The weight loss was awful – four stone in all. The operations were scary. The not knowing is one of cancer’s most evil weapons, uncertainty as you stare at your body desperate to have clarity on what is going on inside. The discomfort is relentless. The worries about your family never end.
But it’s the waiting that Tony Mowbray mentions most. The weeks waiting in hospital felt like years. The pattern of treatments and meetings and check-ups, waiting for good news and fearing bad. Walks with the dog on the beach, getting stronger but still waiting for the call. Waiting for the football results to come in, just to feel like you were still part of it. When the distraction is so wretched, you just miss football more.
Mowbray was Birmingham City manager in February 2024 when he was diagnosed with bowel cancer. He soon stepped down from his role, underwent major surgery and then an extensive, intensive period of chemotherapy. He has got the all-clear and is back at Blackburn Rovers, who he managed for five years between 2017 and 2022.
Being back in football, Mowbray says, is like walking into your home after a period away, basking in its familiarities and comforts. It is all he has ever known and, quite frankly, all he ever wishes to.
“I grew up on a council estate in Teesside, in Redcar in the North East on a set of little closes,” Mowbray tells The i Paper.
“There were eight in all and each had little grassed area. I used all of the grassed areas in every close to play football. I broke all the fences.
“We grew up in an environment where it felt as if football was all there was. My dad took me out of school when I was six to go and watch George Best. Thankfully for me, I developed well enough to become a professional at the team that I grew up supporting as a boy at Middlesbrough.
“I finished the last few years of my playing career at Ipswich Town and was a player coach with George Burley, then moved up to Scotland in Edinburgh to Hibernian. I was off and running.
“Football is all it has ever been. It’s life, football – it flies by and you don’t wish yourself out of it. I love being around the teams, trying to inspire them. I missed it so, so much, every day.”
When Mowbray was forced to step down and focus on his cancer journey and – mercifully – recovery, there was an outpouring of love from within the game unlike anything I’ve witnessed in similar circumstances.
Former players, managerial peers, football clubs – all rushed to wish “Mogga” all the love and strength they could muster.
It should not come as any surprise. Forget the usual epithets: Mowbray is respected and loved like few others in English football. He is a giant of the game, both reassuring old school and dependable but never for a second guilty of becoming stuck in the past.
It’s hard to understand your own place in that hierarchy, and the relentlessness of football only makes that more difficult. It wasn’t until the worst happened that Mowbray really understood how he was judged by those around him. In a sea of uncertainty, it became mood-defining.
“When I had my first operation and lost all the weight, I was in hospital for more than a month,” he says.
“My family kept telling me that every club I’d ever been at – and some clubs I hadn’t even managed – were putting things on their big screens. From where I am, I can’t look outwards and have an impression of what the football world thinks. So it was very humbling.
“And then it didn’t stop. I felt the hundreds and hundreds of texts I was getting, so many I couldn’t keep up. It was taking me weeks to try and reply to all of these people. They didn’t have to text me. They didn’t have to make contact. And yet the whole football world seemed to make contact. Just very, very humbling.”
Now 62 and back in the Championship, Mowbray intends to make up for the missed years and the time spent walking the dog. He says that the last two and a half years have made him doubly grateful for that pathway from Redcar to everywhere else.
But it’s time to get back to what he’s good at: inspiring young footballers to go further for longer and to become greater than the sum of their parts as a team. That is the one element of Mowbray’s management that has always stood out to his peers: even as he gets older and the players stay the same age, his ability to connect with them is extraordinary.
“It feels like an out of body thing for me,” he says.
“I don’t know where it comes from. I feel as if I’m quite a reserved individual and stand back from pushing myself forward, yet when I’m in an environment where I’m stood in front of 30 players in a dressing room, I think I’ll talk for a minute and 30 minutes later I’m still talking and it’s gone somewhere down a rabbit hole that I didn’t expect it to go. It’s only the love of the game, the passion, the emotion.
“I try to inspire them to find their inner child. Where’s that guy who used to score six goals in a game on a Sunday with his mates and never passed to anybody because he was so good? You have to find him, you have to bring him out, you have to bring him to training every day and show me how good you are.”
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For Mowbray, a sense of his own inner child has returned. Without the horrible experiences of 2024 and 2025, he would likely not be spending the days before the start of a new season thinking of football on the grassy spots of small Teesside towns.
But illness and recovery changes you and can often provide clarity. You see how your own life mapped out when you have so long to consider why it was so precious.
Just as football came out to support Mowbray through those worst times, it is delighted to have him back. This season might not be easy – the manager talks about running through walls to compete. But sometimes it’s as simple as feeling blessed to even get the chance and to dance that same old dance again.
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