Tony Mowbray has been speaking openly about his battle with bowel cancer

Former Sunderland boss Tony Mowbray has opened up on his battle with bowel cancer in a heartfelt interview with Sky Sports.

The 62-year-old stepped away from the professional game for a while last year following his diagnosis, leaving his post at Birmingham City in the process. Since then, the popular head coach has received the all-clear, and even returned to the dugout with West Brom back in January.

Now out of work again following his departure from the Baggies in April, Mowbray has taken part in a new documentary entitled “Football, Cancer, and Me”, in which Sky Sports News host Jo Wilson - who herself received a cervical cancer diagnosis in 2022 - speaks to various well-known figures in football who have been impacted by the disease.

What did ex-Sunderland boss Tony Mowbray say about his cancer battle?

Mowbray’s first wife, Bernadette, also tragically passed away as a consequence of breast cancer in 1995, at the age of just 26, and speaking to Wilson, when asked about his experiences with the disease, Mowbray said: “Mine was bowel cancer, so it's about my backside really, and the habits that had changed, probably over a month. I had a colonoscopy, so I'm watching the screen, and I'm seeing the camera - obviously there are amazing bits of equipment - but it was taking a biopsy. It was snipping away at something in my bowel, I could see it on the screen.

“And at the end of that experience, the doctor basically straight away said, ‘Doesn't look right, it's not sure. We'll have the biopsy, but it looks, unfortunately, like it could be cancer’. I've always associated in my life cancer and death, really. I had my amazing, beautiful wife, Bernadette, who was 26 years old when she passed away from breast cancer, when I was a player at Glasgow Celtic. I hear the word cancer, and I have to go home and tell my family, basically.”

Reflecting on an operation to remove his tumour, Mowbray continued: “The doctors tell you all these things, that there's no guarantee that you are coming out of this. So you sit there - kissing your wife, saying ‘I'll be fine’, kissing your children. Really, half of the little percentage in the back of your mind thinks, ‘The doctor said that I might not wake up from this’. But I did wake up.

“I woke up four-and-a-half stone lighter. They'd removed the tumour. I remember looking in a mirror across from the door and thinking, ‘Who's that?’. I was, let's say, four-and-a-half stone lighter, I was grey. I put a tracksuit bottom on... It was like one of them comedy scenes where somebody pulls their tracksuit out, you know, and there's this much gap, a foot's gap.

“The day when my children came to see me after that operation and they stood there at the door, almost not recognising their dad, really, and tears in their eyes, not being able to talk... And I knew I had to phone the football club, Birmingham City, which had been amazing to me, and told them that I'm not coming back to Birmingham. I need to get my health first and foremost for my family. And the journey started, really, on trying to rebuild some strength. And I thought, being an athlete all my life, a big, strong man, that I was going to cruise through chemotherapy, whatever it was, and yet I think three times I ended up back in hospital through collapsing, actually blacking out, hitting the kitchen floor, banging my head.”

On his recovery, Mowbray added: “All I wanted to do was sleep in a dark room and they kept badgering me to get up. Get up. That scar, which is from here, right at my chest, right down into my pelvis, is... you need to keep working it. It needs to heal. It looks like it's just where my abdomen is, like, really impressive, but it's really a big scar down the middle.

“I lived with padded underwear for, like, a year because I had zero control of my bowels. And I remember how embarrassing... It's dehumanising, really, sleeping on the bathroom floor, cause my stoma bag... when I thought, ‘Oh, that's great, I'm getting rid of this horrible stoma bag that needs emptying every day’, but I had no control. So I've been - every day for the last maybe six months, eight months - I do planks every single morning. I try and strengthen my core.

“And if one day somebody says, ‘Your cancer's come back, sorry, Tony... blah, blah, blah’, then we'd attack that and decide what's right or wrong to do about that. And I want to try and live every day and give myself the very best chance to enjoy life. We're only getting one shot at it, so I'm trying to do it as best I can.”

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Mowbray also spoke about receiving the all-clear, and his desire to return to management in the aftermath of the good news. He explained: “The first time the doctor says your body is free of cancer, it's like a... Wow, that was amazing. In fact, I remember actually - because I knew there was a potential job in the offing for me - I'd asked my doctor can he get the scan results on the day of the scan? And he did that for me.

“Strangely enough, the radiologist who read the scans was actually the son of a very famous footballer. And he told the doctor everything was clear, and I was actually on the way home from Manchester driving my car when he phoned me and said, ‘Everything's clear, your body is totally free of cancer’.”

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