The Big Interview: Edinburgh rock

Yet for all that football dominated his life, it never subsumed what made him the person he was. His character, his personality, the traits that defined him stood firm, rather than be affected by the environment he found himself in. After starting two first-team games as a raw 20-year-old centre-back, Mowbray was dropped for the next match. Then, on the Friday, one of the older defenders was injured in training and Mowbray was called to the manager’s office.

“You’re going to be playing tomorrow, son,” said Willie Maddren.

“No, I’m not,” Mowbray responded. “I’m not playing.”

“You’re what?” “You dropped me. You can’t just then ask me to play again. I’m not going to play.”

“That’s it,” barked Maddren, infuriated. “That’s the last time you ever play for this club.”

TONY MOWBRAY is talking about hermit crabs. With his long, thick fingers, he mimics the legs emerging from the crab’s shell, and then quickly closing together when it senses danger. His face is a mask of earnestness, serious, thoughtful.

“It’s a balancing act of when we’ve got possession, spreading out play, then when we lose it...” he begins to explain. “You can use the analogy of a hermit crab, I suppose, it comes out of its shell with all its legs out and then it crunches into a little tight ball very, very quickly. That’s what we’re working on in training, possession drills where you give it away and you’ve got to get back into your defensive shape very quickly.”

This is a 40-year-old body that is still housing the passion and eagerness of the schoolboy Tony. Lessons have been learned, life has been lived, experiences that colour his outlook like tinted filters have been felt and absorbed, but the essential core remains the same. Within a heartbeat, his conversation has skipped from Barcelona’s performance against Celtic last Tuesday — “when Pele talks about the beautiful game, that’s what it is” — to applying it to his Hibernian side — “if we set out to play like Barcelona, it would fall down very quickly”.

Mowbray is sitting in the Easter Road press room during the lunchtime interval between a double training session last Thursday. The small wooden chair doesn’t seem considerable enough for his mighty frame, his long legs crossed, the shins resting against the edge of the wooden table in front of him. He looks like a centre-half should do: tall, broad, hard, dominant. With his short hair, the rest of his features appear magnified: meaty ears, an ample nose that seems as though it has lived a tough life of its own, a jutting chin. When he moves in the seat his dark blue waterproof tracksuit, with a little green Hibs badge on the breast and the bottoms of the

legs tucked into white socks, rustles

like the wind toying with leaves on an oak tree.

Yet Mowbray is not just what he

looks to be, what you would expect him to be. A centre-half who has done his tours of duty in the firing line, serving 10 years at Middlesbrough, four years at Celtic, nine years at Ipswich, but when you prepare to find grit, instead you are faced with sparkle, a glistening intent. A defender, a player trained to obstruct, to negate, when he talks about the game he focuses on its intricacies, its finery. Yet after four months at Easter Road, it is the need for greater substance that waylays him.

“The challenge for us is to try to play a passing, progressive game,” he says in an accent rooted in the north east of England. Its rough surfaces bring a scragginess to his voice, the rising and falling tone making his words seem a plead, almost, a yearn.

“The problem you’ve got is that if you do give the ball away cheaply in the wrong area, you’re vulnerable. I’ve got to get the balance. At this moment in time, the strength of the defensive players we’ve got isn’t great mobility. We haven’t got defenders who can deal one on one with people.”

Three weeks ago, the task facing Mowbray was brought into sharp focus when his young team skipped fluently and impressively to a 4-1 second-half lead over Dundee at Easter Road, only to fall to their knees as the game endured, eventually finishing 4-4. Afterwards Mowbray, who looked shattered, deflated, bemoaned a lack of experience in his team. His signings — David Murphy, Sam Morrow, Dean Shiels, Simon Brown, Guillaume Beuzelin and Craig Rocastle, on loan — have mostly all fitted the same profile: young, callow, hungry to succeed but bereft of wisdom. Before yesterday, Hibs shared sixth place in the Premierleague with Motherwell, after two wins and two draws from the opening five fixtures. A steady start, surefooted first steps, but turbulence will come.

“Now I’ve got my own ideas of what the players can do and what they can’t do,” he adds. “I know how I want to play, but you realise very quickly that some of the players can’t fit into that, so you’ve got to try to adjust it. You know the way football is, you’ve got contracts, you can’t change things around as quickly as you would like to, so there’s a frustration with that. I think it’ll be a longer process.

Next summer there are a lot of decisions to be made on quite a few players, so there are opportunities to mould things the way I want to do it.”

That sculpting has already begun, with Grant Brebner, the club captain, sold to Dundee United, Tom McManus allowed to join Boston United on loan and Paul Fenwick still left in the chill shadows of the periphery. Yet these are just the opening moves.

“The transfer window is a little bit irritating. I’m on a red light, waiting to add the next bits,” he continues. “I’m aware of what we need, but the other side of the coin is that we’ve got three months to identify the players that hopefully we can attract. Quality, experienced players cost money, and we haven’t got the financial clout, really, to be able to pay the salaries. But that’s why I’m here. If it was a question of having loads of money, I’m sure the profile of the manager would have been different.”

So who have Hibs got? Who is their new manager?

“IF I had to fly to the moon I’d take Tony Mowbray, my captain, with me. He’s a magnificent man,” Bruce Rioch once remarked of the player he made Middlesbrough captain at the age of 22. The comment has followed Mowbray around, like a sylph hovering at his shoulder. It reinforces the image of solid dependability, of reliability. Inherent in such a reputation, though, is the unsaid suggestion that no other qualities are present, no intuitive creativity, no sheen of the unexpected.

Yet Mowbray, who was 1988 north east player of the year ahead of Paul Gascoigne, has always been more than he seems, he was never just an ordinary footballer. He had his quirks as a player, superstitions that riddled his conscience. Before every match he had to eat three bacon toasties, and as he ran out on to the pitch he would have to launch the ball high into the air just before his feet first touched the grass. After every match he had to have two pints of chilled milk. There were stronger values, too, a code of living that he adopted and which made him stand out.

“When a match started I was very much part of the team, but even 20 years ago footballers had a few more quid in their pocket than the man in the street, and sometimes you get inflated egos,” he says. “For whatever reason, it’s got to be in your upbringing and your background, I never really went along with the stereotypical things that young footballers got up to. I don’t feel that I was ever aloof or put myself above anybody, it just came from strength of character. I tend to do what I think’s right. As a young player, if I didn’t think it was right for me to go out and drink all night with the team, I wouldn’t. I did it because I felt that I was at best an average talent. I needed to squeeze every ounce out of what I could get to be the best player I could.”

As he talks, his gaze keeps drifting, across the room, out the door. He clutches his mobile phone in his hand, rubbing his thumb across its face and keys. Mowbray is loquacious, his keeness spilling his conversation over like water overflowing from a bath. There is thoughtfulness, too, each declaration drawn from a well of consideration. He is not so arrogant as to think that how he lived his life is the standard by which he should judge his own players now.

“It’s a cultural thing, it’s the person they are, where they come from, their families, their backgrounds, where they live now,” he says. “I didn’t drink alcohol at all after the age of maybe 19. Once I tried it as a young man I thought, ‘This ain’t right for me’, and I didn’t do it again. Now I can’t say to them, ‘Listen, none of you drink alcohol,’ because they’ve got to enjoy life. They ain’t all going to be monks, they’ve got to go out and enjoy themselves. They’re young footballers, they’ve got a few quid in their pocket, but as long as when they come into work they give me everything, and they’re aware when they’re out that they’ve got responsibilities to the club as well as themselves, then we won’t have any problems.”

When Mowbray was appointed Hibs manager, after five years as a coach at Ipswich under first George Burley and later Joe Royle, he sent a letter to each player, introducing himself and outlining his ambitions and expectations. He constantly talks of improving each individual, setting each player on a personal journey to achievement, and he has enlisted the help of Dr Andy Cale, the FA’s sports psychologist, to work with the squad and his staff. Attention to detail, an all-seeing eye, is what Mowbray brings to his job. When the Edinburgh professional rugby side came to an agreement with Hibs to use Easter Road as a venue for their fixtures, Mowbray vetoed the plan because he did not want the pitch to be ruined by overuse. One local journalist who covers Hibs tells of Mowbray unexpectedly phoning him to say: “I’m about to get on a plane and I’ll be out of contact for an hour or so. Is there anything you want to ask me?” because he knew the paper’s deadline was approaching.

He arrives in his office at 8am every morning and goes to his “downstairs office”, the dressing room, an hour later. As the players arrive, he is always watching, always listening as he attempts to get a grasp on their personalities. Who are the jokers? Who are the wild ones? Who are the thinkers? Who are the shy ones? On the training ground it is Mowbray, not his assistant Mark Venus, who takes all the coaching drills.

“I spoke to a lot of people about this job and the message that came back was, ‘What an opportunity you’ve got with so many young players’,” Mowbray says. “Yes there are frustrations, but what a chance to mould them, what a chance to coach them, what a chance to make an impact on their lives. If they want to listen. I can go back to Middlesbrough and Bruce Rioch, he had a young team, the club had just come out of liquidation, and he moulded us into a winning, formidable football team, he imparted his personality into us. Maybe the problems arose when the players became less impressionable as they got a little bit older and weren’t so willing to listen. We hit the buffers, but it was a great education for us.”

Then came Celtic.

THIRTY years on from JFK’s assassination, a couple got engaged. Mowbray had met Bernadette Doyle on a night out with some of his Celtic teammates, and the relationship between the girl from Barrhead, near Glasgow, and the player Liam Brady had signed for £1m from Middlesbrough blossomed. It was also what came to define Mowbray’s time in Scotland. Bernadette had been treated for breast cancer before the two met, but the disease came back and they brought their wedding forward when they discovered the condition had become terminal.

The story touched many beyond those involved, its poignancy catching a collective breath. Mowbray, with quiet, dignified determination, devoted himself to his wife, while continuing to try to give everything else that he had to Celtic. He lost 17lb because he was barely eating and he would travel from the hospital to training and back to the hospital again. Eight months after their wedding, Bernadette passed away, on New Year’s Day 1995. Tommy Burns, the Celtic manager who replaced Lou Macari, Brady’s successor, was caught between doing what little he could for someone in need and trying to revive Celtic. Ten months after his wife died, Mowbray joined Ipswich.

He departed feeling that he was never given a proper chance to prove himself to Burns. As a manager now, how does he look back on that time? “I’d lost my wife eight months prior and you probably think, ‘I’m ready, get me back in the team, get me playing’, and I did play some games, but the manager changed,” he says. “I didn’t figure in his plans. That’s fine, it’s a tough game, decisions have got to be made. Probably in hindsight it was the right decision, because eight months down the line my life was almost evenly divided between training, playing and getting involved in cancer charities.”

He remains in close contact with Bernadette’s family and they attended his wedding to Amber, a girl he met when she cut his hair, three years ago. In seven weeks, she will give birth to their first child. Life moves on, but when you have lived a portion of it in the public eye, that part of it can linger, never fully slipping back. Yet Mowbray knows, too, that for all the compassion that will always be offered to him in Scotland, his job is a separate part of his life, a demanding, insistent, ravenous part of his life.

“I’ve got a great affinity for the people of Scotland,” he says. “What happened in my personal life, I got a massive amount of support from everybody. But I think they know I’m a football person, really, and they let you get on with the job. I’m aware that I’ll be judged on results and the team that I manage to produce. Football is a harsh business. The supporters of this club will expect me to get results and I’ve got no preconceived ideas about goodwill or anything, you know, ‘Tony Mowbray, he’s a decent guy, it’s sad about his wife’, and all this. I have to live among the supporters every day, I have to go shopping at Sainsbury’s and I’ve got to answer my mail every day. There was no apprehension coming back, I just want an opportunity to show people what I am, a football manager.”

HE describes himself as a “borderline obsessive” when it comes to football and he admits that, like most managers, he finds it difficult to let a match go. At the weekend, a game can still be running through his mind long after it has finished, decisions being reviewed, moves deconstructed. Yet Mowbray’s grip on his life outside the game is just as firm, just as unyielding.

“I’m aware of my responsibilities to the job, but at the same time I’ve got a family life,” he says. “Football can be all consuming, but I know that if I take a day off or an afternoon off with my wife to look at houses or to buy a sofa, the club doesn’t stop functioning. You’ve got to be able to realise that, because there are things in life that you’ve got to pay attention to. To be fair, my wife knows how much I love the game and if she has to go and watch Holby City upstairs because I’m watching a game then she doesn’t mind. But it’s difficult for her, too, she’s never lived away from Suffolk. It’s about finding a balance.”

Almost 41 years on from JFK’s assassination, Mowbray is still in the midst of the football crowd, and still standing apart. Celtic travel to Easter Road today, and before kick-off the visitors will form their customary huddle. For that brief moment, something of Mowbray will line-up against Hibs. It was his idea, 10 years ago on a pre-season tour, to instigate the huddle, to try to draw his teammates together at a time when Rangers were winning the title with the regularity of night following day, and Celtic were floundering off the field in choppy waters.

“The club as a whole has bought into it, really, the supporters see it as part of their history now, or the culture of the club,” Mowbray observes. “It’s interesting that as the years went by it still carried on. It would have been very easy for somebody to come in with a strong personality and say. ‘What’s all this about?’ but it’s been bigger than that.”

Mowbray talks a lot about strong personalities. He often challenged his managers, from Maddren to Rioch, from Macari to Burns, and he wants the same from his own players now. If they cannot think for themselves, they cannot grow.

“To be a decent footballer, you’ve got to let your character out,” he adds. “I talk to our players all the time, ‘Don’t be the quiet, shy boy, ask questions. If you don’t know why you’re doing something, ask, you’ve got to understand the game’. I want them to learn.”

And how would he deal with a player who turned round to him and said: “I’m not playing,” as he did to Maddren 20 years ago? “He’d get the same reaction, really, which is fair enough,” Mowbray chuckles. “It all worked out okay in the end.”

He is no longer Mog The Cat, no longer a goalkeeper, no longer a captain, but he is the driving force behind his team. And he is still true to himself, as he has been throughout his career.