Harry Redknapp is sprightly and chirpy, antipodal to the forlorn figure who departed Queens Park Rangers suddenly in February citing the need for immediate knee surgery. The 68-year-old is missing football but appreciative that he is not enduring the stress this time of year entails.

Now is when he would have been at his most active: moving for players, assembling a squad, getting ready for pre-season. Instead of having a phone pressed to his ear, Redknapp is wiling his days away on the golf course – even if he will jump at the opportunity to return to the dugout if the right offer comes along.

He is walking freely, too, when we meet at a south London bowls club to promote a medical product he says helped greatly in his recovery from the surgery which led to him stepping down at Loftus Road. The club were mired in a transfer battle which was ultimately lost when he informed the chairman, Tony Fernandes, in the early hours of 3 February that he was to relinquish his role with immediate effect.

Redknapp was widely criticised for jettisoning himself to safety before the ship capsized after the close of a transfer window where the club failed to strengthen a creaking squad. He accepts how the manner in which he departed resulted in scepticism but rejects the suggestion his resignation was because of the board’s inability to sign the players he wanted.

“It’s not bad, it’s actually quite fine. I had some work done on it and I feel a lot better,” Redknapp says of the knee. “But this is a bit different for me compared to previous years – I’m not stressed out. Normally you’re getting ready for pre-season, looking to get one or two in and preparing a trip away. Until the season starts up, you don’t know how much you’ll miss it. I missed it a bit when I left but I needed a break. I was struggling. I spent most of the time at training sitting down and that wasn’t enjoyable. I want to be hands on. It was frustrating, it drove me mad. But the break has done me good – I needed it.”

So good he is now open to a return, though he refuses to discuss whether that is likely to happen before the season starts in early August. “If there was an interesting project, then definitely. I don’t feel old, I’m as sharp as ever. I would love to work with a young and upcoming coach somewhere and give him some experience. Something like Gerry Francis overseeing Tony Pulis. And I would still take over as manager somewhere if it was the right club with young coaches behind the scenes.

“It would have to be something I really wanted to do. I’m not going to go working with somebody I don’t like. I’ve enjoyed my time at every club I have worked at, I’ve been lucky, but I won’t jump in and finish up working with a chairman I didn’t like very much.”

Harry Redknapp left QPR in February. Photograph: Nigel Roddis/Getty Images

The circumstances in which he stepped down, surprising Fernandes with the news at 5.30am, led to speculation that his relationship with the QPR chairman had broken down. Redknapp denies that, adding that apart from a striker he thought the squad was good enough to remain in the Premier League.

“Tony was more keen on getting players in than I was. I wanted a striker but there was nobody out there. If we had a striker, we would have stayed up – I have no doubt about that. Only Charlie Austin was scoring but there was not anybody out there. We couldn’t get [Emmanuel] Adebayor because he was too expensive, so there was nobody I was even close to getting.

“To say I left over the transfer window is wrong – it was not a case of Tony refusing to bring anybody in, it was a case of me not finding anybody. I had felt like it was time to go for a few weeks, it was time to give somebody else a go while there were enough games for them to stay up. Look at Leicester, they were behind us and came out of it. I always said that if I wasn’t enjoying it, I’d pack up and for the first time in my career, I wasn’t and that was because I couldn’t do what I wanted.”

He was not enjoying it due to the pressure. The constant focus on job safety, internal pressure and the over-analysis in an age of 24/7 rolling news are symptomatic of a game that has changed beyond recognition from the one he played in.

“You now have these owners who are all successful businessmen and they think they should be winning. They come in thinking that they should be winning. Some don’t understand that only one team can win the league. You lose and you’re always two or three more from the sack. Television, pundits with opinions on the managers – it’s much more precarious.”

For now he is happy enjoying some free time, working on getting his handicap down and the odd bit of punditry. Raising plenty of eyebrows with the admission he cannot spell during a 2012 court case, he even joined Twitter earlier this month. For someone who claimed he could not fill a team-sheet in, the tweets have been impeccably structured. They are all his words, though, even if it is run by a social media agency. “I still don’t understand it,” he says. “I don’t have a clue what it is. I don’t even know how long it is going to last.

“I’m going to do some Champions League punditry next year. It’s not going to be easy to be critical of other managers because being there, you know how difficult it is. I will actually be more critical of the players. Managers will always do what they think is right – sometimes it comes off, other times it won’t. And if I play much more golf, I’ll end up on the senior tour. I’ve been playing almost every day – there’s always someone inviting me along to play.”

Redknapp’s absence from the dugout has left him free to express strong opinions without the risk of getting in trouble. While it would be a stretch to say he has become confrontational, he is certainly more forthright than when employed and he has a large bee in his bonnet about agents.

“Agents are befriending chairmen and chief executives now because they know the chairman will be there long term and the manager is only passing through,” he says. “Unless you’re Arsène Wenger and have real control of the club, agents will go directly above the manager. If they have an issue with one of their players, they’ll go to the chairman: ‘Oh your manager is an idiot because he’s not playing my player’. That’s how it’s gone.

“When I was a player, you only left the club if they wanted to get rid of you. That was your team – if you were at West Ham you didn’t leave until the manager wanted to replace you. You didn’t think about playing for Arsenal or Chelsea. But agents don’t make money with that – they make it by moving players around and getting clubs to use their fat chequebooks.”

Yet if a club are willing to offer Redknapp a slip from those chequebooks, he would be quite happy to jump back aboard the merry-go-round.

Harry Redknapp uses FLEXISEQ – the drug-free, pain relieving gel designed to keep people of all ages active. Discover more at Flexiseq.com