Little things like relegation will never be allowed to cloud the horizon of broadcaster Tom Ross, as Graham Young discovers.

Broadcaster and soothsayer Tom Ross is already looking ahead to a new football season of untold promise.

His beloved Birmingham City have just been relegated from the Premiership for the third time in six seasons but Ross refuses to see it as the end of the world.

That this year’s Carling Cup winners have bounced back to the Premiership twice since 2006 tells Ross that Blues – the most relegated and promoted club in English football history – can do it again.

“The club have just told me that (manager Alex) Mcleish is staying,” he beams.

“He’s one of the best managers we’ve had.

“Before you can enjoy anything in life, you have to experience losing.

“And once the initial shock is over you just get on with it.

“We might not get to another cup final for 50 years, but we can come back to the Premiership next year.”

Like Martin Scorsese before him, Ross once thought the priesthood would be his calling.

But on March 28 this year it was 30 years to the day – or five relegations for Blues – since the former head altar server at St Chad’s covered his first game for BRMB.

As well as making a good living for leading business analysts Dun and Bradstreet (D&B) in the City – while commuting every day to London from 6am-9pm – Ross had also been freelancing for what is now BBC WM.

When BRMB’s head of sport Tony Butler asked him to move over to Aston Road North, Ross took a “66 per cent pay cut” to seize the job of his dreams.

The second eldest of eight children, he had grown up wearing hand-me-downs in the slums of New John Street West off Summer Lane.

Mother Mary was from Belfast, while his father, also called Ross, was from Glasgow.

Because Blues had a Scottish winger called Alex Govan (now 81), that was the club Ross Sr chose to support when he moved south, even though the family lived much closer to the Villa ground.

If pennies were hard to come by, Ross Jr says he grew up surrounded by love in a house where his father ‘‘could slice a Swiss roll 200 times’’.

“I’m not ashamed of my background with cold water and no indoor loo, I’m proud of it,” adds Ross. “Anyone can achieve their dream if they work hard enough. Where you’ve come from is never an excuse.”

Willing to reminisce about his late parents all day long, Ross is understandably less eager to rake over the coals of the living.

He has three marriages to his name and is hoping for a fourth next year, to Anne Delaney from BBC Mailbox.

Even though there are eight grandchildren to fuss over from his five children, the fact that his eldest son of three hasn’t spoken to him for years clearly hurts.

But Ross is not a man for turning the clock back.

“I won’t say a bad word about any of my wives,” he says. “The job takes over your life and I think they get fed up being on their own.”

His entire philosophy is built around the fact that in the history of football no game, goal, free-kick or sending off has ever been the same.

And that your next match, whether it’s with “Manchester United or Port Vale”, could be the best you’ll ever see.

The best player he ever saw was Pele when Santos came to Villa Park.

It’s also his considered opinion that George Best was better than Barcelona star Lionel Messi.

Totally in love with the game while it’s out on the pitch, Ross readily derides the industry’s emphasises on football’s top four at the expense of giving everyone else a chance.

“Next season hasn’t kicked off, but I can already tell you the names of the 16 clubs who won’t win the Premiership,” he says. “Football has become like Animal Farm.

“Everyone talks about systems when teams lose, but the game is, has and always will be about players and supporters.’’

“Everyone knows they can trust me. I could make £1 million selling ‘stories’ to the News of the World, but why would I want to when I’ve got the best job in the world?”

Formerly of BRMB himself before joining BBC WM, Ed Doolan once told me that the hardest lesson he’d ever learned was to say ‘No’.

Likewise Ross admits he can’t use the shortest word in our language either.

As head of sport for BRMB’s parent company Orion, he’s involved with co-ordinating coverage of more than 200 games per season so there’s always another game to see, people to interview, presentations to attend and charity functions to support.

“I started off with nothing and always want to help people,” he says. “I see my kids fit and healthy and then look at others less fortunate.

“After the Boxing Day tsunami I did a 127-hour radiothon and we raised £147,000.”

Since 1984, Ross has been on 1,215 Friday phone ins and hosted 4,850 post-match phone-ins.

He’s travelled more than 925,000 miles to see 2,600 games, commentating on more than 2,000 of them including three FA Cup Finals, five Carling Cup finals, four play-off finals, five League Trophy finals and two FA Trophy Finals.

Left footed as an amateur player, Ross says: “Being told I had cancer in 2008 frightened the life out of me. I had to have an operation to remove a cancerous growth from my right leg.

“At least the surgeon told me that while I might look like a Metro on the outside, he said I was like a Rolls-Royce on the inside, the best way to be.”

Four years earlier Ross endured his darkest moment. Driving home one night, 40-year-old Birmingham man Kevin Murphy stepped into the road in front of him and died from multiple injuries as a result of the collision with Ross’s car.

Police witnessed the accident and Ross was cleared of any blame under all aspects of the law, but the accident on that dark, wet night, still haunts him. Mr Murphy’s blood alcohol was more than twice the legal limit, while Ross has always been teetotal.

But seven years later it still makes him choke more than any relegation battle ever will.

“The family were great and said it wasn’t my fault and were probably far more understanding than I probably would have been had it been my family,” says Ross.

“When his father hugged me, I just broke down.

“I don’t forget it and I won’t despite being exonerated. I still wish I had turned left instead of right and not gone down that way.”

Of the rest of his life and work, it’s simple. “I’ve enjoyed every minute and wouldn’t change a thing.’’

In other words, like the Blues’ anthem, he’s going to “Keep right on...”.