Tony Mowbray has discussed feeling 'part of the furniture' at Blackburn Rovers, and how he is enjoying being back in the north east and spending time with his family...
LEAVING BLACKBURN
"I didn't know where my future was going to be but I was confident enough in my ability. We had taken Blackburn from League One to a team that was turning down big, huge, sums of millions of pounds for its footballers and that was competing at the top end of the Championship. We had built and grown the football club, we felt, but my contract was expiring, there was no talk [about a new contract], and I with my family decided that we'd go on some nice holidays and relax over the summer, then let's see when the season starts again. If you talk in management about where you think your stock might be, I felt as though we had done a pretty good job at Blackburn and that somewhere along the line, somebody would need a football coach and I'd get back to work."
MISSED CHILDREN'S YEARS
"You can sometimes take a breather, mentally, which is what we decided to do as a family. I'd been away [working at Blackburn] five-and-a-half years, I'd missed the main years of my children's lives, their educational lives growing up. My boys are 18, 16 this week, and 13, and if you take five-and-a-half years off that, my eldest was 13, my middle one was 11 and my youngest was eight when I left to go to Blackburn. Now they are all men, just about, with girlfriends - one of them has got a car!"
FAMILY MAN
"They are going out and I'm thinking 'where did my life go?' I missed that crucial part. So I had no problem saying to my wife that we should go on some lovely holidays and that I should spend some time with my kids. That summer I went in the cages at the hotel and played football with them, and just was a dad, really. I paraglided with them and had a go at paddle boarding and what have you. But when the opportunity to come to Sunderland arrived, because I'm 30 miles down the road, it allowed me to still be a dad and a husband and yet come to work and do what I love doing."
NEVER ENOUGH
"I'm enjoying it. It's re-energised me because five-and-a-half years in one job becomes tough; you are part of the furniture. I felt that with the fans more than anything. There was an expectancy that they wanted promotion, we'd been growing the team, but it's never enough. Everybody knows the answers, everybody thinks you should be doing better. Somewhere down the line, that will happen here - if I'm here long enough!"
PART OF THE JOUNREY
"That's just part of the journey I think, unless you're [former Manchester United boss] Sir Alex Ferguson and you get rid of your best players every now and then when they get to an age and keep on reinventing the team - but that's easier to do when you can break world records and sign players from top teams."
LEAVE TEAMS IN GOOD PLACES
"I genuinely think that every club I have left, I feel that when I have left I have passed on a good team. Hibernian won the League Cup months after I left. West Brom got promoted the year I left for Celtic. I feel we leave good teams, so the day I leave this club, I hope you have a really good team with really good players. If for whatever reason I leave - maybe because we've gone on a five or six-game run where we don't win, and the fans moan, and the owner thinks 'we can get this young guy from so-and-so and he'll be good, so we'll get rid of that old git' - that's just life, isn't it? I'm pretty relaxed about it."
