Rangers man Bobby Williamson on beating cancer and African adventure

It’s four decades now since Jock Wallace shelled out £100k to take the livewire striker away from part-time football at Clydebank and into the Ibrox fold.

Now 61, the former Killie and Hibernian boss, who went on to have an African adventure as national team manager of both Uganda and Kenya, has beaten cancer and lived a football life less ordinary.

Here in the second instalment of a two-part Rangers Review interview, Bobby looks back on the ups and downs of 20 eventful years in football management.

From Kilmarnock to Kenya, from the glitz and glory of lifting the Scottish Cup to the grim reality of contractual legal battles.

For 20 years Bobby Williamson lived through the peaks and troughs of football management with club and country.

With Kilmarnock, Hibernian, Plymouth Argyle and Chester City in the British game before bossing Uganda, moving to Kenya to win a title with Gor Mahia then landing the national job in the second African nation he has called home.

The former Rangers striker, now 61, returned home to Ibrox last weekend to watch the duel between his boyhood heroes and the team he guided to silverware in a 1-0 Scottish Cup final over Falkirk on the Govan turf in 1997.

Williamson hasn’t worked in the game since February 2016 when he was axed as boss of Kenya and he became embroiled in a legal wrangle with the country’s FA after they refused to pay up his deal.

A year after the axe in his last managerial job Bobby was diagnosed with nasal cancer and went through the ordeal of a string of operations and bouts of chemotherapy before being told he was in remission.

He reflected: “It scares you that, after all that time wrapped up in the game.

“I lost 22 kilos in weight and I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognise myself.

“It’s seven years now since I came out of the game and if I am honest I don’t miss it that much.”

Williamson was reserve team coach at Killie when Alex Totten was sacked in December 1996 and he was handed the job on an interim basis.

The six months that followed would establish him as one of Scottish football’s brightest emerging coaches.

He recalled: “I lost in my first game in interim charge of Killie against Dundee United and you could really feel the apathy around the club.

“I was just the reserve coach stepping up and I decided to bring in two young players in Alex Burke and David Bagan and they lifted the whole place.

“The senior players were going through the motions and those two brought a freshness. The fans needed to see a change.

“I brought in Jim Clark and Gerry McCabe and they were a great mix. Jim was a serious coaching figure, Gerry knew the game but brought all his patter and nonsense to Rugby Park and we gained momentum.

“We got results at home against both Rangers and Celtic, drawing with Gers and beating Celtic 2-0, and if we hadn’t done that we would have been relegated.

“I remember wee Burkey running Enrico Annoni ragged in the Celtic game, he tormented him, ripped him apart.

“Then we got to the final match of the season and needed a point against Aberdeen and we got it and stayed up.

“So it was an eventful first six months as a manager, we won the Scottish Cup and I earned a contract on the back of it and was able to build from there.”

The six years Williamson had in charge of Killie saw him not only earn the club their first Scottish Cup in 68 years but they once again graced the European stage.

He lost just 90 of his 246 games at the helm and built the club into a consistent top-flight force again with ex-Ibrox stars Ian Durrant and Ally McCoist seeing out their careers under his guidance and imaginative signings like French forward Christophe Cocard shining.

Bobby recalled: “The Bosman situation had just happened and I was able to bring in good players for wages without a fee.

“We gradually constructed what was a Top Four team and I was proud of that and bringing back European football to the club.

“Teams became aware of us, that we were decent on the counter-attack, and they started sitting back on us and when that happened we drew more games than I would have liked.

“Yet in my time there we were never truly threatened by relegation, I knew the place and the staff and I knew what was needed.”

The job Williamson had done at Killie meant that there would inevitably be suitors for his talents.

Hibernian lured him to Edinburgh but like so many before him, and since, he would find the job to be a poisoned chalice.

Since his time in Leith ended there have been 13 permanent managers in the hotseat in 19 years, a sobering statistic.

Bobby Williamson whilst in charge of Hibernian (Image: SNS)

Bobby sighed: “Moving to Hibs was different because we had 20-odd players and it was the League of Nations.

“They were from everywhere and we had inherited this culture of in-fighting in the dressing room between factions of players.

“Then the money fell away when the Sky TV deal went and Hibs had players on big money who had to go.

“We had to introduce younger players like Scott Brown, Kevin Thomson and Derek Riordan who I enjoyed developing but I wasn’t happy with how things were going behind the scenes within the club.

“I moved on at the first opportunity and if I hadn’t I feel I could have achieved a lot more there.

“We lost the 2004 League Cup Final 2-0 to Livingston and in the January I tried to bolster our midfield because I knew we were going to struggle.

“When it came to Hampden I played Gary Caldwell out of position there and a young player called Alan Reid who I freed at the end of that season.

“In hindsight I should have started Tam McManus but I thought he would be better coming off the bench.

“Livingston at that time were better than us, they’d had financial troubles but they cleverly worked the rules and kept their established players and with stars like David Fernandez they had more than us.

“We had suspensions and injuries and we had to go three at the back because of a lack of resources.

“Hibs would win that cup a couple of years later hammering Killie in the final, with all the young boys we had brought through like Brown and Thomson as mainstays.

“Maybe I should have stayed but there were things that happened that meant I just felt I couldn’t.”

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Somewhat disillusioned, yet still believing in his ability to galvanise groups of footballers into a cohesive unit, Williamson moved south to succeed fellow Scot Paul Sturrock in the hotseat at newly promoted English Championship club Plymouth Argyle.

I spent a weekend visiting Bobby back then doing an in-depth interview for a Sunday newspaper and he seemed re-energised in a different environment.

He was relishing the challenge of new rivals to face and I remember then he told me the mission he’d been given in the cut-throat Championship was simple. Keep Argyle up.

That murderous league of 24 teams and 46 games is often a graveyard for gaffers.

Inside the game down south it is viewed in clutches of eight clubs, the top eight, the middle eight and the bottom eight.

Plymouth finished 17th and top of that bottom eight, for context the likes of Watford, Brighton and Nottingham Forest were below them. Sometimes success is relative.

When the second season didn’t start well, though, Williamson was brutally jettisoned and he revealed: “I got shafted at Plymouth by some of the players I’d left out.

“I discovered that the English directors loved to socialise with the players and be their pals and that’s never good.

“One young director in particular would listen to stories from disgruntled players he was buying drinks for on the club card and feed them back to the Board. You can’t win in situations like that.

“I still surprised me when they sacked me because my remit was to keep them in the Championship and we did that comfortably.

“In the second season I only had six games and we weren’t even in the bottom three but the sack came anyway.”

England’s League Two and a spell working with controversial chairman Stephen Vaughan at Chester City was a chapter to forget.

Williamson admits now he was feeding the need to stay the game and his time in Wales became a source of regret.

He said ruefully: “At Chester City I had the bizarre situation of having two of the chairman’s sons in the squad.

“I could hardly use that old one: ‘Let’s show the chairman!’ his boys were sitting listening to me.

“I had noticed that the previous four managers had been sacked just after Christmas time but the club were going well at one stage.

“I had a list of players I wanted in the January but before I could deliver it I had players coming in and asking if they were up for transfer.

“It was all news to me but then the chairman told me they were all up for sale because we had overspent against league rules and now we had to cut our cloth.

“We were living beyond our means and when the FA checked everything we faced sanctions.

“Both the players and myself weren’t getting paid and it was demotivating. When he sacked me I couldn’t get up the road quick enough.”

Back then if you had asked me who the most unlikeliest Scottish manager to move abroad would be, I’d have said it without hesitation. Bobby Williamson.

The former brickie from Easterhouse who Jock Wallace plucked from part-time football at Clydebank when he made him a Ranger for £100k back in 1983 was a 100 per cent home boy in my eyes.

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He admitted: “I had no intention of moving abroad but the truth is that I couldn’t get back into Scottish football, I spoke to Dunfermline, Livingston and Ross County but no bites.

“I thought I had a decent reputation in Scotland but it just didn’t happen, I was out for a year on gardening leave after Plymouth and I needed to work again.

“I saw that Csaba Laszlo had left Uganda to become Hearts boss and I asked my agent to speak to them.

“It was a huge culture shock initially but I loved being a national manager.”

The shrewd Scot would master a volatile football environment in charge of The Cranes and guide the nation steadily up the FIFA rankings throughout four and a half fruitful years in the job.

He became a victim of his own success in the end, though, as a heartbreaking loss on the verge of qualification for AFCON was followed by a poor start to qualification for the 2014 World Cup and the axe fell.

It was an experience Bobby savoured, however, and he admitted: “I liked the fact that you weren’t stuck with players as you are with a club when they are under contract.

“If you didn’t like their attitude you just didn’t select them again.

“If we were playing on a Saturday we might not get the international players until the Thursday so that was tough.

“We only lost one home game in the five years I had with Uganda, though, and that was on a penalty shoot-out to Zambia to miss out on going to the African Cup of Nations.”

Football insiders in Africa knew the job he had done, though, and Bobby was soon back in employment as boss of Kenyan Premier League side Gor Mahia.

The Nairobi giants had been struggling but their new coach became a unifying force and they stormed back to prominence.

Bobby pointed out: “Gor Mahia hadn’t won a title in 18 years when I got there but we got it over the line.

“I said after we won it that we would kick on as a club and they did after that season got me noticed and I moved to the Kenyan national team.”

Williamson’s time in charge of the Harambee Stars did not emulate his success in Uganda.

He gives a fascinating insight, though, to the trials and tribulations of coaching in the region.

Bobby stressed: “The travelling in Africa is unreal, with Kenya we played Cape Verde at home on a Friday and won 1-0.

“The FA asked me what I wanted to do for the return match on the Tuesday and I asked how long the flight was.

“They said eight hours so I said we can go Sunday, get there in the evening then sleep, train Monday and play Tuesday.

“They said they would charter a plane and we would go on the Monday so I got to the airport at 9am but the players didn’t turn up until 2pm with the FA people.

“I looked out onto the tarmac and there was a twin-propeller gun metal grey thing sitting there.

“I’m not joking when I say they were actually running around putting the Harambee Stars signs on it on the runway.

“We eventually left at 9pm that night, we stopped four times to refuel and flew through the night and we turned up two hours before kick-off.

“It was madness, the flight took 23 hours and we lost 2-0. That sort of thing happened all the time, it was a nightmare. “ In the seven years since the end of his troubled Kenya reign Bobby has had few yearnings to step back into the fray.

He feels fulfilled, that he realised all the dreams he had as a kid, to play for Rangers, score and Old Firm winner, win trophies as a coach.

And he pointed out: “Coaching here in Kenya you were battling against the facilities which are not the best and the way it ended with the national team was very poor.

“They have not paid up my contract and even now the legal battle over that is grinding on but I won’t let it go.

“I had a few years left on my contract but my card was marked when the President who hired me lost his job.

“His successor told me he hadn’t made up his mind what direction they would go in then I read in the newspaper that they had hired a new National Coach.”

That case has crawled through the Employment Courts in Kenya but is nearing completion now as Williamson prays his persistence pays off.

With an autobiography in the offing and his health restored he will jet back home this week to Nairobi after a little fix of the Scottish game that once consumed him.

The one-time brickie from Easterhouse has won some fights and lost some in the game he loves but when cancer came calling, he won the most important battle of all.