Obviously the gaffer here has helped my development a lot in the past year – little things like making runs into the box, and winning headers. It’s brilliant when you can play against the likes of Edgar Davids and Alessandro del Piero at such a young age It can only help your development. The gaffer has given me the chances and when I’ve been in the team hopefully I’ve done well. When you’re at a big club like this, and you’re in the the Champions’ League and you see what you actually can achieve as a young player, you have to go for it.

“I didn’t come to the club just to sit around and wait for things to happen. Twelve months on from his First Division days with Forest, he has played in direct opposition to Edgar Davids in the Stadio delle Alpi, made 41 first-team appearances for Newcastle and has established himself at the creative hub of a Newcastle side challenging for the club’s first title since the sepia days of 1927.”That’s what I was hoping to do, to be honest with you,” he said. Jenas junior made a favourable impression as a wide-right stand-in for Nolberto Solano earlier in the season, but it is in his favoured central midfield role that he has been really flourishing of late. “He’s delighted with the way things have been going for me.” And with good reason, too. He coaches in Albuquerque now.”We keep in contact a lot, though,” his son said. No need to get a rush on.”But then, judging from the speed of his galloping box-to-box runs, young Jermaine has inherited the fast-twitch fibres that made his father one of the quickest centre-forwards in non-League football Dennis Jenas played for Burton Albion and Grantham Town. “I try to stick to the same morals and values and take life one step at a time.

“I think a lot of me comes from the grounding my mum and dad gave me,” he said. He happens to be as serene a character off the pitch as he is in the thick of the action on it. It would be no surprise if his name were to appear in Eriksson’s party for the friendly fixture against Australia at Upton Park on 12 February.Not that Jenas is getting carried away by the burgeoning expectation and hype. Jenas scored the winner that day and gave another first-class exhibition of the link-man’s art. It is another mark of his progress that the England coach Sven Goran Eriksson made the trek to St James’ Park to watch him play against Bolton Wanderers two weeks ago. Before the start of last season he had played just one First Division game for Forest. Hopefully, on our birthday, we’ll be able to come home happy.”It is a measure of how far Jenas has come that he is already a veteran of four big games in the Champions’ League.

“We’ve got a big game in the Champions’ League that night, in Leverkusen. “Yes, it’s quite incredible that we were born on the same day,” Jenas mused, barely recognisable in the bowels of St James’, with a brown woollen hat pulled down to his eyebrows. He turns 20 on 18 February, the day of Robson’s 70th birthday. He is his own man, with his own influence on the game.”He might be a man now on the Premiership football stage but Jenas is still a teenager. People want me to compare him with other big-name midfielders but I don’t have to.