"AS HE drove home one night this week after another day doing his best to "improve the players" under his charge at West Bromich Albion, Tony Mowbray switched on a radio football phone-in and almost crashed his car.
"I couldn't believe the ridiculous stuff being spouted by a couple of Arsenal fans," says the 44-year-old Englishman. "They were saying it was time to get rid of Arsene Wenger. Get rid of him? They should be kneeling down before him and offering up
thanks for what he has given them."
Wenger's puritanical football may have consistently provided Arsenal followers with regal entertainment. But no title has come the club's way in four years. The free-scoring West Brom side Mowbray has forged since being enticed away from Hibernian in October 2006, meanwhile, has been dubbed 'the Arsenal of the Championship'. "Not by me, never," Mowbray is keen to stress. But the tag underpins why a car-crash of the footballing variety is expected when the unshakeably idealistic Hawthorns manager drives his sporty little kit car at the juggernauts of the Premiership next season. Assuming, that is, West Brom do not veer off course in the two games, the first against Southampton tomorrow, from which they need a point to secure top flight status.
Mowbray is a man convinced of his ability to change football clubs. Football clubs will never change him. It is why he is completely unaltered from the untried manager who was installed by Hibs in the summer of 2004. Now, as then, he dares to preach a philosophy that demands aesthetic principles provide the basis for the craft required to win football games. The only difference in 2008 is that the past nine months offer empirical evidence that his approach doesn't merely fashion losers with finesse. Even an FA Cup semi-final appearance did not deflect his team from climbing to the summit of the Championship. "I was told plenty of times you can't get out of this league unless you adopt a form of kick and rush," he says. "I was told it when we scored over 100 goals last year and then were beaten in the play-off final. I was told it when we were signing a certain type of player in taking in £20m and spending only £10m to improve the squad. Until we get to the Premiership, we won't be able to say it's otherwise, but we have gone a long way to showing there can be a different way.
"It hasn't always been easy. There have been times I have been sitting in other managers' offices having a beer after games and they have been drooling about our style, telling me how great it is and what good footballers I have almost to a sycophantic extent… on the back of them beating us 2-0. That is hard to accept, but you don't change what you do, you just try to become better at it. This is a brutal division, no doubt. Half the teams will stick only one up front and have another nine outfield players behind the ball. But not being able to retain possession, master the football, attack on the flanks and in expansive fashion, has to hold you back at some point. I think I'm doing right for the long term. Watford struggled in the Premiership because they didn't score a lot of goals and kept giving the ball away. Why do Manchester United keep winning things? Why didn't Jose Mourinho's Chelsea win the Champions League?"
Mowbray will take his lead from his old club and not the Emirates side when it comes to a role model. He is comfortable with the idea West Brom could potentially be the Hibs of the Premiership. "At Hibernian, we would have our days at Ibrox and Celtic Park… and then lose against Inverness. I know the Premiership is a bigger beast, but whereas in Scotland you have the same top two, down here it is the same top four. In my time at Easter Road we could produce results on the big occasions because attacking teams didn't stretch us as we were open anyway."
Mowbray was as open off the field as his teams were on it. Much admired, his intensity and passion were understood within the context of him as a football missionary. The pull of leading a club to the Premiership "and keeping them there" was too much to resist despite his affinity for Hibs. Mowbray found Scottish football "suffocating", with the "same old faces, the same managers, players and media people, all the time". Now he is realising perhaps the media closeness wasn't all bad. For the perception of Mowbray in England is far removed from that north of the border. In the eyes of many in the English press he is morose, a curmudgeon. "Sometimes I will see a journalist for 20 minutes in one press conference and they will size me up and then go and express an opinion they might then share with a million readers. So it snowballs. Much of it comes from when we beat QPR 5-1 and I was angry afterwards because we lost a sloppy goal. People couldn't understand why I wasn't all chuffed but I just wanted us to do better than we did in conceding it. I've never tried to present myself as a character and have a laugh and a joke because I am serious about what I do. But there has been stuff said, that I make Avram Grant look like a comedian and I'm Jack Dee without the jokes, I find disrespectful. These people don't know what banter I share with my players."
It was more barbed words when Mowbray first arrived. Curiously, the resistance he met with has certain parallels to that encountered by his Hibs successor John Collins. "I said to our chairman (Jeremy Peace] that he had to stick with me because there are going to be some choppy times to start with. I took over a team just relegated and some of the squad still looked at themselves as Premiership players. They saw this guy coming down from Scotland they didn't know and didn't want to buy into my work ethic; didn't want to work hard in the training ground to achieve the repetition that is the vital currency in my playing ethos. It was like oil and water. They had big cars, big houses, were on 25 times the money the players I had at Easter Road were on and thought that meant they could go their own way. With transfer windows I needed time to change the make-up of the squad because, and it was the same for John (Collins], you can't let the lunatics run the asylum.
"I had to recruit on a budget and that will be the same again this summer. If we go up, we will have one of the lowest wage bills. But that is the challenge. I have to find diamonds among the pebbles as I would say at Hibs. We have lost too many goals from crosses because our defenders don't put their heads on the ball. But I don't just want to sign a plank."
Mowbray says enjoyment in life is all about "family, work, relaxation" but, even with children aged three and one, his driven nature causes him to skimp on the third. "I can say to myself I'm doing my job to give my family a good comfortable life, but know I'm immersed because it is what I love."
Mowbray's progress at West Brom is such that he has inevitably been linked with Celtic, the club he played for with distinction. Fancifully, he is supposed to have been placed on standby by Celtic major shareholder Dermot Desmond in the event that the club need a new manager in the summer. "My passions are focused on making West Brom a fixture in the Premiership, but Celtic is Celtic…," Mowbray says. "I try to live my life respectfully and wouldn't dream of talking about a job when a manager is in it. Let Gordon get on with it. I'm hoping he has enough games to go on and win the league."
If he doesn't, pragmatic football will have usurped a passing game. However much that might be anathema to Mowbray, it happens.
