Harry and Sandra Redknapp have always been besotted with each other

But anyone who has ever met Harry and Sandra Redknapp will know this is nothing new – they’ve always been besotted with each other.

I was lucky enough to meet them way back in May 1998 when Sandra was kind enough to give me her first interview ever.

The Redknapps were living in Ashley Heath at the time and Sandra had been asked to appear in a radio commercial because Jamie was due to play in the World Cup.

Harry let me in and jokingly asked why I wanted to interview Sandra before telling me: “She’s lovely.”

He was managing West Ham at the time and Sandra was doing what she does best, being a loving wife and mum.

She explained that she used to take it in turns with the other mums to wash the team kit for Jamie’s schoolboy league and would watch his matches but had barely watched Harry play during his West Ham days. “I used to work on Saturdays but mostly it wasn’t the done thing to go to games,” she said. “Harry felt it was like a wife going to watch her husband at the office.”

But another reason for not going was because: “If he’d had a bad game, at least he could come home and forget all about it. If I’d kept asking him about what went wrong, he’d have felt even worse.”

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For the same reason she told me she didn’t attend many games when Harry was managing. “You have to be very thick-skinned,” she said. “Sometimes I feel like hiding under the seat but mostly I just feel for Harry. He puts all his effort into it and if it goes badly he gets all the stick.”

Instincts like these have carried her through 54 years of marriage – and football - and probably explain just why Harry still adores her. And she, him.

She told me that following an away game, Harry would rather drive through the night to get back to her than stay in a hotel and would ring her constantly.

“We enjoy each other’s company and we’re not the sort of people who need other people around to enjoy ourselves, we’re very close,” she said.

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Perhaps the reason for that is their solid family values. She said that when Jamie went to play in Liverpool he lodged in a house in the city and called her to say it was freezing cold. “I sent him winceyette sheets and electric blankets but I didn’t think it did him any harm to realise that not everyone’s as comfortable as we are,” she said.

Like any family they had their moments. “Harry would never go and shout at Jamie like some football dads, but he'd never let him win anything for fun, even snooker,” she recalled.

From his dad Jamie was told to always be polite to fans. “These are the people that pay their wages,” she said. “Being recognised is part of the job and Harry says it’s when people don’t come up you should start to worry.”

Thanks to Harry’s rapid elevation to National Treasure there’s no danger of that. Just as there’s no danger of any of this changing the way they live.