London

I remember Venables as a player, not so much from his Chelsea time but at QPR a bit later. Looking back, that Chelsea side were quite a good-looking team, but tempered with some viciousness at the back – people like Webb and McCreadie. The defenders were never the lookers. If I remember rightly, Venables was a defensive midfielder on the right. He didn’t play in defence; he was too good-looking for that. It was the same all over Europe – even the Italians – you could tell which ones were the defenders quite easily on the team photos. They were the ones who weren’t smiling and looked a bit menacing. Nowadays, you don’t have mean-looking defenders; they’re all equally coiffeured. Feature continues

There’s all sorts of things I like about Venables. I think he was born somewhere out east, and he’s got that confidence; there’s a little bit of the wide boy in there, isn’t there? The Artful Dodger is another favourite Londoner of mine and I suppose Terry has touched on the Artful Dodger a few too many times. But I like people who are confident about themselves. I think that’s made a difference in how he’s managed sides and the way he is on TV.

As a TV pundit – well, this is the way I choose to translate it – I see him to the left of people like Mick McCarthy and Atkinson. Well, obviously to the left of Ron Atkinson, as it turned out. And another thing, Venables chooses to pronounce the names of people correctly and chooses to do some homework and that, to me, suggests that he’s not arrogant. You look at Jack Charlton in the ’70s and he seemed to enjoy pronouncing some names wrong.

I see Venables as more of an internationalist. His time as manager of Barcelona was impressive and the players he chose to bring in were quite interesting – Steve Archibald and Gary Lineker. It really annoyed me, though, that it was ‘El Tel’, but never ‘Don Ron’ when Ron Atkinson went out to manage in Spain. That probably explains his failure.I’m well aware of his reputation [in 1998, Venables was banned by the DTI from being a company director for seven years], but that to me smacks of a working-class person overstretching himself.

He got into a mess, but I do think that people from his background are the ones who get the blame and that people who are up the social scale tend to get away with it. He was involved with the Thingymewig [early business venture aimed at ladies wanting to hide their curlers behind a perfect hairdo]. I think he threw quite a bit of money at that. I get the idea that people like him are surrounded by people with odd suggestions and they’re too loyal to say no.

But he bounced back with several, erm, disasters. Maybe your readers can help me with this, but there was a sportsman who was trying to get tiddlywinks into the Olympics and he ploughed absolutely loads of money into it. I was watching it on telly, about 1980 or something, and crying with laughter. How did this bloke come to put so much money into something like tiddlywinks? Nothing to do with him, but that smacks of Venables.

I liked him as England manager. I think he was able to look after himself much better than most. To me, one of the reasons they seem to have given McClaren the job is almost in anticipation of mounting humiliation upon him. Some parts of the English press want to know that the England manager will break down and cry. But Venables could look the press in the eye because he’s from that era when players bought themselves a house that was far too big for them and maybe took over as landlord in their local pub and pissed that away. Venables’s wine bar was one step better than that. I know the entrepreneur thing doesn’t really tally with my views, but it is better than taking over the George & Dragon and nobody recognising you ’cos you’re 20-stone.

I’d love him to be director of football at my club, Sheffield United. We’d go over on scouting trips together looking at Dutch footballers; it’d be a right laugh. And I fantasise that we’d find these players on the M6. You know, like 15-year-old Czech footballers who’d been kept in a lorry for a month. We’d bust the Premiership wide open. Never mind doing a Wigan, we’d be doing a big ’un, El Tel and El Heato!

Terry Venables is part of the ITV team during the 2006 World Cup.