Mowbray puts the heart and soul back into Coventry.
TONY MOWBRAY is enthusing about taking his three boys to Lapland, riding through the woods, following a light to a house where the elves were making toys for Christmas. He took them to Disneyland and played football on the beach in Dubai. “I did all the things that dads do that football managers can’t do because they work non-stop,” he says.
It was the first year he’d had away from football since making his debut for Middlesbrough in 1982 and he loved every minute of it. But Mowbray won’t be on hand today to take his boys to their Sunday morning games at Nunthorpe Athletic Juniors, the club he played for as a teenager; instead, he’ll be taking his high-flying Coventry side to Sheffield United, hoping to extend a 12-match unbeaten run into the Christmas rush.
Those who remember Mowbray as a rather dour figure in his latter days at West Bromwich Albion or Middlesbrough might be surprised. He is enjoying life in League One, enjoying turning around the fortunes of a club in decline for too long and, above all, enjoying the challenge of making a progressive football team out of an eclectic mix of young players such as Adam Armstrong, Jacob Murphy and James Maddison and old lags such as Joe Cole and Marcus Tudgay. Coventry are second in the division and starting to put some of their recent troubles behind them.
A crowd of 15,500 watched them defeat Gillingham 4-1 in a top-of-the-table game and an average gate of 10,000 or so suggests that, after an unhappy exile in Northampton, the club’s soul is stirring once more.
At the heart of the revival is the formidable figure of Mowbray, once a commanding centre-half with Middlesbrough, Celtic and Ipswich who, as a manager, took West Brom into the Premier League, where they won a host of fans for their attractive style of football. They were relegated, but on the final day of the season the fans wore Tony Mowbray masks in appreciation of their manager, who left for Celtic soon after. When Coventry came calling last year, Mowbray held a vision of the club he knew as a player — breeder of creative players and attractive teams — not the rather dejected one he found.
“I’m a great believer in trying to give the club an identity,” says Mowbray. The training ground was his first target. “There were no club signs on the gates, no welcome sign, nothing on the walls,” he says. “It could have been a doctor’s surgery or a hospital ward.” Now, the motto round the club crest reads: “Play for the badge on the front of the shirt not the name on the back” and individual words — humility, integrity, honesty, respect — line the walls to the dressing rooms. The entrance hall is covered with murals of smiling faces from Coventry’s glory days.
The makeover seems to be working. Games are not just being won but are being won with a degree of swagger, thanks in part to Armstrong, the league’s leading scorer on loan from Newcastle. “He’s a magnificent talent, better than this league,” says Mowbray. “But his personality is the key to it all, he’s respectful, he’s honest, he’s single-minded and he’s 18. He’s got every chance.”
Murphy, on loan from Norwich, and James Maddison, a product of the Sky Blue Academy, are other young talents who are benefiting from Mowbray’s educational instinct.
“This is a coach’s league,” he says. “I feel like I’m influencing the team. They’ll look you in the eye, nod their head and listen. I said to Joe Cole in training this morning, some of the stuff is second nature to him but I’ve got to go through it because some of the lads don’t understand. You keep drip feeding the message and you do it again and again and if you’re winning they come along with you and you can add a bit more and bit more. We’re not far off from being a pretty good team in this league.”
