Mowbray’s Future

[philipl]

Condolences to Mark Venus. 

[tonygreenbank]

40 minutes ago, Mattyblue said:

Not masses in it about Rovers. More a ‘life in football’ piece.

Real ‘the smell of the bovril, the glare of the floodlights’ type stuff you’d expect from Mogga!

A very good read and tells you a lot about Mowbray as a person, as a manager and as a parent. He does mention the owners which will surprise a lot of people.

if I knew how I would upload this article for everyone to read!

[Bigdoggsteel]

16 hours ago, blueboy3333 said:

He's absolutely nothing like him.

So Travis isn't a strong runner who likes to get the ball forward? 

[Stuart]

1 hour ago, Mattyblue said:

Not masses in it about Rovers. More a ‘life in football’ piece.

Real ‘the smell of the bovril, the glare of the floodlights’ type stuff you’d expect from Mogga!

[tomphil]

Great piece on Mowbray what a proper football bloke he is, shame about Venus situation there was a few questioning if he was a good enough coach but the poor fella wasn't even coaching. We really do forget that despite the money they get and the circus they are on in that industry they are all human and have the same trials and tribulations as everyone else.

[tomphil]

16 hours ago, DE. said:

Winter was one of very few journalists who fully stood behind the fans when the Venky's/Kean saga was in full swing. Don't remember him ever taking a shot at us, only pointing out what the owners and the bald snake had done and were doing to us. 

He did a pal of mine bumped into him up here when he was covering a game around the time the full Venky/Kean/Anderson situation was kicking in and off record he was genuinely disgusted at it all and seriously worried about the clubs survival at that point, I think they owed Barclays 10 million about then.

[Stuart]

Interesting that he talks about passing on “his integrity” to “a group of lads I can mould”. Probably why Smallwood is one of his favourites - that honesty, work ethic.

Also says he left Coventry “because they became a basket case”. Nothing to do with his awful run.

Love that he talks about Rovers as “a prope club with proper people”. Less convinced by  his description of the Raos as “nice, humble, honest people”.

Overall comes across very well though, much like we’d expect. A thoroughly decent bloke.

Edited January 5, 2019 by Stuart

[Mattyblue]

Watching the Sunderland doc was a real insight into the tireless work people put in to football clubs, so you can picture Leslie and the other staff at Brockhall and Ewood.

[blueboy3333]

1 hour ago, Bigdoggsteel said:

So Travis isn't a strong runner who likes to get the ball forward? 

Lots of players are 'strong runners' who like to 'get forward'. You specifically mentioned the Ox. He's nothing like the Ox. 

Chapman is a strong runner who likes to get forward. So is Bell.  Neither are like Travis. 

[Bigdoggsteel]

17 minutes ago, blueboy3333 said:

Lots of players are 'strong runners' who like to 'get forward'. You specifically mentioned the Ox. He's nothing like the Ox. 

Chapman is a strong runner who likes to get forward. So is Bell.  Neither are like Travis. 

Hence why I said he is like the ox INSOFARAS he is a strong runner who likes to get the ball forwards. 

You have gone off on some tangent and lost me with the last paragraph. 

I think it's time for some January pest control. Time to stick a couple on ignore. In my opinion, yourself and 47er don't really contribute anything from a football knowledge point of view. Just go around looking for little angles to disagree with people on. Usually ignoring or missing their entire points. 

Edited January 5, 2019 by Bigdoggsteel

[Bigdoggsteel]

4 hours ago, Mattyblue said:

Good piece in the Times.

It explains why Venus was absent for a while. His wife died of breast cancer just before Christmas.

Poor man. 

Puts things in perspective 

Hopefully he is back soon 

[blueboy3333]

20 minutes ago, Bigdoggsteel said:

In my opinion, yourself and 47er don't really contribute anything from a football knowledge point of view.

Jesus Christ you've some opinion of yourself! You made a pointless remark about 'strong runners' and players who like to 'get forward' which could include about 5 players in every team in the league. You somehow decided in that context that the Ox and Travis were similar players. I just pointed out they aren't. If anyone lack 'football knowledge' my angry little friend it is you. You just can't cope with anyone disagreeing with you , yet you are responsible for some of the most pointless and inane disagreements on here.

Know thyself Doggy!

FYI. I haven't got you on ignore so I will disagree with your posts if I so decide. That's how a democratic forum works. If you want to throw your dummy out because you can't handle a bit of non-offensive discussion then that's your problem. Crack on. 

 

 

[blueboy3333]

On ‎04‎/‎01‎/‎2019 at 12:46, FGS5635 said:

Henry Winter‏Verified account @henrywinter

Spent some time this week with Tony Mowbray at Blackburn Rovers. Fascinating man. Will link interview later. #brfc

Could you post the interview if you are behind the Times paywall? (if that's where Winter is these days)

[AllRoverAsia]

26 minutes ago, blueboy3333 said:

Could you post the interview if you are behind the Times paywall? (if that's where Winter is these days)

Register for free with the Times and you can access 1, maybe it's 2 or 3, articles for free each week or maybe it's per month. Obviously I haven't read the small print but free it is.

Anyway just read TM, great read, can't copy as on a crap phone and the article has too many photos etc to edit out.

[Mattyblue]

Stuart has took a photo and pasted in the hard copy on the last page, readable with a bit of zooming in!

[blueboy3333]

1 minute ago, Mattyblue said:

Stuart has took a photo and pasted in the hard copy on the last page, readable with a bit of zooming in!

Ah yes. made the cardinal sin of not reading beyond the post I quoted! Cheers,

Edited January 5, 2019 by blueboy3333

[Herbie6590]

4 hours ago, JHRover said:

I'm not a subscriber to the Times but I'm tempted to do so just to read that article, especially as it is by Henry Winter.

I heard the thing about Venus over Christmas. Him and Mowbray have had rotten luck in losing their wives at relatively young ages. I suppose working in football and being involved every day might be the best thing for him to try and help him through it. 

You can sign up for free for a small number of free articles ??

[blueboy3333]

4 minutes ago, Herbie6590 said:

You can sign up for free for a small number of free articles ??

I just looked but couldn't find the option. It just showed a £1 for 8 weeks option or a normal subscription. Probably me being a bit thick. 

[AllRoverAsia]

20 minutes ago, Mattyblue said:

Stuart has took a photo and pasted in the hard copy on the last page, readable with a bit of zooming in!

As an academic exercise and also because I don't like to be bettered by a shit Sammysung phone I did a copy, paste on a gmail page for space, edit, copy and paste transcript as follows. Quite easy really:

"Even now, almost a half-century on, Tony Mowbray, can remember when he first fell in love with the FA Cup. It was watching the final, starting in 1970, when his father would draw the curtains at their house in Redcar, North Yorkshire, get the TV ready, and his mother would lay out the cold beef sandwiches.

“Dad always seemed to win the meat draw at the social club — must have known the committee,” Mowbray says laughing. “He used to have all his mates round, 12 blokes sitting there. I could never get on the sofa, so I’d be laying in front of the telly, a telly you turned the dial to tune in. The FA Cup final was such a massive event in our house. 1970 is the first I remember: Leeds v Chelsea, long throw, [Dave] Webb coming in at the back stick [to settle the replay]. Then Liverpool v Arsenal 1971 . . .”

And the following season, a fifth-round replay on February 29, 1972, a day that will never be forgotten by Mowbray, eight at the time. He was at school, when his father, Clive, a scaffolder at British Steel, burst into the classroom. “What’s my dad doing here? ‘Come and watch Georgie Best,’ he said. Manchester United were coming to Ayresome Park. The coal strike was on, no floodlights, so they had to play in the afternoon. My dad used to drip-feed me on George Best, and that’s what a footballer should be like. Unfortunately for me, I became a big rugged centre half, not George Best.

“My dad was driven on football. Loved it. He was in the social clubs constantly with his mates, and I was the little lad left at the door, while he had a quick pint, then, ‘Get your scarf ready’. We’d walk through the streets, he’d pay to get in the Holgate End, I’d nick in front of him and we’d go through together. It was buttons to get into Ayresome Park. Now football all seems corporate.

“The memory I have is of walking up the concrete steps in the Holgate End and seeing the oasis of green. It left a lasting effect on me of how sacred football was amongst all the working-class people in their grey and black coats, and the smell of Bovril. In the middle of the Holgate End, the crowd swayed as shots came in, feet off the ground.

“At nine and ten, now and then dad would take me in the middle before the madness started. As I got older, I got closer to the middle, in with my mates, thinking this was what life was about, really.

Ayresome Park is not there any more, it’s housing estates. Sometimes I find myself just driving down the road to go past where the stadium used to be.”

As the third round of the FA Cup quickens today, Mowbray oversees his 100th game as Blackburn Rovers manager, heading to St James’ Park where he made his Middlesbrough debut in 1982, marking an England legend. “I remember the nervousness of playing against Kevin Keegan, thinking, ‘I hope he doesn’t embarrass me.’ I only had one fear, letting people down.”

He did not. The game finished 1-1, and Keegan never got away from him. “Whenever I have a day off, I meet Gary Pallister in Yarm, and we talk about life and football. The driving factor of a lot of players like me and Pally was the fear of letting down the people you love, your family. I don’t want to be the one who costs us the goal, who loses his man in the box. It churns your stomach.

“My mum was always critical of me. I have kids — nine, 11 and 14 — who all play football in their local Sunday teams, and I’m very mindful of trying not to be overcritical of them. I have a 14-year-old who is nearly as tall as I am, can run like the wind, wins the cross-country and 100m, and yet he hasn’t the hunger I have in my belly, burning away. ‘Why did you let that kid push you about?’ I tell him. ‘Get stuck in.’ He’s trying to figure out at 14 that he knows how much his dad loves him but why is he pushing me so hard? I want him to survive in life, let alone the next football match. But he’s on the PlayStation and this Fortnite game all the time.”

So why not turn the wifi off? “Listen, it’s chaos then,” he replies. “I say, Go in the garden and play football’. I spent my whole life as a kid walking to school, and kicking a ball about. I’m really worried about the next generation of players, not Harry Kane and Dele Alli — they’re great players — but the next generation on their PlayStations.”

Mowbray is tempted to show his eldest son a picture he keeps of what he was doing at 14, standing in the tunnel at Ayresome Park as Graeme Souness strides past. “The tache. The long hair. He looks like Magnum! The shorts in the 1970s were almost obscene [short] and he has these legs which were always shining. I see Souness now on TV, and you can feel in his analysis that if you haven’t got a bit of bite about you then you’re weak. He’s from an era where he played against Billy Bremner and Johnny Giles, and if you don’t look after yourself you were in trouble.”

Mowbray could certainly look after himself as one of Middlesbrough’s most cherished players, blossoming under Bruce Rioch. “I’d had Jack Charlton and Malcolm Allison, managers with big reputations, yet Rioch made us think two or three steps in front,” he says. “He taught us a lot about positional play. He was an amazing manager for me with successive promotions from liquidation, not even administration, to the top flight.”

A famous diving header in 1988, in a victory over Aston Villa, helped Middlesbrough on their climb to the old first division. “I had a daft blond flick with peroxide hair,” he says. “That picture has been in lots of magazines. People do send me pictures to get signed, and the lads pin them on the wall before I get to them. I have still got the bottle of champagne from that game, unopened, man of the match. I was a young boy from the town, being captain, being successful, does it get any better?”

Mowbray went on to play for Celtic and Ipswich Town, and has managed 625 matches, impressing at Hibernian and West Bromwich Albion, but often doing jobs in difficult circumstances. “Have I ever gone into a calm club? At Celtic, I didn’t survive a year in a job that needed dramatic change, with an old team. Second is nothing at Celtic. If you’re losing, you get absolute pelters, and you are the bad guy in the story that is Scottish football. It’s the brutality of that job, the brutality of green or blue, win or lose, goodie or baddy, dealing with five or six national newspapers every day, that didn’t suit my conscientious side.

“I went back home, went to Middlesbrough. For three years I toiled hard at that club. That was the most painful time. I had young children who went to Yarm School, all Boro fans, and they were getting, ‘Your dad’s just got sacked.’ It was a tough time for my family.

“I took time out. I tried to be a dad for six months but football dragged me back. Joe Royle phoned me up and said, ‘What are you doing? Coventry City, are you joking?’ I said, ‘Joe, listen, I need to get back to work, a group of lads who I can mould, give my values to, my integrity. We had James Maddison, Adam Armstrong and Jacob Murphy. Joe Cole came. I left Coventry because they became a basket case [with the politics about the ownership and stadium].”

Then the controversial Venky’s family offered him the Blackburn job. “Joe Royle phoned me up and said, ‘You are a glutton for punishment.’ Yet this is a proper football club.” As he walks along a corridor at the Brockhall Village training complex, Mowbray points out the pictures of the title-winning Chris Sutton and Alan Shearer, the huge badge in reception with 1875, and we stop and talk to his popular PA, Lesley Fielding, part of the human fabric of Blackburn Rovers. “It’s a proper club with proper people,” Mowbray says.

“I met the owners, I think they are nice, humble, honest people. They talked about family, which appealed to the conscientious side of my nature. I have great aspirations to help the owners to try to put Rovers back to where they and the supporters feel it should be. The highs of being a manager are greater than being a player.

“But unless you have your tactics, words of inspiration and selection right, and you get beat, nobody knows the depths you can fall to. I’m not nice to be around when we’ve lost. I have to go back to three boys waiting for me, and when the lights come up the drive they all come running to the door. They are consoling. You have to be a dad then and yet the wife [Amber] knows when she can start a conversation.

Mowbray has managed seven clubs in a career in the dugout spanning 16 years.

“I have to switch off because I have to take three kids to matches, and try to watch their games but I have yesterday’s game in my head. With modern technology, I can watch the whole game back on my phone. Football . . . I do it because I love it. I do it for my kids so they can go to a nice school, and get an education and have a life. I toil with, ‘Am I doing the right thing by my children? Am I spending enough time with them?’ Life’s a juggling act.”

Perspective on his profession is not far away. On our walk through Brockhall, Mowbray encounters Mark Venus, his assistant manager, who chats away, not giving any hint of recent bereavement. “His wife died on the 18th of December of breast cancer,” Mowbray says later. “My wife [Bernadette, his first wife] died New Year’s Day 1995. Breast cancer. He [Venus] hadn’t been to work for two and a half months. He’s just come back. There’s perspective for me. Somebody I’ve known, and his wife, for 30-odd years. He’s just buried her. It’s horrific, really.”

Mowbray cares for his staff, and such compassion was confirmed when he was psychologically profiled. “You answer 60 questions, and there are four elements of a profile: dominant, influential, steady or conscientious. I’m stuck on the line between dominant and conscientious. I’m a football manager. I have to be dominant for 60, 70 people — the whole building,” he says.

Spending brief time with the leading managers in the land gave Mowbray further insight into the importance of emotional intelligence, being conscientious. “We played Liverpool pre-season, and Jürgen Klopp came in afterwards, and we talked for half an hour. Wow. I sat next to Pep Guardiola at a dinner. He has the ‘dominance’ factor, and yet he’s conscientious, caring too. Klopp and Guardiola are two of the world’s greatest managers and yet you could feel their humility.

“I care about people here, make sure they get a card, a bottle of wine or chocolates on their birthday. If they’ve got a problem with their family, ‘Forget about the football go and look after your missus or kid’. I feel for players when I leave them out. I make sure I explain the logic. The only time I’m not conscientious is when they let me down. I shout at them. They have respect because they know I’m shouting at them to try to make their careers better.” Mowbray cares.

HIS MANAGERIAL RECORD
Ipswich 
11 Oct – 28 Oct 2002
Played 4 Won 1 Draw 1 Lost 2 Win % 25

Hibernian 
May 2004 – Oct 2006
Played 108 Won 52 Drawn 16 Lost 40 Win % 48.1

West Brom 
Oct 2006 – June 2009
Played 140 Won 58 Draw 30 Lost 52 Win % 40.7

Celtic 
June 2009 – Mar 2010
Played 45 Won 23 Draw 9 Lost 13 Win % 51.1

Middlesbrough 
Oct 2010 – Oct 2013
Played 153 Won 61 Draw 37 Lost 55 Win % 39.9

Coventry 
Mar 2015 – Sep 2016
Played 75 Won 26 Draw 22 Lost 27 Win % 34.7

Blackburn
Feb 2017 – present
Played 99 Won 47 Draw 30 Lost 22 Win % 47.5

Team Honours 
Championship 2007-08
Individual honours 
Scottish Football Writers’ Association Manager of Year 2004-05
League Managers Association Manager of the Year 2007-08
 

[philipl]

Thanks- a lovely read.

[Leonard Venkhater]

1 hour ago, philipl said:

Thanks- a lovely read.

Love TM, but I couldn't help smile at.."But unless you have your tactics, words of inspiration and selection right.."

I am confident that he always has the words of inspiration!

Edited January 5, 2019 by Leonard Venkhater

[jim mk2]

Why not buy the Times today - at £1.90 the Mowbray feature is worth the price alone. 

[Husky]

Come back Groundhog Gaz. All is forgiven. ?

[Tyrone Shoelaces]

You can't not like the bloke, he's what football should be about not 20 year olds in Ferrari's.

[tomphil]

5 hours ago, Leonard Venkhater said:

Love TM, but I couldn't help smile at.."But unless you have your tactics, words of inspiration and selection right.."

I am confident that he always has the words of inspiration!

You do feel sometimes that some of that is what stops him being a regular gaffer at a higher level but if he did pull off promotion here it would be some achievement, surely his best one.