Daniel Taylortalks to Birmingham City manager Alex McLeish who will not go down without a fight

NOT EVERY manager would agree to an interview when, in the previous game, his team had surrendered 5-1 to their most despised rivals. Some would put the request straight in the wastepaper basket; others would make an excuse. But Alex McLeish has never been one to sulk, or hide, or feel sorry for himself, even in those moments that every manager occasionally goes through, when he could be forgiven for wanting to sit in a darkened room.

When Alex Ferguson watched his Manchester United team lose 5-1 to Manchester City in 1989 he was so emotionally crushed he went home and lay on his bed for several hours with a pillow over his head. McLeish is cut from the same cloth as Ferguson and he too has suffered this week. He is straight-backed and dignified, and he makes a point of maintaining eye contact as he goes through the excruciating details of Birmingham City's capitulation against Aston Villa. But there are dark smudges beneath his eyes.

"I would defy any manager who could say they can get a good night's sleep when their team has lost," he says. "It's impossible . . . You might manage it for an hour or two. You might even start to have a nice, pleasant dream, but you will inevitably wake up in the middle of the night. That's when the reality hits you. All you can think is 'S**t, we got beat', there's no going back to sleep after that."

He has received an apology from the referees' chief Keith Hackett - Villa's second and third goals were offside - but it does not alter the fact it was Birmingham's worst league defeat to the old enemy since 1960, or that they are in desperate trouble, third from bottom with three games to go.

The run-in begins against Liverpool today and McLeish is playing it as cool as possible, with the supporters and the players. "Don't get me wrong," he says. "There have been times in the past when I have thrown teacups around the dressingroom. I have kicked a few hampers too. I broke my toe on one occasion and I had to try to disguise it. But I prefer to do it another way.

"As a player I had six years under Alex Ferguson at Aberdeen and there was always that fear factor. But management has evolved. These days it's all about psychology. I'm a big one for positive thinking. We had a video session on Thursday and it was a positive session. It wasn't about pointing fingers at anyone. It was about showing the players some of the things they had abandoned and getting back to playing as a team. I told them there was nothing we could do about what had already happened but we could do things better in the future and that I wanted to help educate them."

McLeish replaced Steve Bruce in January when Birmingham were 16th, with 11 points from the first 14 games. There have been highlights since, most notably taking four points off Arsenal, but 20 points in 21 games has dropped them into the relegation zone. The ordeal at Villa Park - "the worst derby defeat I have had as a manager" - was demoralising and McLeish accepts there is a substantial threat of relegation.

"We can do two things in the worst-case scenario. We can go down and be negative, thinking it's the end of the world. Or we can do something about it and come back even stronger. The end of the world? Maybe it might be the beginning.

"I've been relegated before with Hibernian and, yes, it was a very sore experience but we came back at the first time of asking. I'm not a person who gives up easily. I'm a fighter and when I get knocked down the one thing I know about myself is that I get back up again."

McLeish is a hard man, with the broken nose to prove it. But Birmingham fans should also appreciate "Big Eck" is more than just a motivator. In many ways he is an academic, a man of the world who has studied and can talk about everything from grass-roots football in Australia to the state of the game in Africa.

"Growing up, I suppose I was a bit of an anorak," he says. "At school I prided myself on knowing every club in every country, and in later years World Soccer became my bible. I've got a collection going back to the 1960s . . . I just always felt it was important to have a worldwide knowledge of football if I wanted to go into management."

A movie buff, he also has a collection of Empire magazines going back to its first edition in 1989. "The problem is there aren't enough hours in the day to read them, never mind see the films. Even when I leave the office and go home I'm still thinking about football. It's 24/7.

"I find myself sitting at home, surfing the channels looking for a game. Occasionally I might reach saturation point and, okay, enough's enough, let's watch half an hour of Coronation Street. But then the adverts come on and I go back to the football. Chelmsford might be playing and I'm thinking, hmm, I quite fancy watching this . . ."

He had an easier pace of life as Scotland's manager but the truth is he missed the challenge of day-to-day work and always wanted to work in the Premier League. Only 49, it is conceivable one day he may return to the national job. That, however, can wait. "Will I regret it (leaving Scotland) if the worst was to happen and Birmingham were to go down? Well, put it this way, I'd like to be further up the table but we're a young and inexperienced team and I don't think it can be a surprise to anybody that we are where we are.

"All the analysts had us relegated at the start of the season and I always knew it would come down to the last three games . . . we also have a great chance of staying up, and if we do we have a superb platform from which to build. The potential here is massive and I came for the long haul. Yes, there was a short-term goal but the real aim is long-term stability and making Birmingham a bona fide Premier League team, not a yo-yo club going up and down. I want to get this club to another level and I want to change the mindset of the supporters.

"One thing I've noticed is sometimes there's a wee bit of an air of gloom. They were embarrassed by what happened at Villa and understandably so, but I'd noticed it even before then. We have to inspire them, and the only people who can do that is us - the players, the management, the board."