For Mowbray entertaining is serious business

It does not take long in Tony Mowbray's company to realise this is a man of substance. Up close you can see the scars above his eyebrows, the legacy of some epic battles with opposition centre-forwards. He is a large, imposing man with an outdoor face and the kind of handshake that makes it easy to understand why team-mates used to call him Zeus. He has been described as dour or, to quote the Daily Mail, "Jack Dee without the gags", when in truth he is full of opinion about what is wrong with the game and what needs to be done about it. And, in this personality-obsessed age, he is refreshingly unconcerned about how he comes across.

"There seems to be a perception that I'm Mr Miserable," he says from behind his desk at West Bromwich Albion's training ground. "People complain that I'm never smiling, never laughing. My wife has picked up on it and she says, 'Why don't you smile more when you're on television?' But I don't want to smile or laugh when I'm working and, without wishing to sound defensive, I really don't care how that means I am perceived. This is my work and it's something I take extremely seriously."

To Mowbray all that matters is winning matches and there is a pretty big one tomorrow against Bristol Rovers in the quarter-final of the FA Cup. He does not go in for the gimmickry of PR. He has never been one for surrounding himself with puffed-up advisers and he has no desire to flutter his eyelashes at the media.

"I'm not a self-publicist. Some managers are, and good luck to them. They're held up as 'great characters' for the game, yet their teams are struggling like hell and they can't get a win from anywhere. I would rather be judged on how my team does. I don't want to be on television pontificating about other people's teams. I don't want to be in the newspapers. I do a press conference every Thursday and Monday because it's my job. But, if Sky want to come to the training ground to do their fancy little extras, I won't do it. I just want to be good at my job and concentrate on my team."

He has already made the point by agreeing to a photograph as long as "it's straightforward, no posing, no gags, nothing too clever," and the Midlands football writers have grown wearily accustomed to his blood-out-of-stone press conferences. Yet away from the cameras, the broken-nosed old centre-half is a different man - a football romantic, delivering long, impassioned homilies about the game. "The first football I can remember was the World Cup in 1970 and that great Brazil team of Pele, Tostao and Jairzinho," he recalls. "Then my first game was Middlesbrough versus Manchester United. It was the coal strikes of the early 1970s and my dad came to school to take me out of class. I still don't know whether he'd OK'ed it with the headmaster. He just said, 'Son, I'm going to take you to see Georgie Best.' And I can still remember it now: walking up the steps at Ayresome Park, smelling the Bovril, listening to the noises and seeing the oasis of green grass among all the people and concrete. It just sparked something off in my mind."

The scaffolder's son from Redcar went on to play for Middlesbrough for 10 years, captaining the side at the age of 22 and helping his local club through the most turbulent period in their history. The club were on the verge of folding and the gates to Ayresome Park had been locked. "We were begging, stealing and borrowing just to get a practice session going. We had nowhere to train so we went to public parks. We didn't have bibs or cones or a proper bag of balls. Anybody who was earning decent money had to leave. So we were left with a team of apprentices. We weren't getting paid and we started the season playing at Hartlepool because they wouldn't let us in our own ground. I've still got some photos and we were just a bunch of scraggy kids in tatty old tracksuits. But those scraggy kids got the team promoted through two divisions back to the top of English football. It's an incredible story."

Mowbray was revered for his performances and in 1991 moved to Celtic for £1m. But then life changed. Bernadette, his first wife, was diagnosed with breast cancer. She died eight months after their wedding. "I don't think you can go through something like that, losing a wife when she is only 26, without changing as a person," he says. "It's given me a different perspective on life. I know now, for instance, that if we get beaten it's not the end of the world. It's my job, my game, something I care passionately about. But I can take a step back."

In his first game back Mowbray introduced the Celtic huddle as a show of solidarity. He has remained close to Bernadette's family but the 44-year-old also has a young family of his own, with a second wife, Amber, and two boys, Luke (three) and Max (one). "People say I don't smile enough but I smile lots when I'm with my kids at home, throwing them around, tickling them, letting them climb all over me. That's my release but it's difficult sometimes because I work long hours and I feel I'm missing a bit of their life I should be enjoying. There are days when I leave the house before they're up and get home when they've gone to bed.

"Then my wife tells me I never switch off because I put football on the TV. Even my three-year-old complains there's too much football on TV. He wants to watch cartoons on CBBC. But I have all the football channels, even MUTV, Chelsea TV plus the ones from Arsenal and Liverpool. The bottom line is my work is my work."

Mowbray, without doubt, can be classed as a workaholic in the Sir Alex Ferguson mould and he preaches a similar type of expansive football, an Albion manager in the tradition of Ossie Ardiles and Ron Atkinson rather than Bobby Gould or Gary Megson. "Some managers don't seem to care about entertainment, they just want results, but it's an entertainment business and I believe you can be brave sometimes to win football games. At times it can leave us open to criticism and the disappointment is that we scored over 100 goals last season and still didn't get promoted. It could happen again this year, too [the team are currently fourth in the Championship] so I'm very aware we have to balance the team defensively. But I have a philosophy of how I want my team to play. I want the players to express themselves. I tell my centre-halves to show they are footballers in the truest sense of the word: show composure, pass the ball, bring it down and play. I don't want anyone hooking it blindly over their heads or kicking aimlessly forward. The ability is there in every player and centre-halves are no different. It's there, bursting to get out, but there are coaches who will tell them, 'What are you doing? Just head it, kick it, get rid.'"

It is a philosophy that has led to Albion being dubbed "the Arsenal of the Championship", with the most impressive goals-for column in the country. The romantics may favour Bristol Rovers today but few would begrudge Mowbray if his team eliminate the last League One representatives. And he might even force a smile.