Former Birmingham City midfielder and manager Lee Bowyer is dreaming of helping ambitious international minnows Montserrat reach the World Cup finals - and his success against the odds in a Blues shirt is driving those aspirations.
Bowyer left Blues in 2022 after a little under a season and a half in charge, during which he kept them in the Championship. Back in his playing days, Bowyer helped the club under Alex McLeish post a top half Premier League finish in 2010 and scored six goals that year.
Then, a year later, he lifted the League Cup having helped Blues prevail over big favourites Arsenal in the Wembley final. Now in charge of the tiny Caribbean island's national team, Bowyer wants to help them achieve their lofty aspirations.
“The biggest thing for me was that they want to try to get to the World Cup," Bowyer told The Times. "They are very ambitious. I’m quite a laid-back person anyway, so I was, ‘OK, that’s interesting, something different’. I had to go to Montserrat to meet everybody and see what their ambitions were and what they wanted me to do. It’s a small country, a tiny little island, you have to fly to Antigua and then take a small plane, a ten-seater, or a boat.
“When I first took over at Charlton it was a challenge to try and get them out of the division and I did that. When I took over at Birmingham everyone said, ‘What are you doing there, you’re not going to keep them up?’ and I kept them up. This is a different challenge. It’s going to be difficult but why not have a go?
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“They are ranked 176 in the world but you just never know. When I played in the League Cup final for Birmingham against Arsenal, on paper we should never have won that game but we did. Why? Because we had big hearts and we wanted to win it more on that day than Arsenal. So, we could go to Nicaragua [in June, for their first World Cup qualifier] and they could have a man sent off, we could get a penalty...so many things can give you a chance.”
Bowyer, who before his stint at Blues had also managed Charlton Athletic in the Championship and League One, admits that management and coaching hadn't really been on his agenda when he began to contemplate what lay ahead for him in retirement, during the end of his playing days. A chance opportunity presented to him by a former teammate opened his eyes to the role.
“I didn’t want to coach,” Bowyer added. “When I was playing football I had zero intention of going into coaching. I was out of football for four years and it fell on my plate. Harry Kewell was at Watford under-21s and he rang me and asked me to come in and help. I was killing two birds with one stone, seeing if I liked it and helping a friend.
"When you’re a player you get rewards but as coach I wouldn’t be doing the best bits, so what would my reward be? I was working with one of Harry’s strikers and he started improving and scoring goals and his mum came up to me after a game and said, ‘Thank you so much, he’s loving the work’ and I thought, OK, that’s my reward."
