Bobby Williamson opens up on Scotland job ridicule, exposing a 40-year Rangers secret and Hibs exile

He did in fact apply. “I think I had World Cup fever,” explains Williamson. “I was up at 3am watching football when I heard Steve (Clarke) had resigned.

“I thought: 'I wonder if McCoist would be interested in assisting me?' So I texted Coisty. Usually he doesn’t get back to you for a couple of days. He texted me two or three later: ‘I’m in!’ Brilliant. I have known Scotty (Brown) and Kevin (Thomson) and watched their careers develop. I texted them. Sure enough, they wanted in as well. At least that’s the message I was getting!”

Although he accepted the fans wouldn’t be excited by his appointment, he figured they would get behind McCoist, Brown and Thomson. “My idea was to do the job for a year, maybe two years, and groom these guys to step up and have the experience of working at that level,” he says. “That was my plan.”

He recruited an intermediary to send his CV to the SFA. Williamson looked it over too, just to remind himself of his accomplishments. Seeing them set out in black and white—including leading Kilmarnock to a Scottish Cup win aged only 35 and four regional Cecafa (Council for East and Central Africa Football Associations) titles with Uganda—something struck him. “I thought: ‘Not a bad career…’,” he says.

Not bad? Bloody extraordinary he means. Enough to entitle him to a hearing from the SFA, certainly. Just one problem. “I realised my European licence had lapsed ten years ago!” he says. The late Jim Fleeting, SFA director of coaching at the time, contacted Williamson.

Fleeting explained that the qualification was due a refresh. Williamson, however, did not view this as a priority, especially given he was living and working in Kenya and now had a child there. He also doubted Sir Alex Ferguson and Jose Mourinho, other Largs graduates, were being summoned back to renew their qualifications. He decided to stay put and save himself a few grand.

“The long and the short of it is that I was not qualified (for the Scotland job)!” he says. He unsubmitted his application.

No one is saying that if Williamson had been in possession of a fully up-to-date European coaching licence, then he – along with McCoist and Brown and Thomson – would be leading Scotland into their first post-World Cup fixture in Slovenia this weekend. It might have been fun to observe, but Sebastien Pocognoli seems a little more ‘of the current time’.

Perhaps unsurprisingly Williamson isn’t big on “algorithms and all that stuff”—the sort of skillsets that get coaches in through the door these days.

But he’s done things, seen places. He's flown in a two-engine propeller plane from Kenya to Cape Verde, via three refuelling stop offs, for a vital World Cup qualifier, arriving with his players three hours before kick-off. “The president phoned me afterwards,” Williamson recalls. “Not the president of the association, the president of the country! ‘Heads will roll,’ he told me.” Accountability only seemed to go so far. Williamson remains in dispute with the Kenyan FA over unpaid wages over a decade after leaving.

Although he received a fair amount of ridicule once the Scotland job application story emerged, all publicity is good publicity. He laughs it off now. “Some of the stories were brilliant, I told my son and my daughter, don’t be reading social media, I’m bound to be getting abused on it. They couldn’t wait!

“My boy (Steven) phoned me. He said he’d just heard someone on the radio say: ‘Bobby Williamson? I’d rather have Bobby from Still Game!’ Honestly, I was killing myself laughing.”

Williamson is honest enough to admit that his sudden appearance back in the news didn’t harm the initial promotional drive for his new autobiography, Out of Easterhouse. On the cover of the actual hard copy, Africa is scored out. Why? Well, he’s not from Africa, clearly. He’s very much in Africa. Kenya, to be exact. He lives with his second wife Michelle, whom he met in Uganda, and their 13-year-old daughter, Saoirse. Now 65, Williamson has got enough to be going on with.

Back briefly in Scotland to launch his book, he’s not alone in taking a slightly dim view of Glasgow, his hometown.

“I am a bit disappointed,” he says. “I am sitting in the hotel, watching people outside drinking cans of beer, sitting on the kerb, arguing with themselves….”

One revelation in his book, written with journalist Lorne Gardner, is that he's finished with football (another reason to be amused by him putting his hand up for the Scotland post). Williamson might choose to put it another way: football has finished with him.

The phone isn't ringing anymore. But then the game, he complains, doesn't give him the same thrill. He hasn’t managed since the advent of VAR. If he wants entertainment, he can go to the cinema – a memorable line, attributed to him during his days at Hibs, that he now claims never to have said.

One wonders what’s on at the Nairobi Multiplex? The Kenyan capital is his base now. “Like anywhere, there’s good and bad areas,” he says.

Although he once readily sacrificed everything for the game, including loved ones, football doesn't really feature in his life now. His autobiography is an emotional read in places. He apologises to his children for not being around when they were growing up and chronicles gradually drifting apart from Lorraine, his first wife. Daughter Emma, a nurse, and son Steven, a fireman, have read the book. "They have a better understanding of where I was coming from," he says. “Because football’s 24-7, six days a week.

“On a Sunday, I wanted to go to my local to play pool, have a few beers, talk about football." Lorraine wanted him to join the family for lunch excursions to places like Saltcoats and Troon. "I said: 'I am not doing that'. I wanted some time to myself. That’s how we separated. I was getting to an age, 48-50ish. I thought, ‘If I don’t make a move now….’”

His own parents did not divorce until they were in their 60s. “They lived in Easterhouse, then my mum moved out to a house round the corner,” he recalls. “They never met anyone else. I thought: ‘I can’t let that happen to me’. I can’t live just myself. I need someone.” He met Michelle, a half-Irish lawyer who now works in human rights shortly after his eye-opening relocation to Uganda. “Without her I’d be dead,” he says.

Battling illness and saving Ally McCoist from the sack

I feel I have my own apology to make. The last time we spoke was just after he left his post as the Uganda national team manager. After 50 minutes, with the phone pressed so hard to my ear that I was hearing African birdsong for the rest of the day, Williamson finally brought the conversation to a halt. “I am walking around the garden here and the sweat is lashing off me," he told me. "I have not put any sun cream on, so I am probably burnt to a crisp!"

Fast forward 13 years. Last weekend, during an appearance on the radio programme Off the Ball, Williamson revealed he had recently undergone surgery to remove basal cell carcinoma – a form of skin cancer - from his nose. He was informed the cancer was probably due to sun exposure.

“But I am a sun dodger!” he protested. The doctor told him it could date back to his youth. "What, for 50 years, this has been lying dormant?!” he wonders.

He’s now careful to apply cream. He fishes out pictures from his phone of the deep cavity in his nose following surgery. With the stitches out, it’s already healing well.

Williamson looks like a different man though some same distinguishing marks survive, including the ten-inch scar on his right shin. He pulls up his trouser leg. It looks like he’s been gnawed at by a shark. While the injury was sustained in Australia, it was on dry land. No football was involved, though. Rangers were on tour and, well, alcohol had been taken.

Williamson tries to put it delicately, given this is a family newspaper. He was trying to “wash” McCoist’s shoes while urinating before a bout of wrestling saw them kick out at each other’s shins: McCoist got the better connection. “If it was his leg that had been broken, think of all the trophies Rangers wouldn’t have won, all the goals he wouldn’t have scored,” he says. “He was a better player than me so it was probably better that it was my leg!”

Williamson took the rap, telling manager Jock Wallace that it was his own stupid fault. He had tried to hurdle a fence. He knew Wallace didn’t need an excuse to come down like a ton of bricks on McCoist: “Big Jock didn’t like Coisty at that time. He was always late and was on his final warning…”

McCoist urged Williamson to tell the truth. However, his pal was adamant. “My career might be finished, I don’t want yours to be finished too,” he told McCoist. In terms of Rangers' modern history, it was a significant pact. McCoist went on to become the greatest goalscorer in the club’s history, although he sailed close to the wind on other occasions. Williamson, meanwhile, was bombed out by Graeme Souness without, he laments, getting much chance to impress.

He enjoyed a decent career nonetheless and remains much loved at Rotherham, where he moved following a frustrating period at West Brom under Ron Atkinson.

Then there was Kilmarnock, where he bridged the Fleeting and Burns eras. Although he adored Tommy, Williamson was not always flavour of the month. The former Celtic midfielder laid into Williamson at half time of a match with Raith Rovers. “Don’t pass to him,” the player-manager instructed. “He can’t control the ball!”

Much later Burns was speaking at a dinner and, spotting Williamson, complimented him as someone who “did the work of three men”, before adding: “It’s just a shame he has eaten two of them!”

The weight Williamson has shed is partly down to his first battle with cancer. In 2018 he was diagnosed with undifferentiated nasopharyngeal carcinoma in his nasal cavity. “Easy for you to say!” he told the oncologist, before the severity of the situation was spelled out. Already at stage 3, he was treated in Delhi on his wife’s company health insurance. “A lot of Kenyans get their treatment in India,” he explains.

Williamson wonders whether anyone will recognise him now, which can be a plus. Last Sunday, for example, when he was invited to hospitality in the Jock Stein Lounge at Celtic Park as a guest of a Celtic-supporting pal. So there was at least one Rangers fan present at Parkhead to see the away side run out 1-0 winners. “A few recognise me once I open my mouth!” he says.

Prior to our meeting in a Glasgow city centre pub, he sent me a description: “Hairy face, leather jacket”. He genuinely doesn’t expect people to know it’s him any longer. Perhaps he’s right; in over two hours of conversation, no one approaches our table. Not to have a go or welcome him home.

He started off at Clydebank, striking up a productive partnership with Tommy Coyne. He describes Coyne as “arguably the best striker I ever played with” in his book. That’s no slight on McCoist, he points out.

“Tommy was better for me than Coisty was for me,” Williamson explains. “Coisty knew how to read Davie Cooper, I couldnae,” he continues.

“I’d see him beating a boy and make a run to the front post, Davie would check back out again.” McCoist lapped up the chances Williamson didn’t get. He left Rangers having won only the Tennent’s Sixes and yet, when he arrived at Hibs as manager all those years later, he still felt damned by the Ibrox association.

It didn’t help that he was replacing someone known as “Le God” – Franck Sauzee. Even though he had barely won a game as manager, he was revered for what he had done on the pitch as a player. “I was the Weegie Hun…it was like walking on stage after Sinatra,” Williamson writes of his appointment, almost 25 years ago.

Incredibly, he hasn’t returned to Hibs since leaving for Plymouth Argyle, to succeed Paul Sturrock. “I don’t think I have been back to Edinburgh full stop!” he says. When he returns to Scotland, he tends to go to Kilmarnock. It’s where a launch event for his book was held earlier this week.

“I keep reading I had a tough time through there (at Hibs), but I enjoyed it,” he says. “I enjoyed the club, the players…I even enjoyed the fans. People say the fans didn’t like me. Fans don’t like people if they are no' winning football matches. If you're winning football matches, you're fine.

"If I was a Hibs fan, I’d still have loved him (Sauzee) too.” There is no need to review his Hibs days in granular detail. Suffice to say, because he is associated with blooding youngsters such as Scott Brown and Kevin Thomson, history has been kind.

It seems apt that the day we met in Glasgow – “maybe next time I will come through to Edinburgh,” he says – Hibs named Marink Reedijk as their new manager, the 16th permanent appointment since Williamson occupied the hot seat. Life goes on. Mr Bobby, as he became known in Uganda, ought to be content knowing he’s left his mark, both near and far.

Out of Easterhouse – The Bobby Williamson Story (Pitch Publishing) is out on 12 October, £25.00.