Then, as the piece that carried his words put it, out the door, down the corridor and onwards into history — with Dalglish, not himself, at the front of his mind.
Friday, he said, belongs to the man he still calls the greatest player his country has produced.
A record-equaller, then, but not a nostalgia trip. Robertson said he was thinking of Dalglish, not of his own place in the history.
In the room where he spoke there were a dozen ordinary chairs and, set apart from them, one elaborate seat.
On the pitch and off it, he said, the move to Liverpool as a 23-year-old was the greatest he could have made.
The Dalglishes, he said, helped so much that he could hardly ever repay them for their support and friendship.
In a reflective mood he also spoke of his mother, his father and his brother.
He said he had always doubted himself, and that the doubt had brought the best out of him. He had always tried to prove other people wrong, and to prove himself wrong.
He said he had always lived in the here and now, and that it had served him well. He may have meant that a quiet belief in his own ability sat alongside the questioning that still defines him.