Jarvis meanwhile came within a whisker of collapse after expanding too rapidly into the PFI market causing

Jarvis, meanwhile, came within a whisker of collapse after expanding too rapidly into the PFI market, causing it to run out of working capital.”It’s very difficult to have a balanced debate. Even the Conservative Party criticises PFI and they invented it,” notes the PFI expert. “There’s an argument about the private sector being involved, but the private sector has been building hospitals for as long as I can remember.”Whether Ms Hewitt will continue to allow it to do so, in the current form at least, will not be known until the end of this month, when the review of the Bart’s scheme is completed.But unless the Health Secretary and her fellow ministers can come up with another way of funding much-needed public projects, no obituaries should be written for PFI.. Perhaps it should not totally astonish us that the happenings of Brentford Football Club tend not to cause a beep on Sven Goran Eriksson’s radar. Still, Martin Allen decided that an invitation to drop in was appropriate when the pair met before Christmas. “I was lucky enough to attend the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year,” recalls the Bees’ manager.

“I won the award for London Sports Personality.” He pauses before adding with a satisfied smile: “I beat Jose Mourinho. Anyway, during the evening I asked Mr Eriksson if he’d like to pop down to Brentford one morning, watch us train and have a chat.
“Well, he didn’t even know who Brentford were. ‘Who’s Brentford; where are you? What division are you in?’ he asked me I replied, ‘Thank you very much; goodbye’, and walked away. It was at that point I wondered what it would be like to go into a 50-50 tackle with him.”That recollection had been the response to an original question relating to last weekend’s newspaper sting But you under-stood the assertion. “God bless, I hope England do win the World Cup,” adds Allen, who, in marked contrast to the Swede, walks an emotional tightrope during games, and without a safety net either “It would make me so happy But when he didn’t know Brentford.. I must admit I wasn’t too happy. If I earned £5 million a year, I’d make sure I knew every club from Devon to Newcastle, every player, coach, manager, referee…”Allen, whose name became a byword for forthright, occasionally blood-curdling commitment in a midfield career which embraced QPR, West Ham and Portsmouth, and a character whom nobody would relish confronting even if the challenge was 70-30 in their favour, is determined that Eriksson can have no excuse for not being fully aware of his team by Saturday night.A home fourth-round FA Cup tie between his First Division promotion-chasing team against Premiership-but-doomed Sunderland is a sumptuous prospect, and one the Black Cats will regard as decidedly unappealing should Allen manage to let slip the Mad Dogs of war – if he will forgive a reference to that epithet which so irritated him as a player.”Doesn’t apply to this game,” he says, rejecting the notion.

“A lot of Sunderland players were brought in from lower-League clubs and they know what it’s like coming to play here We’d have a better chance of beating Chelsea. In fact, we would, in my opinion, have definitely beaten Chelsea Those players would have had a short, sharp shock. Sunderland’s players, God bless ‘em, know what to expect.”He adds: “It’s great for me to be in the dug-out next to Mick McCarthy, a bloke who’s managed in the World Cup I’m full of admiration for him. But of course, we’ve got a chance with a sell-out crowd backing us.”The last observation is about as predictable as he ever gets, this dedicated if somewhat eccentric 41-year-old, who plunged into the freezing waters of the Tees before Brentford’s FA Cup fourth-round victory at Hartlepool last season, and then took a dip in the Solent ahead of the fifth-round game against Southampton He insists such acts are spontaneous, not publicity stunts “I never do it just to be silly,” he says. “There will always be something hidden that you can get across to the players; meanings in life, meanings in professional performance.”Indeed, he bridles at the suggestion that he is a “personality manager”, as he was labelled last week when it was reported in one newspaper that Greg Dyke, appointed as non-executive chairman of the club by the new owners, the supporters’ trust Bees United, on Friday, would bring “extra publicity”.He relates what occurred an hour and a half before that Southampton match. “I knocked on Harry Redknapp’s door, just to say hello,” he recalls.

“In there were Jim Smith, Kevin Bond, Dennis Rofe and Dave Pleat, all sat watching a game on the TV. One of them said, ‘So, have you been diving in the Solent this morning, Martin?’ And they all laughed. Once the laughter had stopped, I looked every one of them in the eye, and said, ‘Yeah, I swam in the Solent, and now, this afternoon, we are going to beat you’ I never laughed, I never smiled I just left and slammed the door. As I went back to our dressing room, I thought, ‘We’re going to win’ Why? I just knew it. Sometimes people underestimate you.” He wasn’t far wrong, either.