 61 on 28 April 2020, fondly looked back on it all in the interview with Hughes, which was published in the Mainstream Publishing title Red Machine: Liverpool FC in the ‘80s: The Players’ Stories, and was also featured on theanfieldwrap.com. However, his early appearances in Liverpool’s red drew some scathing criticism when he failed to score in his first nine games.

Hughes recalls how, covering one early match, a former leading BBC Radio commentator described him on air as “a dyspeptic water buffalo grazing with a herd of gazelle – clumsy, awkward, a yard behind the play and a thousand yards from Dalglish’s analytical, surgical football”.

Thankfully, Robinson scored twice on his 10th outing, against Odense in the European Cup at Anfield, and went one better with a hat-trick in the league at West Ham two weeks later. “After the game, all the lads signed the match ball,” Robinson recalled. “Kenny Dalglish left a message. It read, ‘I don’t believe it’.”

Robinson scored seven more times as Liverpool won the treble of League, League Cup and European Cup, playing 39 matches + 3 as a sub across all competitions, although he was left out of the squad for the final ten league games. He only appeared on the bench at the European Cup final in Rome because five substitutes were permitted (he went on for Dalglish in the 95^th minute as Liverpool eventually beat Roma 4-2 on penalties after it was 1-1 at the end of extra-time) and he had nagging doubts about his contribution to the Liverpool cause.

He had fulfilled his dreams by signing for the club and Joe Fagan offered him a new two-year contract, but he didn’t want to linger as an also-ran when Liverpool brought in new additions to the squad.

“Personally, I had an average season after a really dodgy start,” he told Hughes. “I realised Liverpool never stood still and they were always considering how to improve. Maybe I’d be sacrificed.”

He made 10 more appearances the following season but Liverpool signed striker Paul Walsh and Robinson said: “I figured that it was principally to replace me. Their criterion in signings was always spot-on. I thought I’d be condemned to be in the reserve team.”

He added: “I just knew that I was never a great enough footballer or supremely professional enough footballer to become a Liverpool regular.”

He took a call from his former Brighton boss Alan Mullery, who was in charge at QPR, and although Mullery was sacked the day before he travelled to London for a meeting, he made the move anyway.

“It was my biggest mistake. I was unfair to QPR because I compared everything unjustly to Liverpool, when really I should have gone abroad,” he said.

That move eventually came in January 1987 when he joined La Liga’s second-from-bottom side Osasuna, in the north Spain city of Pamplona. It was the beginning of a love affair with the Spanish way of life that ended up with it becoming his home and the place where he built a career in Spanish television similar to the one Gary Lineker had in the UK.

“I enjoyed more or less everything about Spain and the way the Spanish interpreted life,” he told Hughes. “I finished up realising that I had loads in common with the Spaniards. We laughed about the same things, cried about the same things.”

After hanging up his boots, Robinson commentated on the 1990 World Cup in Italy and it marked the beginning of a new TV career which culminated in him having his own show, El Día Después (‘the day after’).

“I couldn’t believe it when they asked me,” he said. “I only had 100 words in Spanish and most were expletives. They told me that was the least of their worries.”

The programme was written, directed and presented by Robinson, and he said: “It was as if I had been given a blank canvas to play with all the paints and all the brushes that I wanted and create something completely out of my own imagination. I felt like I was a kid and been locked in Toys R Us and everybody had gone out.”

• More on the early part of Robinson’s career ahead of the Manchester City games.