Mowbray hits Hibees road

FIRST the bard news: it's Burns Night in Edinburgh and Tony Mowbray - a man who probably thinks a haggis should be addressed via Princes Street post office - is somewhat taken aback.

"I don't think my wife knows, either, " he says. "I doubt if we'll be having tatties and neeps for tea." For all his Sassenach scepticism, however, the Redcar-born manager of Hibernian FC earns an awful lot more column inches in Tuesday's Edinburgh Evening News than Rabbie Burns does.

They may not yet toast the Immortal Memory down Easter Road, but they wax pretty lyrical nonetheless.

Mowbray, who in both professional and personal life has had much cause to ponder the Burnsian adage about a man being a man for a' that, arrived at Hibs in May after an outstanding playing career with Middlesbrough, Celtic and Ipswich.

All nine out of contract players were released because they couldn't be accommodated within a reduced budget, the transfer kitty was as empty as a second hand sporran, there were neither left back ("not even a YTS") nor goalkeeper at the club.

"There were massive holes in the squad, the players were away for the summer and all I had were a few videos, " he recalls.

"Twelve days after the preseason training started we were in the Inter-Toto Cup. It was absurd, you need at least six weeks to get the players ready." His signings have almost all been youthful on the grounds (he says) that kids don't expect as much money.

He has first teamers in the Scottish Premier League earning less than £25,000 a year - "peanuts, " says the manager.

"We have a budget of £1.5m and with absolutely no money for transfers, competing against two clubs with budgets of maybe £50m paying massive wages, " adds Mowbray. "It doesn't make it particularly easy." Hibs, for all that, sit comfortably in third place, are unbeaten in their last six games, earn increasing admiration from the critics.

The Glasgow Herald talks of Hibernian chic, the Evening News of a stunning array of youthful talent, Edinburgh dreams of a Europe beyond the Firth of Forth and while the Old Firm may not yet be shaking in their corporate boots, they'll be watching the futures market very closely.

Already they've drawn with Rangers at home and lost to a penalty against Celtic. Next week they're at Ibrox, and not just for the view of the Clyde.

Mowbray - articulate, courteous, passionate about football and qualified as a coach to the highest possible level - is precisely to time for the interview, the 112-yearold Easter Road stadium just a single shade of green.

The welcome signs are in Urdu as well as English, posters for the new kit proclaim they haven't looked so good since they led Real Madrid 2-0 at half-time.

Another poster promotes an Elton John concert at the 17,000 capacity stadium in June. In 1950 almost 66,000 watched the derby with Hearts; last Saturday just 12,600 saw the 3-0 win over Kilmarnock which left Hibs five points clear of Aberdeen in fourth place. Hearts, bypassed, lie fifth.

"It's because of the segregation," insists Mowbray. "There's room for 3,600 in the visitors' stand and Kilmarnock only brought about 300. We'd have had a full house for the Old Firm, or for Hearts." There are no attendant public relations men, no telltale tape recorders, just tea and biscuits - the cup o'kindness as Rabbie himself observed - and an hour's concrete crack.

Now 41, he'd joined Boro as a junior and stayed for ten up and down first team seasons and 400 appearances, a commanding central defender so popular that he beat Paul Gascoigne and team mate Gary Pallister to be named North-East player ofthe year and topped a Boro legends ballot ahead of Clough, Murdoch and Juninho.

"If you were on a rocket ship flying to the moon, " Middlesbrough manager Bruce Rioch famously observed, "Tony Mowbray would be the man you'd want sitting next to you." In 1991 he moved to Celtic for £1m during Rangers' run of nine successive championships, his four year stay coinciding with the death of his wife Bernadette after a long battle with breast cancer.

Already Celtic fans had taken to his honesty and enthusiasm: in adversity they held him yet more closely.

"There were literally tens of thousands of letters. I will never forget the warmth of the Celtic people, and of football everywhere, after Bernadette died," he says.

His own health suffered, too, his weight dropping by two stones. Eight months after his wife's death, Celtic manager Tommy Burns - Burns of a rather different degree - decided that he was unwanted.

Mowbray himself used the word "outcast" in a subsequent fanzine interview; now he is more conciliatory.

"Tommy's a very religious man who probably thought I needed to grieve somewhere else, " he says, remarkably.

"I look at pictures from that time and I was so thin, so drawn. He was a football club manager and he had a team to build; he needed a powerful, dominant centre half and couldn't see one when he looked at me.

"I'd been trying to be everything to everyone, visiting my wife in hospital and trying to do my best at football when my mind was elsewhere.

"I became almost a full time breast cancer charity worker, talking to people or helping to raise funds almost every night. It started taking over my life; finally I decided I needed to get back to football." Mowbray is also credited with the concept of the players' huddle, dreamed up at the back of the bus during a pre-season tour to Germany.

"At the time we just wanted to bond a bit more with the fans, but it's grown arms and legs, " he recalls.

"Celtic are the Huddle Club now, all sorts marketed on that." He moved to Ipswich for £300,000, became player coach and, briefly, acting manager, met his second wife when she cut his hair.

"It developed slowly, " he recalls. "I have a hair cut once a month so it was about six hair cuts before I asked her out. I was the last in that night; we went to the Chinese down the road." Now they have a baby and a television set. "Fortunately she understands about me and football, " he says, "I can feed the baby while I'm watching it." He headed back across the border in May, Hibs, desperate to find a coach who could develop young talent. If it is perforce to be a youth club, however, he is determined not to be seen as a curmudgeonly old master.

"They all have bleached blonde hair, ripped jeans, yellow Lance Armstrong arm bands and all those things.

People say that they're reminded of Pally and Ripley and Mowbray at Middlesbrough." Rioch's military regime, however, was wholly different from Hibs. "I want them to be happy and the club to be warm. I want them to express themselves and to enjoy themselves. I'm running a football club, not a boot camp. I have inbred discipline, but if you want them to flourish, you can't be too overburdening.

"Bruce Rioch had a warmth and affection for his players and I think I have, too, but I like to think coaching has moved on a lot in the last 20 years." Dave Riordan, one of his upcoming talents, hit a hat trick against Kilmarnock and is being tipped for the next Scottish squad; Garry O'Connor has ten, 17-year-old Stephen Fletcher also weighs in.

"He gets tackled by big strong centre halves, you have to look after boys like that, " says his manager ? attention inevitably drawn to his own achievements and aspirations.

"I don't want to say which clubs I might become involved with, the jobs mightn't come up, " but were Martin O'Neill ever to be coaxed from Celtic Park or Steve McClaren cease to be Boro surveyor, the bookies wouldn't look far for a favourite. Mowbray's cautious.

"You always have a soft spot for the clubs you've played for, but I feel I have an affinity with supporters which I would be very reluctant to lose because as sure as eggs are eggs a football manager will have a bad run. I'm not saying I wouldn't do it, but there's an obvious danger." "I gave 100 per cent. I was never going to be a Man United player like Pally, but I feel as if I did all I could in football because I worked hard every day to become the best player I could be. That's what I want here." Nor, he insists, will he be satisfied with third place in a two horse race. "Realistically we can't compete, but you have to have goals, set targets. I look at Ferguson at Aberdeen in the early 80s. I don't want to say we'd be content with third place every year." Outside for a few snapshots, one of his players - senior pro by the look of him, 21 if he's a day - is showing his wife around the ground while his little lad orbits the pitch perimeter on a scooter.

Mowbray, introduced, embraces the lass - chic to cheek - even remembers what she wrote on their Christmas card.

If Celtic is the huddle club, Hibs may be the cuddle club.

Even if Rabbie Burns were right that the best laid plans gang aft agley, the good news is that Tony Mowbray leads a rising at Easter Road.

And finally...

THE Sunderland connection which links Arsenal, Exeter City, Leeds United and Spurs (Backtrack, January 25) is that all four clubs had their highest gates against the Wearsiders - and well done to Jacqueline Watson in Harraton, Washington, who worked it out.

Since Andrew Strauss became only the second English test cricketer to score a century on both his home and overseas debuts, Steve Smith today invites readers to name the first.

Back, tons up, on Tuesday.

Published: 28/01/2005