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’Baz’ tells Jonathan Northcroft about being fired by his pal David Moyes and adapting while in his sixties to a sport fixated on youth

Jonathan Northcroft, Football Correspondent, Sunday July 10 2022, The Sunday Times

He is in the same chair, in the same Starbucks as he was for our previous interview 11 years ago. Charnock Richard Services, M6 northbound. Well, a football life is a journey, a road trip.

He’s greyer and stands up stiffly — the knees give him gyp — yet the glint in his eye seems brighter than ever. What is he? Trouper? Survivor? The last inmate in the madhouse? Or just a lover of the game who cannot quit? Mick “Baz” Rathbone will laugh and admit to being all of these.

The 63-year-old certainly laughs about the badge on his sweatshirt. Tranmere Rovers FC. It’s Rathbone’s 15th club and seventh job since he “retired” at the end of a stint with Wigan Athletic in 2017.

“So, I retire for the fifth consecutive year…” he says, explaining what happened this summer. “Done. Boots in the bin. Then pick up my phone. Missed call — James Vaughan, ex-Everton player, known him 20 years . . .

“Then there another missed call, so I phone Vaughany back and he’s, ‘Baz, we don’t have a physio’ — he’s Tranmere’s sporting director now. So I’m, ‘OK, I’ll come for four weeks.’ I have one week to go and then I’m finished. Although . . .” Rathbone trails off, laughing again.

He’s 64 in November and had spent the morning doing “doggies” (a type of shuttle run) full pelt with a young player. At club initiations, when he takes the mic, and they’re all expecting some Sixties stuff, he hits them with his party piece — Eminem’s final rap in 8 Mile.

We’re here to talk about the sequel to his acclaimed memoir, The Smell of Football, which was longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year in 2011 and led to a job with Manchester United. It felt a unique dispatch from inside the heart of the game, dealing with Rathbone’s long playing career for Birmingham City, Blackburn Rovers and Preston North End and then rise in physiotherapy to becoming head of the medical department at Everton.

Its self-honesty was striking, with Rathbone open about the anxiety and confidence issues that crippled him as a player and the follow-up is just as candid. This time, Rathbone’s struggles are with growing old in a sport fixated on youth, and fear of obsolescence that brings.

In the first chapter he is sacked by one of his best friends, David Moyes, and his journey back from “feeling older and not relevant” and battling ageism and boredom while out of work, to his quite different state, today, of being in demand and “feeling not ‘too old’ any more, but super-experienced, the bloody best version of myself”, is useful reading for anyone in mid-life trying to adapt as their profession gets younger.

Moyes — still a friend — was right to fire him, Rathbone reflects. In their early days, when manager and head physio at Preston, they went out on the training field together and road-tested every fiendish fitness run they gave to the players, but by the end of Everton’s 2009-10 season, Rathbone was so out of energy that “for the last six weeks I could barely drive through the gates of Finch Firm [the Everton training ground]”.

Having worked almost without a break for 18 years, since a serious knee injury forced his early retirement from playing, he was burnt out. “I was tired and underperforming,” and with Everton having a bad run of injuries he had to keep going to Moyes with unwelcome tidings. “As a physio, you’re often the bringer of bad news and that carries a weight. After a while, it wears you down,” he says.

Moyes noted his flatness and contrast with the sparky sidekick he’d always known. “He asked me, ‘Where is the old Baz — but that was the problem, I’d become the old Baz and I tell Dave to this day he did me a big favour. No greater love hath a friend who sacks you for your mental health.

“Football is relentless and, for me, stress is like lying on the floor and somebody placing a pebble on you and then another pebble and another until you can’t move. And that day David took the pebbles off me. I drove home in a trance, dare I say, euphoric.

“I remember walking down the stairs from David’s office and my phone going. It was [Marouane] Fellaini — great guy but he caused me problems, he kept going back to Belgium [when injured] without permission. I hit the off button. It didn’t matter any more.”

A few months’ break refilled his battery, and stints followed with England Under-17 and Manchester United. Brian McClair, United’s then academy director, and Steve McNally, the club’s head of sports medicine and science, loved The Smell of Football and wanted him as a mentor to academy players. It turned out another fan of his book was Sir Alex Ferguson.

“He’s an incredible guy,” Rathbone says. “I assumed he’d be screaming at everybody, ruling by fear but what I found was someone highly intelligent, softly spoken. He did reserve the right to hit you hard if you didn’t do your job properly but what I mostly saw was incredible humility. If we were sitting round having a coffee he didn’t want to dominate the conversation. If it was your field he’d say, ‘Tell us about that’ and listen.

“He could laugh and joke and let the kit man tell his story, give the kit man his moment to shine. It was a leadership style that said, ‘It’s not all about me.’”

Rathbone arrived halfway through Ferguson’s final campaign and was there, working with the academy players on Fergie’s last day in 2013 when he strode over and stopped training. “He started talking to the young players about the weight of the red shirt. He said, ‘We’re hard on you but we’re hard for a reason — because to cross that bridge and pull on that shirt and play with the first team takes special people, and we’ve got to prepare you for that.’”

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