Tony Mowbray has reflected on the day Birmingham beat Sunderland last season, where he told Mike Dodds about his diagnosis. The pair are obviously very close having worked together for 15 months at the Stadium of Light.
BOTH GOT EMOTIONAL
“Gosh I remember getting emotional telling Doddsy. He was asking 'how are you, gaffer all right, everything good?' And I said 'oh no mate it's not good' and he said 'what do you mean it's not good'... I told him I'd just been diagnosed with bowel cancer and I'm gonna have to leave. But he got quite emotional as well, to be honest."
HORRIFIC EXPERIENCE
“I was going into the unknown. I genuinely thought I was big and strong and I was going to get through this no problem, I'll get through an operation with no issues and yet there were days when I was picking myself off the floor, the days when I was emancipated. I'd been to the toilet 40 times in an hour, and you've got no fluid left in your body and your body's crinkling away. Your voice - you could hardly talk because your throat was so choked up because there's no fluid. It's horrific really and that's what I can say."
FAMILY
"Your family get you through. It's the people who care and love you, you know, get you through it. My wife at a drop of a hat would drop everything and just drive me two and a half hours to Manchester because I needed to get to the hospital, and the doctors were there and the nurses were ready and everything was there for me, but yeah it was tough."
BIRMINGHAM AMAZING
“Birmingham have been amazing to me, very supportive. The owner is an amazing human being, the chief executive Gary Cook has been fantastic. Craig Gardner, the sporting director, was unbelievable with me. I felt as if we had a chance to be all right and yet they did always say that things were going to change at the club and they were going spend some money and probably the plan wasn't that they were going to get relegated."
WOULD BLUES HAVE STAYED UP?
“It's easy for me to say 'no I don't think we would have got relegated'. We just won the last two games against Sunderland and against Blackburn Rovers and we were pushing pretty good I think. But listen, it is what it is and Birmingham have now done what they're doing. They're going to move into a 60,000 seater stadium in three or four years time and hopefully they'll be pushing to be in the Premier League if not in the Premier League by then.”
