Tony Adams has featured in 10 cup finals, Harry Redknapp none, so no prizes for guessing who has been cast in the “Cool Hand Luke” role (“Taking the pressure off here, boss”) at Portsmouth of late. Redknapp may have had 25 years in management, but Adams has all the experience when it comes to Wembley, and will have a bigger part than ever to play in the run-up to next Saturday, when Pompey strive to win the FA Cup for the first time since 1939, at Cardiff City’s expense.

For the former Arsenal and England captain, 41, it will probably be his farewell to the club he joined as assistant manager nearly two years ago. He feels it is time to have a second crack at management in his own right, after a brief sojourn at Wycombe Wanderers in 2003-04, and will be actively seeking a No1’s job when his contract expires, at the end of the season.

Meanwhile, he will continue to give his all for the employers he has helped to transform from a relegation ragbag to European contenders and odds-on favourites for the most celebrated knockout prize in domestic club football.

Adams has scouted Cardiff three times recently, is fully aware of their strengths and weaknesses, and knows Portsmouth have enough in their locker to prevail. Apart from the vagaries of his own team’s form, at a time when they have clearly been distracted in the Premier League, the unpredictable factor in the old Gunner’s mind is Aaron Ramsey, the Welsh club’s 17-year-old midfield prodigy, whose precocious performances in the Championship have alerted Liverpool and Arsenal, among others.

Ramsey may not start on Saturday, but he has the potential to come on and influence the outcome. Adams said: “He can play football, the kid. It’s a big pitch and it could suit him. Someone so young doesn’t yet know what a cup final means, and without that pressure he can just go out and play with freedom. That could be very dangerous. Looking back, Ray Parlour comes to mind, doing that for Arsenal.”

A Cardiff player with whom Adams is more familiar is Roger Johnson, their centre-half and newly-elected Player of the Year. They were together at Wycombe, where Adams stripped the young defender of the captaincy and dropped him - a rancorous memory that still motivates Johnson, four years on. In a recent interview, he told me: “When Tony took over from Sanch [Lawrie Sanchez], I hoped to learn a lot from him, but it didn’t happen. It seemed he didn’t fancy me as a player, and we fell out.”

Frowning when the subject was raised, Adams said: “Roger was very young, and working with him taught me a great deal. When you’re a manager, you have a different set of rules when it comes to dealing with people. We had a difference of opinion, and that was valuable experience. I wasn’t at Wycombe long enough to make a proper judgment about him. At that particular stage of his development, and mine, we weren’t right for each other. I was there to learn my trade. Next time, I’ll do things differently.”

Johnson, who joined Cardiff from Wycombe for £275,000 in July 2006, is a quick, adventurous centre-half who scored a nicely-taken goal in City’s sixth-round victory at Middlesbrough. “Roger has done incredibly well lately, and deserves his moment of glory,” Adams said. “I’ve spoken to Dave Jones and Terry Burton about him, and they’ve kept him on his feet a lot more. He had a tendency to go to ground. Maybe it was misdirected at Wycombe, but he was strong willed with an attitude about him. He was a young man, he was learning and he was in a poor team.

“I don’t need to defend my treatment of Roger, but I didn’t have the time to coach him as I would have liked. I was only there for a year, and three months of that was summer holiday. I needed results with a very poor team, and probably did him a favour by taking him out of it. Wycombe were losing £6,000 a week, the club was going down the Swanee and, no disrespect to Roger, but he was way down my list of priorities. That was one of the reasons I left, because I knew I had to spend more time coaching players.”

Despite his false start, Adams is keen to return to management, a role for which he has prepared himself with rare thoroughness since retiring as a player after the cup final in 2002, when Arsenal did the Double. He is the only man to have captained League-winning teams in three different decades. He played under some of the very best — George Graham, Terry Venables and Arsène Wenger to name but three. Could he distil what he had learned from them into his own, effective management style?

Encouraged by Wenger, he gained his coaching badges and B licence. “I got the qualifications to find out two things,” Adams said. “Coaching is a completely different job to playing football, so was I going to enjoy teaching the game, coaching it? And the other thing: Was I any good at it? That was massive. If I couldn’t do it well, I was just going to get frustrated. I play backgammon with the wife and when she beats me, the board goes up in the air. To this day, I still can’t stand losing at anything, and in my working life, I do need to be the best, or at least feel I might get there.

For the perfectionist in him — alcoholism was a manifestation of Adams’s obsessive personality — footballing qualifications were not enough. “I got my licence, knew I could do the job, and that I could be good at it,” he said. “Now I needed a broader knowledge, and I met a professor, a sociologist, who suggested I enrol at Brunel University for a sports science degree, to develop my mind. I thought it was a good idea, so I went back to college, which was humbling, sitting with a lot of students. But I did it and got my credits. What I found myself excelling in was the anthropology-sociology part of the course, environment building. I knew that was going to help me, creating a happy camp and bringing a group together.”

In his second year at university, he got the itch. “I was getting impatient and wanting to get back into football when Wycombe came calling,” he explained. “I sat down with the chairman, Ivor Beeks, a lovely guy who charmed the socks off me. I knew that at some stage I had to leave the theory behind and actually do the job. It wasn’t coaching, which is what I was looking for, it was management, but I thought I’d have a shot at it.”

Cue disaster. “As soon as I started, I knew instantly that it wasn’t the club for me, and I do mean instantly. They were losing £6,000 a week — rumours said it was really 15 — and I’d been shielded from that side of the industry for 20 years at Arsenal. It was like dropping down to work in a corner shop when you’d been top man at Sainsburys. I was dealing with directors and players every day — actually writing players’ contracts. I was responsible for everything. At lower league level, that’s a real culture shock. I wanted to coach, but there was little time for that.

“There were no chairs at the club so I went to a second-hand store and bought some, so that the players could sit down. I took my own fridge in, and my coffee machine. It all brought home to me that I had no experience at that level. What I did have was 21 players whose contracts were up. I let 19 go, and only two of them are playing League football now. The other two I wanted to keep were too expensive for my budget. They thought I didn’t like them. I had to say, ‘Look, I just can’t afford to pay you £2,000 a week’.

“Before me, Sanchez had a wages budget of £1.6m. I had to slash that by half. I remember saying, ‘I could have Thierry Henry for three months, or Wycombe’s full squad for a year’. I think I’d have been better off with Thierry. I had the choice of 10 mannequins for coaching purposes or an overnight stay before an away game. I took the mannequins. Maybe I ought to have taken the hotel, got the points in the bag and forgotten about coaching. That was the Martin O’Neill style of management at Wycombe: ‘Forget about everything else, just go out and win the game.’

“I worked my arse off. I went out and got a few new players who they’ve been able to sell on for decent money. They weren’t losing thousands every week, they were making money when I went to the chairman and said, ‘I’ve got to get out of here. Thank you very much, but please let me move on’.”

The last thing Adams wanted was another job in the lower divisions, so he took an educational sabbatical. “I went to have a look around Europe, to work with the best coaches and learn from them. France first. I went to Le Havre, Lille and Lyons. Then into Italy, where I had two weeks with Capello at Juventus. I got to see their preparation day, which is a rare privilege. They are very secretive about it and don’t let strangers in. To see how they prepared the day before a game was very beneficial to me. After all, they say the best coaches are the best thieves. Jose Mourinho is the best example of that. He had no playing career, he learned everything as an observer of others. I was very impressed with Capello’s small-sided games and break-out play. I took notes about all that.

“From Italy I went to Schalke, in Germany, where the manager, Ralf Rangnick, was an old Arsenal scout. After that, I wanted to be in on a pre-season programme with a top club, and I knew Wim Jansen, at Feyenoord, who is a decent man whose knowledge of the game is first class. More than that, he was a teacher. I watched him at work and he showed me all his notes, his training plans and told me how he dealt with players. He let me coach at all levels, both with individuals and on team play. I worked Monday to Friday and sometimes stayed over for weekends. I paid for it out of my own pocket. Financially, I’m okay. I’ve got money, and I don’t want anything from anybody.

“It got to Christmas and the chairman of Utrecht, who had been a director at Feyenoord, and knew of the work I’d been doing there, asked me to join them as first team coach with a view to taking over as manager, because the guy doing the job was going to Bruges. What the chairman didn’t do was tell the manager I was coming, so I walked in and he flipped. He didn’t want me talking to anyone or doing anything. I shook hands with him and said, ‘Look, I didn’t mean to tread on your toes, it’s the chairman who’s at fault, I don’t need this’. After that, I stayed a little while.

“I was getting ready for another season on my travels, there was a lot more I wanted to see, when Harry said, ‘Why don’t you join me here? I’m 60 now, you get out there and do the coaching for me’. I thought, ‘Fantastic, let’s go and get a bit of experience as assistant manager in the Premier League’. It has worked really well. The set-up here is very Continental, with Harry more involved in the wheeler-dealer side of things, like a director of football, and me the head coach. With more and more foreign owners, it’s a scenario that could become more common.

“Harry doesn’t do a lot on the training pitch. He’s a busy man, so I prepare everything, including pattern of play, and co-ordinate with all the staff.”

When manager and assistant disagreed, Redknapp always had the final say, notably in pre-season, when Adams suggested signing Marlon Harewood and was overruled in favour of David Nugent. “I’d watched Nugent at Preston and playing for the England Under-21s, and for me he was too expensive," Adams said. “It was a gamble on a young player who had not scored goals in the Premier League. There were other strikers on the market who had proved that they could do it — Harewood, for example, who went to Aston Villa for £3m.

“Harry likes to open things up for discussion, but occasionally he will pull something out of the bag and a player will just appear. A couple of times I’ve told him, ‘There’s no point me being here if you’re not going to talk to me about things’. But most of the time, be it players, systems of play or tactics, he’ll open it up and it will be, ‘Oh, you’re thinking about that? Let’s give it a go’.

“He wanted to play three at the back this season, but I convinced him not to. We had a good back four last season, one of the best in the league, and I knew we could improve on our goals against record. I put my ideas on the table and at the end of the day it’s up to Harry.”

It was in order to force more of his own ideas through that he was seeking promotion. Adams explained: “I remember Don Howe telling me, ‘Tony, don’t get labelled a good coach, whatever you do, that’ll be the end of you as a manager’. He had a point. All of a sudden I’m known as a fantastic assistant manager, but that’s not how I want to end up. What I’m doing is ticking all the boxes and gathering the sort of experience that takes time. “This isn’t short term, it’s my life, and the No1’s job is my next step.”

Winning the FA Cup would enhance any CV, and Adams is confident Portsmouth are about to do it. “We’ve been very difficult to beat this season — 22 clean sheets is a club record,” he said. “We are very resilient, and that’s not just down to the defenders, they’ve had a lot of help from people line Niko Kranjcar. He came here from Croatia last season and thought, ‘Jesus! Have I got to run back as well?’ We said, ‘Yes, everyone in the Premier League has to do their share of defending, it’s different over here’. There’s not another league like it, you haven’t got time to dwell on the ball, as you can abroad.

“Sylvain Distin has just been voted Players’ Player of the Year, and he has been magnificent at the back, as has David James, but my choice is Kranjcar, because the defensive side of his game has improved so much. He has worked his socks off.” Lassana Diarra was another favourite, man of the match in the backs-to-the-wall quarter-final triumph over Manchester United. “It has been amazing to get a player of that quality here,” Adams said. “Arsène made a mistake selling him, I’m sure he could have done with him this season. We’ve reaped the benefits and let’s hope he stays around for a couple of years.”

Redknapp is thinking the same about his valued assistant, but destiny waits for no man. For Tony Adams, the play may be up at Pompey.

Win tickets to the FA Cup final

The Sunday Times and E.ON, sponsors of the FA Cup, are offering you the chance to win a pair of tickets to see the FA Cup final on May 17. To be in with a chance, email your answer to the following question, along with your address and phone number, and stating whether you are a Portsmouth or Cardiff fan: which was the last team from outside the top division to win the FA Cup? Email your answer to sporttickets@sunday-times.co.uk. Entries must arrive before noon, May 13 2008.

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