The deaths of Cyrille Regis and Jimmy Armfield have got Neil Warnock thinking

Cardiff City boss, 69, wants to give his fans as much joy as he can before he dies

Warnock has ruffled plenty of feathers during his four-decade managerial career

Warnock's Cardiff host Pep Guardiola's Manchester City in the FA Cup on Sunday

'I want us to try and entertain as best we can without getting humiliated,' he says

Neil Warnock will be 70 this year and mourning for men he counts as contemporaries has begun to change him. It is not that age has wearied him. It has most definitely not done that. But it has made him think more about his love for the game he has worked in all his adult life and the message he would like to spread in the time as a manager he has left.

'Cyrille Regis dies, Jimmy Armfield dies,' says Warnock, as he gazes out of the window of his office at the Cardiff City training ground. 'People all around me from my era are dying or dead. You start to think about that. I've started to think even more about how I want to give as much enjoyment as I can to the supporters and the people who love the game while I'm still here.'

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He will get another moment in the national spotlight on Sunday when Pep Guardiola's dazzling Manchester City visit the Cardiff City Stadium for a sell-out FA Cup fourth-round tie. But Warnock looks at me quizzically when I ask whether he has been to watch them dismantle any of their recent opponents in the flesh.

Sixty-nine-year-old Warnock wants to give his fans as much joy as he can before he dies

'Why would I want to do that?' he asks, with a glint in his eye. 'That would frighten me to death. I don't want to watch them any more than I'll be watching them on Sunday. I'll be watching them for a couple of hours then while you lot are sat there in the press box with your bloody pens.

'We have been practising for this game all week. Just running round as fast as we can. Not with the ball. Just running round. We've been practising chasing shadows because we'll be doing a lot of that. Are you with me?' Warnock laughs and laughs. 'With a team like this City team, that's all you can say, isn't it.'

The stories of a rich life in football management, from Todwick in the Sheffield and District Sunday League, to Gainsborough Trinity to the Premier League, still pour out of the Cardiff boss like clear water from a happy, babbling brook. Top of the list this week is how he took his Notts County team sledging in a park the day before they giant-killed Manchester City in the FA Cup in 1991.

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'It had been snowing heavily in the build-up to the match,' says Warnock. 'The day before the game, we went training in Wollaton Park but there was so much snow we decided to go sledging instead. The lads were throwing snowballs at me while I was giving interviews to the TV crews.

'At one point, I looked round and our two goalkeepers, Kevin Blackwell and Steve Cherry, were both on the same sledge, coming down this big hill, weaving in and out of trees at about 100mph. The speed they were going, they'd both have broken their legs or worse if they'd crashed and we wouldn't have had a keeper.

'On the day of the game, we got a load of fans down to help us clear snow off the pitch at Meadow Lane. When the City manager, Peter Reid, arrived a couple of hours before the match, he said there was no way it was playable. I told the ref it was fine. The game went ahead, City hit the woodwork four times, Gary Lund scored in the last minute and we won 1-0. City moaned all day.'

Warnock's Cardiff host Pep Guardiola's Manchester City in the FA Cup on Sunday afternoon

City top the Premier League and Warnock sees them dominating English football for some time

Sometimes it feels as if Warnock's affectionate memories of his adventures in the lower leagues are one of the last links between English football's lost world and the present day. He is like an old stage act, playing the bars and the clubs one last time. It is only 20 years ago but it was another era, a time when it was easier to have fun, a time when there was less distance between players and fans.

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Warnock is leaning back in his chair at the training ground in the countryside a few miles outside the Welsh capital, chortling about how good Guardiola's City side are, suggesting that they and Manchester United will rule English football for years to come and roaring with laughter about the tributes he wants when he moves on to meet the great gaffer in the sky.

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The coldest night of the year and Pep’s in the stand at Field Mill. That is respectful

'Bristol City are the enemy down here,' he says. 'And there is a lot going on when the two sides play each other. We're both doing well, so the rivalry's even bigger. I joke with their fans that, when I do pass away, I hope they all have a minute's applause for me at Ashton Gate and remember the good times I've given them.

'I don't want silence. I want them all to be chanting "Warnock's a w*****" over and over again. For a whole minute. That would be my ideal. They'll all smile because they'd all know that would mean a lot to me. As daft as it sounds. It matters because it would mean I've stirred emotions. I've helped people love football.'

Warnock feeds off the rapport he has with supporters as much as any manager in the game. Not just home fans but away crowds, too. A couple of weeks ago, when tickets went on sale for the City tie and queues of fans snaked around Cardiff's ground, Warnock stopped his car and leapt out to chat with the supporters and thank them for their patience and dedication.

He says working in the Premier League frustrated him as players often snubbed supporters

'At an away game, I always sign autographs for about five minutes wherever we go,' he says. 'When I was in the Premier League, most of my players got straight off the bus with their heads down and their big earphones on and headed straight into the dressing room. They never spoke to fans, never signed an autograph.'

GOOD FA CUP OMEN FOR CARDIFF CITY? Cardiff last met Manchester City in the FA Cup in the fourth round in January 1994 when they knocked out Premier League City 1-0 as a third-tier side thanks to a Nathan Blake goal.

And he adds: 'I remember when I was six or seven, waiting until 6.30pm at Bramhall Lane for an autograph. It was pouring with rain and my older brother said he wanted to go home. I had water coming down my nose and I was soaked through — but I wanted to get that autograph. When the player came out, he said he was in a rush, ran across the road and disappeared.

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'I cried my eyes out. I'll never forget that. I said I would never, ever refuse an autograph — and I never have done. I always spend five minutes talking. At away games, I find a couple of kids with their mums or dads and say: "I'm sorry you're going to be going home unhappy tonight kids, don't blame me when you're going home crying with your dad", then the dads have a go back and we have a bit of fun.

'When we played Sheffield Wednesday at Hillsborough last weekend, there were three chants of "Warnock's a w****r". It was brilliant but they weren't loud enough for me to acknowledge them. I usually wave to them when they do that but they were really quiet. They give me stick but as long as it's not vicious stuff, I don't care. It's part of the game.'

Cardiff earned a crack at big-spending City by beating Mansfield in a third-round replay

Warnock says he would've played the kids and likely lost had Cardiff not been drawn with City

Warnock feels at home in the Championship. It is where he enjoys the game most. He prefers its earthiness and lack of airs and graces to the rarefied world of the Premier League, where he has managed Sheffield United, QPR and Crystal Palace and never quite been able to deal with the shift in the balance of power away from the manager towards the players.

'I didn't enjoy the Premier League,' says Warnock. 'I was unlucky to get relegated with 38 points with Sheffield United. I didn't deserve to get sacked with QPR and they regretted it afterwards. We were never in the bottom three. We had easy games coming up. I didn't enjoy the fact that players were talking to owners and chairmen about the manager.

'And on social media, tweeting and that. It was belittling the manager. Players were going out at night with chairmen. I couldn't grasp that. There were players on 50 grand a week — players that maybe I'd dropped for a game — and they had the chairman's ear. They weren't going to be saying good things.

'My contract is only till the end of the season. Mehmet Dalman, the chairman here, is the best chairman I've had for many years. I couldn't do the job without him. They want me to sign a new contract. Who knows what's going to happen. Contracts mean nothing.'

Warnock labels Cardiff chief Mehmet Dalman as 'the best chairman I've had for many years'

One of Warnock's remaining ambitions is to win an eighth promotion, breaking the record he currently shares with Graham Taylor and Dave Bassett. He has been talking about retirement for 10 years.

He tried it for a few months at his home in Cornwall but his wife, Sharon, who is still recovering from breast cancer and fighting lymphoedema, persuaded him to get out from under her feet.

'I was picking the eggs from the chickens and feeding the ducks and I'm on my tractor but there was something missing,' he says. 'It's like a poison.

'It's like a drug. I eat at 10am when it's an afternoon kick-off and I can't eat until after the game then because my stomach's all over the place and that's at my age. An hour before the game, it's terrible. That kick when the final whistle goes and you've won, you can't replicate it anywhere in life.'

He has done a superb job since he arrived at Cardiff in October 2016 when the club were languishing one place off the bottom. Fresh from his miracle rescue of Rotherham the season before, Warnock quickly lifted Cardiff to safety and, this season, having spent little more than £1million net in transfers, they sit just two points off an automatic promotion place.

THE UPS AND DOWNS OF A FOOTBALL JOURNEY Warnock's career as a manager started at non-League Gainsborough and Burton Albion. He then took Scarborough into the Football League in 1986...

He says: 'When I arrived here last season, the club was a bit of a mess off the field as well as on it. 'We have brought it all together. This game on Sunday is a reward for everybody who has done their bit since I've been here. Off the field, there were factions, there were splits and they're gone now. I enjoy bringing a club together.

'We have a chance of the play-offs but we're up against clubs such as Middlesbrough, who have spent £45m on strikers, and Derby and Wolves have spent a lot, too. When we lose three or four of our first team, we haven't got the depth to push for automatic promotion. Right from the start, we've said if we could get anywhere near the play-offs, we'd snap your hand off.'

Sunday's clash represents an altogether different challenge. City are 12 points clear of United at the top of the Premier League, in the final of the Carabao Cup and advancing in the Champions League.

'I've always liked Guardiola,' says Warnock. 'He doesn't get distracted from what he wants to do. Everybody was saying last year that he wouldn't be able to do it in England. Everybody was saying: "You can't play football like that in England." And Pep just kept cool. And he's thinking: "Wait and see then."

Warnock's favourite City star is Spanish playmaker David Silva. He explains: 'I just purr at him'

'The biggest thing I love about Pep is that we played Mansfield on a s****y night, the coldest night of the year, 10 days ago in the third-round replay and he's in the stand at Field Mill. That was unbelievable for me. That was the biggest thing I took from that night. That is respectful. I saw what he'd done and I said: "Well done, son."

'I'm not going to be offering him an expensive bottle of wine or anything. If I buy an expensive bottle of wine, I'll be drinking it. Make no mistake about that. He'll come into my office anyhow, I'm sure, because he's a gentleman.

'All we want to do is give them a game. We want to make this the cup final. If we hadn't drawn them, we'd be out of the competition because I'd have sent the kids to Mansfield for the replay.

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'We can give it everything against City. I couldn't go out there and play for a 0-0 because you get beat. I want us to try and entertain as best we can without getting humiliated. City are such a brilliant team. I mean, David Silva. I just purr at him. If I had a pick of all the players in England, it would be him. So let's hope he's not playing.'