They may be non-League, but Francis had had them watched four times.”As a manager you work 24 hours a day,” Francis added “You hardly have any time at home. The morning had been spent in the freezing cold outside at Tottenham’s rented Mill Hill training ground – the highlight being Ian Walker’s goal in the end-of-session match. Then there were almost three hours of interviews with radio, television, the press and Clubcall. While Tottenham have won it a record eight times, he only made it into the quarter-finals once as player or manager – and that was 21 years ago.Away from the game he was more successful, so much so that the strength of his property business gives him the security to work without a contract. Those outside interests – together with recent bereavements and a worrying illness to his 19-month-old son, Adam, – reinforced his belief that football is not everything.At present, however, it is almost all-consuming.

With Francis linking superbly with Stan Bowles and Don Givens, they missed the title by a point to Liverpool.Francis’s FA Cup record is especially poor. Terry Venables, who played alongside Francis at Rangers, and twice signed him, provides a glowing testimony: “He was quick, with a devastating change of pace, strong and skilful, a good passer and finisher and a powerful tackler – he had the lot.”Yet he never won any medals, partly because of his loyalty to a QPR side whose high point was a glorious failure in 1976. Again there is no long contract, just a month-to-month agreement. Francis likes being in charge of his future.”I served a long apprenticeship and I learned how different managing was to playing. I would pack it in tomorrow if I could play again,” he said.He was, incidentally, quite a player.

A driving midfielder, he captained England in his fifth match aged 23, only for a back injury to cut short his international career after 12 caps. It was the same story but on a bigger scale, as Paul Parker, Andy Sinton, Roy Wegerle, Darren Peacock and others were sold. In just under four years,Francis made £8m profit on the transfer market and took Rangers to fifth in 1993, despite spending only £150,000 that season.Eventually, following the machinations in November involving Rodney Marsh and the Thompson family, the owners of QPR, he regretfully left Loftus Road and joined Spurs within a matter of days. In the past, despite being on a succession of yearly contracts, he had turned down approaches from West Ham, Aston Villa and Swindon. This time he left.A series of offers followed before QPR, the team he supported as a boy and spent 12 years with, came in. They came 13th the following year but, Francis said, “then the application for a new stadium, the third since I had been there, was turned down”.It was the final straw – “I just did not see that we could go any further,” Francis added. It was frustrating – I did at leastget my £10,000 back then, but no interest.”Rovers still won the championship and went to Wembley for the Leyland DAF Cup.

I do appreciate financially it was perhaps the only thing they could do, but I was looking at what I’d done and how I’d worked at making these players better, and then had them taken away. Of that I received £70,000 to spend.”We had a right row about it. In the next we were top, and then they sold Gary Penrice to Watford for £500,000 and Martyn to Palace for a million in a week. I wheeled and dealed with free transfers, and found a goalkeeper in Cornwall called Nigel Martyn, who I persuaded to join by offering him a £10 a week rise – to £110.”We came eighth; the following year we lost in the play-off final. The team I built that year cost £10,000 and that was my own money with which I bought Ian Holloway.

It was absolutely frightening.”But I still wanted to play, and Dave said, `give it a go’, so I took it. That was when the Exeter experience paid off, as the mistakes I made there I remembered. “I said to Dave, `it’s the same as Exeter only worse – they could go bust any minute’. They had already had to sell John Scales for £70,000 just to pay the summer bills, they had come 19th in the Third Division, had no ground and changed in Portakabins.