Normally it's a joy to watch him."These are anything but normal times, however, especially for Portsmouth. A last-minute win over Manchester City and a 4-2 success over a weakened West Ham have replaced despair with optimism."Things are starting to fall into place," Redknapp said. "We played well for a couple of months without getting the breaks we're getting now."Relegated with Southampton last May, the former West Ham manager insists he did not lose hope as his return to Fratton Park initially failed to spark a revival. "If you stop believing, everyone stops believing," he said."We have closed the gap when it looked like a two-horse race Suddenly we're back in it. We've had a hard sequence of games, but if you look at our fixtures between now and the end of the season, they are all winnable."Albion, whose run-in appears almost as forbidding as Birmingham's, go to Tottenham on Monday night, the memory of a 2-0 win over Spurs in December doubtless fresh in their minds. To Robson, who has lost his back-up goalkeeper Chris Kirkland with a broken finger, the way Martin Jol's side are set up offers an opportunity his faltering team must seize."Spurs are a good footballing outfit and they allow you to play," the Albion manager said yesterday. "Our games with them have all been close and we've proved we can match them."People are talking about our run-in and how hard it is But it isn't dissimilar to last year.

We had five away games then, including Spurs, and lost only one. We need to go on that sort of run again by making it difficult for teams to beat us."Bruce encapsulated what the coming weeks are all about to all three clubs. Intended as a rallying call for his own beleaguered troops, his words could equally be used by Redknapp or Robson to fire up their men for the battle ahead."We all want to play in the Premiership Nobody wants to go into the Championship. No one wants relegation on his CV, whether it's the player, manager, coach or owner.". For some years now it has been bugging me that overseas footballers playing in the Premiership seem, as a general rule, to be brighter and more articulate than their British counterparts. Why, I wondered, might this be? After all, they all tend to come from similar backgrounds. Very few foreign players belong to educated, middle-class families - Gianluca Vialli being a notable exception - and I don't suppose there was significantly more privilege in the childhood of Thierry Henry than there was in the childhood of Wayne Rooney I'm not accusing Rooney of being thick.

Einstein had no more intelligence in his head than Rooney has in his feet, and besides, how many mathematicians have demonstrated a clearer grasp of trigonometry than Rooney does, every time he makes an angled run towards the penalty area? It's reasonable to assume that he doesn't invite Cristiano Ronaldo to join him in forming a co-ordinate plain by intersecting the abscissa axis with the radius vector, but it's a form of trigonometry all the same. Moreover, it's not Rooney but one of his England team-mates - I'm mentioning no names - who is said to be so far from being the sharpest tool in the box that he's practically a spanner. But I'm meandering from my own sharp point, which is that foreign players - exemplified these days by Henry and in days past by Osvaldo Ardiles - generally seem more thoughtful than their English team-mates (not that Henry has many of those). Maybe it's because footballers who ply their trade in foreign countries have, ipso facto, wider horizons than footballers who stay at home. And I'm not talking about the Ipso Facto tipped to become the next coach at Hearts. Of course, few top footballers from the British Isles need to seek employment on the Continent nowadays, and there was never more than a trickle of them, but generally it tended to be what passed for football's intelligentsia - Gary Lineker, Liam Brady, Graeme Souness, and before them Kevin Keegan, and after them Steve McManaman - who thrived on foreign fields. Generally, too, it was those not blessed with the sharpest of intellects who found that they couldn't prosper overseas. There are all sorts of stories of how Ian Rush floundered in Turin, for example, and the one I enjoy most - told to me by a Liverpool team-mate of his, who swears it's true - relates to the very day Rush arrived to join Juventus.

For weeks he had been trying to master some basic Italian, but with lamentably little joy, so instead he concentrated on learning just a few words: "Tanti grazie per la vostra accoglienza", meaning " Many thanks for your welcome". Obviously, a few words of Italian to the Juve supporters gathered at the airport would go down a storm. So he duly rehearsed the line over and over on the plane, but when finally he took the microphone his nerve failed him, and instead he uttered the single word "welcome" In English. Anyway, all this brings me to the news this week that each Premiership club has been asked to pick one player as a "reading champion", spearheading an admirable campaign to encourage people to read more. These 20 players each selected the book that they had found most pleasurable or thought-provoking, and sure enough, the British/foreign intellectual divide is dispiritingly evident. Arsenal's Philippe Senderos chose The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, Fulham's Moritz Volz chose The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery, while Manchester United's Ruud van Nistelrooy plumped for The Diary Of A Young Girl by Anne Frank and Portsmouth's Lomana LuaLua picked Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. And the lads from the British Isles? Paul Konchesky of West Ham chose The Krays: The Final Countdown by Colin Fry, and Stephen Kelly of Tottenham wanted Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J K Rowling.