Tony Mowbray is up off the settee and signalling to follow him into another room where he keeps memorabilia from over 40 years in professional football. He looks lean, strong, and, as he says, “ready”.
Past framed jerseys in a small office, Mowbray is immediately enthusing, as he does, about images of players and clubs, not just him and his.
There’s a photograph of the Charlton brothers with their 1950s quiffs; a panorama from the 2000 First Division play-off final at Wembley, in which Mowbray scored Ipswich Town’s opening goal; a cartoon featuring Brian Clough; and a framed quotation from former U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt about “the man who is actually in the arena… who, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly”.
Mowbray points to the words and says: “That’s what I live my life by.”
Life and Tony Mowbray: they have had a tense 12 months.
This was Thursday afternoon in the family home south of Middlesbrough. Some 48 hours earlier, Mowbray had been on his way back from Manchester after his latest hospital appointment when he received a call from his doctor to say the chief radiologist had seen his latest test results. The message was: everything’s clear.
Relieved, refreshed, “energised” in his description, Mowbray phoned his mother, Margaret. She still lives in the Redcar house in which Mowbray was raised.
“She’s 82 in April and I keep telling her to stop following football,” Mowbray says, smiling. “She worries about football. She says she’s enjoyed the last year because she’s not had to worry (about me and football).” He is laughing, shaking his head.
But Mowbray is back now, accepting the job at West Bromwich Albion on Friday morning. Margaret probably knew it would happen because Tony’s connection to football feels umbilical.
He recalls his first sighting of Middlesbrough’s old ground, Ayresome Park, at the age of eight when his father, Clive, interrupted a primary school class to take his son out. Clive Mowbray was a steelworks scaffolder whose nickname was ‘Killer’. The teacher said nothing.
“We’re going to see George Best,” Clive told his son. Middlesbrough had Manchester United at home.
A young Mowbray playing at Ayresome Park against Leeds (Teesside Archive/Mirrorpix/Getty Images)
And when relaying the story of Tuesday, Mowbray says the radiologist his Manchester United-supporting doctor Jonathan Wild contacted is Colin Bell’s son. (For younger readers, Colin Bell is a Manchester City legend; he was born near Hartlepool in Mowbray’s north east.)
“Colin Bell’s son!” Mowbray exclaims. “Colin Bell’s son! Colin Bell’s son says ‘everything’s clear’.”
That judgment meant Mowbray was free to discuss in detail his next move and it turns out his future takes him back to his past, to West Brom, the club he joined in 2006. Mowbray was 42 then and his world was different.
Management would take him from there to Celtic, Middlesbrough, Coventry City, Blackburn Rovers, Sunderland and Birmingham City.
At the last of those, this month last year, Mowbray was starting to make an impact on a struggling team at an ambitious club where Wayne Rooney had just been dismissed.
Then came Mowbray’s unwanted news. Cancer and a year of emotional anxiety and physical agony. At its worst, Mowbray lay in hospital and saw the tears in his children’s eyes “not knowing whether I was going to live”.
Ipswich and Birmingham City unite in support of Mowbray at their fixture in February 2024 (Hannah Fountain – CameraSport via Getty Images)
But the Tony Mowbray walking into the Hawthorns today is recovered.
“Sitting here, I’m very, very good,” he says. “I’ve no discomfort anywhere. I can go shopping with the wife in Leeds, I can pick the kids up from school. I can have a coffee with Pally (Gary Pallister) as I did this morning. I’m living a normal life.
“I’m back in the gym every morning except Sunday, when I give myself a break. I’m doing weights, abdominals, strengthening. I walk for an hour on the beach. I feel good. My voice is back, you can’t shut me up.
“Six months ago I was told I’d no cancer in my body. On Tuesday, again it was clear. Everything’s good, get on with it. I have no hesitation, I’ve got the energy for it. I know I’m ready. I’m burning. I want to influence a team again, meet young footballers, make them better. I’m pretty relaxed, but it’s burning in here and Amber, my wife, knows that.
“I’ve got 40 years of football knowledge to impart, hopefully, to young players to help create an environment in a stadium that people want to go to. My wife and I went on holiday to the Maldives just to draw a line under the treatment. I feel great, the treatment’s finished.
“I’m energised.”
On this weekend last January, Birmingham City had just won their first match under Mowbray — an FA Cup tie against Hull City. They were about to win a first Championship match, against Stoke City. A Birmingham side that had won four games since August won four more in 35 days under Mowbray.
“I think Birmingham were happy with how I’d started,” he says. “And then this happened.”
‘This’ was a cancer diagnosis following an annual medical examination provided by the League Managers’ Association that Mowbray had not undergone for years.
“Everything was good,” Mowbray says of the medical, “but I had a colonoscopy and they found it there and then. In the doctor’s opinion, it looked cancerous, which was the first time I’d heard the word.
“I drove home from Manchester. I’d to tell my wife first. ‘What are we going to do?’, ‘How are we going to deal with this?’. Medical people don’t go through every detail, I didn’t really know what was coming. They had to book an operation first.
“I had to leave Birmingham City. I did tell them I’d watch games and watch training on my laptop — and I did. But I’d a 10-hour operation a couple of weeks after.”
Mowbray acknowledges the travelling Sunderland fans at Birmingham last February (Ian Horrocks/Sunderland AFC via Getty Images)
Even a man of Mowbray’s natural ebullience and resilience understands anatomical reality after 10 hours of surgery. He chuckles now at his optimism; the idea he could or would be back for Birmingham’s pre-season tour in July. From stepping aside in February, Mowbray took leave of absence in March and resigned in May.
All the while, Birmingham, falling towards relegation, kept in touch and he is very appreciative of that, as he is for all the affection and respect shown by clubs and fans across Britain.
But Mowbray had a new hourly and daily challenge to face: bowel cancer.
“I had a stoma attached after the operation on the part of the bowel where there was a cancerous tumour,” he says. “A year ago I wouldn’t have known what a stoma was. Now I do.
“They bring your bowel out through your stomach (stoma) and attach a plastic bag. All of your human waste goes into your bag. It’s mainly liquid. You have lots of medication to try to make it more solid, otherwise you have diarrhoea all day. You are… the best word is wasted.
“You are totally dehydrated, no energy. I remember standing up in the shower and it was too much. I had to sit down. I was just worn out. I couldn’t walk down the stairs. When your body is empty, every step is a chore. You know you’re ill.”
Surgery had removed 15 centimetres of bowel and Mowbray, struggling to eat or drink, was shedding weight, 4.5 stone (28.6kg) in all. His throat shrank so much he could barely speak.
Amber was driving him the five-hour, 250-mile round-trip to Manchester’s Christie Hospital for blood tests and saline rehydration. One trip took five and a half hours just to get there. Mowbray, 6ft 1in (185cm), would lie on the back seat trying to sleep — “I was wasted, she was driving.” Four courses of chemotherapy started. Mowbray looked in the mirror and says he saw “half a man”.
He nods across towards the kitchen and says: “I had two moments on the kitchen floor. My wife had gone to pick the kids up from school. The doorbell rang and I got up from the sofa, I don’t know why. The next thing I knew I was on the floor rubbing my head. I’d collapsed, blacked out. I banged my head on the hard floor. Twice I did that.
“I phoned the hospital and they said come down. I was so dehydrated. My body was empty of fluid. I’d go to Manchester and they’d put me on a saline drip and I’d wake up the next day feeling like I could run a marathon. Unbelievable.”
Birmingham’s Jordan James wears a shirt sporting the word ‘gaffer’ in support of Mowbray (Stephen Pond/Getty Images)
As for most of us, chemotherapy was a word Mowbray had heard. Experiencing it was altogether different.
He opens his palms and says: “I had these intravenous drips slid into my wrist. I’d sit there for two hours in Manchester. I’d go home, get six tablets a day for three weeks. They were like horse tablets; big, brown. Have a week off, then go back and get the next. We did that four times. It just wears you out.
“I was being told to eat and drink and I was saying: ‘Eat and drink? Are you joking me?’.”
This man, who nostalgically remembers the smell of Bovril and the wafting cigarette smoke on the terraces of Ayresome Park, says “just the smell of food was making me vomit”.
“I was feeling really nauseous. They send you anti-nausea tablets and I was taking 22 tablets a day, I think that was the most. They’re telling me to eat and I was telling a senior nurse down the phone that I couldn’t do it. I’d have to go back down to Manchester to get rehydrated. It was a horrible cycle I was stuck in. You can’t build up any energy to feel normal.”
Gradually, the medication took effect. By July, Mowbray not only felt able to take his three children to Spain on holiday, he wanted to. He wanted to get them out of their environment. They played golf, Mowbray getting around the course on a buggy.
The Hawthorns shows its support for Mowbray (Bradley Collyer/PA Images via Getty Images)
The good news was the doctors said Mowbray could have a “reversal”, a re-stitching of the bowel, an end to the plastic bag. The less good news, and unexpected to him, was that this next operation “hit me hard”.
“The doctors said they could reconnect the bowel back to where it belongs. I was thinking I’d be back to normal, but aw… I’d basically to lie on the bathroom floor for hours because any movement would mean diving onto the toilet. That was maybe for a couple of weeks. I was exhausted.”
Again, though, there was progress and, while it took months to rebuild strength, by November into December, he felt fit. He was back in the gym and put on weight. Now he is ready to go.
But Mowbray will not forget 2024. He will not forget the day he telephoned Birmingham CEO Garry Cook to say, after all, there would be no return.
“It made me think about death,” Mowbray says of the year. “That day in hospital when I phoned Garry Cook, it was because my kids were crying. I could see the water in their eyes. I know what they were thinking — I’ve been there.”
Mowbray was a player at Celtic in the early 1990s when he met and married Bernadette. She had cancer before they met. Then it returned.
“I sat in a big armchair beside a hospital bed for three months in Glasgow,” he says. “I didn’t go home after training. I just held her hand. She was on steroids for months. In the end, she withered away. Secondary cancer they call it. When we married, she’d had a lumpectomy. She’d been clear for six years…”
Mowbray’s voice trails off. His mobile phone rings. “I’ll call you back.”
He resumes. “Anyway… it was a difficult time. Because I was a footballer. I played an Old Firm game in between going back into hospital and holding her hand. It was difficult. And when she did pass away, I almost stopped being a footballer and became a cancer charity worker. That was because people wanted to do dinners, talks, raise money. I did the book ‘Kissed By An Angel’ for cancer charities.
Mowbray slides into a challenge on Motherwell’s Tommy Coyne during his Celtic days (Jeff Holmes/EMPICS via Getty Images)
“I keep in touch with the family, her Dad — that was her sister’s husband on the phone there.
“Bernadette’s in my life all the time. I talk to her at times. When things aren’t good, even in a football context, I put her up in the corner of the room in my mind and talk to her. She loved football. Everybody in Glasgow’s a Celtic fan — well, not everybody (laughs). Half of them. It’s an amazing city, isn’t it? But I’m not sure it suited my temperament. It’s too bitter for me. That city is too harsh for me.
“So, yes, cancer had been in my life.”
Bernadette was 26 when she died. Mowbray was 31. The basic goodness within Mowbray means the sadness he discusses is mixed with appreciation for the nursing staff and the doctors who treated him. He mentions some by name, such as doctors Wild and Sally Harris. He praises the teamwork of the nurses.
“Being in a hospital like the Christie — I’m fortunate that because of football I had private healthcare — but you’d go to parts of that hospital that are NHS and it’s so busy with so many super-ill, fragile people. The scanner is overloaded. I’d sit there and think how fortunate I am.”
On Thursday night, Amad Diallo scored a hat-trick for Manchester United. As he did so, a hashtag appeared on social media.
#sonofmowbray
Amad and Mowbray have been texting. The player came under Mowbray’s guidance at Sunderland in August 2022, a month after Amad’s 20th birthday. He was reserved initially on and off the pitch at the Stadium of Light, but he began to blossom under Mowbray’s nurturing, intelligent coaching.
“Amad gives me the credit for giving him confidence to show people his talent,” Mowbray says. “But he did it himself. I texted him the other day. He’s so humble.
“I didn’t know him at first. I asked the analyst to show me some clips to see what he was all about. He wasn’t the Amad Diallo you see now. He was quiet, shy, mixed in with the French kids. But you can’t hide talent.
Amad thrived on loan at Sunderland under Mowbray (Alex Dodd – CameraSport via Getty Images)
“He was strong. With his hips and backside, he could hold people off and the ball was stuck to his left foot. There was one training session when no one could get the ball off him and he was smashing it in the top corner. It’s not clever management to put them in. You just have to. Their talent is telling you that.”
GO DEEPER
A month of Mowbray at Sunderland – no No 9s, cautious giddiness and Mickey Mouse crocs
At Mowbray’s club before Sunderland, Blackburn, where he was manager for five years, another young talent he encouraged was Adam Wharton. Now 20, of Crystal Palace and England, Wharton was 13 when Mowbray took over at Ewood Park and it was only in his last couple of years that he invited the teenager to train with the first team.
When he did, Mowbray and assistant Mark Venus would leave training for a familiar conversation.
“Veno loves a technician,” Mowbray says. “He used to laugh. He’d come in after training and say: ‘Just so I’m not going daft, who was the best player in training today?’.
“I’m saying ‘I know, I know’, but you can’t put him in the team when he’s 15! Veno would then compare him to Paul Scholes.
“Adam trained with us every day. His older brother, Scott, was more dominant and he was in the team. Adam was a skinny kid, not very fast, not very strong — but in over a year’s training, I never saw him lose the ball once. He had all the pictures.”
Wharton was schooled under Mowbray at Blackburn (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)
Mentoring, coaxing, as well as technical coaching; this is what Mowbray does with players young and old. He wants to do it again, get a team playing “front-foot, no-fear football”.
It doesn’t always triumph and he laughs again when remembering how Alan Hansen would criticise him “every Saturday night” on Match of the Day the first time around at West Brom — “a bit like Ange Postecoglou today. ‘Why is Mowbray still doing this?’, ‘They need to change’.
“I like Alan Hansen, what a footballer, but they used to hammer me. Ultimately, we did get relegated, but we played some great football.”
He is going back to the Albion, where the Championship and promotion to the Premier League were won in 2008. Above the chess set outside his office is another photograph, of James Morrison and Jonathan Greening holding the Championship trophy aloft the day it was secured at QPR’s Loftus Road.
Mowbray’s West Brom celebrate promotion at QPR (Tom Shaw/Getty Images)
“I like the history of clubs,” Mowbray says. “I went to Coventry City because of 1987 — Keith Houchen, diving header, Wembley, the FA Cup. And West Brom, it was a no-brainer to me then because of Bryan Robson, Remi Moses, Brendon Batson, Cyrille Regis. What a team.
“That’s what I like. What I feel I try to do is give them that back. I try to give them the beautiful game back because of the history of what they’ve done. I know there are people in that stadium who saw those players — not everybody is 19, 20. There are people in their 70s who saw Robson, Batson, Derek Statham.
“I’m not saying we can recreate that, but we can be positive, attacking and try to make them smile.”
Tony Mowbray is smiling again. He has endured, he is flowing, talking up the game itself. “Soldiers and artists” is one of his trademark phrases regarding teamwork. He is both.
The romantic realist returns.
(Top photo: Michael Driver/MI News/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
