Bothroyd on life with the Bluebirds, being big in Japan and proving ‘clown manager’ wrong
JAY Bothroyd gets home from his weekly shop in Hokkaido, an island at the north tip of Japan, and picks up the phone to speak to WalesOnline.
He is alone in his residence, his wife, Stella, and two-year-old son Zar are back in London due to the travel restrictions owing to the coronavirus outbreak.
Football is on hold there, as it is everywhere else, so it gives Bothroyd time to sit down and reflect upon a remarkable career which, after 537 games and 163 goals, is showing no signs of slowing down.
North London upbringing
HIS mum, Leslie, was a part-time cleaner in a school and his dad, John, worked for British Telecom and they were determined to keep him grounded in an area of London which, Bothroyd says, was riddled with temptation.
“They raised me and did the best for me that they could,” he says. “I grew up in a rough area in North London called Archway, in between Finsbury Park, Tottenham, Haringey, that sort of area.
“You get a mix of all the badness that happens in the north part of London.
“I always had the ball at my feet, so I wasn’t embroiled in all that. I knew what I wanted to do.
He was picked up by Arsenal at 10 and rocketed through the academy system as one of the stand-out players.
Bothroyd, while still a teenager, was training regularly with a squad which would in a few years’ time be known as ‘The Invincibles.’
He was convinced he was going to make it with the Gunners after winning the FA Youth Cup and remembers a conversation with Arsene Wenger which cemented those ambitions firmly in his head.
“I remember he said, ‘Next year I want to start involving you in some of the cup games,’” Bothroyd recalls.
“I was training with the first-team squad every day almost, I was the first one to do that.”
Bothroyd had the world at his feet but, after being substituted in the Premier League Youth Cup final, he threw his shirt at youth coach Don Howe on the substitutes’ bench and was subsequently sold to Coventry City for just £1m as an 18-year-old.
He admits he harbours some regrets over that moment and cites his bad attitude at the time.
“I have regrets about throwing my shirt, but it’s stuff I’ve got to live with,” he says.
Despite three relatively successful seasons personally at Coventry, Bothroyd’s assessment of the club is withering.
“Once Gordon Strachan left Coventry, everything went to pot,” he says.
“Every year it just got worse and worse and worse. Changing managers every five minutes, the club went into liquidation and asked me to take a pay cut and I said no, I asked them to let me leave for free and that’s how I ended up going to Italy.”
Italy and the harrowing tales of racist abuse
SO, to Perugia then. Bothroyd subscribes to the view that, back then in 2003, Serie A was the best league in the world.
He is one of a select group of Englishmen to go and ply their trade in the Italian top flight and was recruited after one of the coaches saw him playing in the Youth Cup final with Arsenal a few years before. His eyes were widened by how hard they trained and how far ahead they were in terms of fitness and nutrition.
But it is a harrowing tale of the egregious racist abuse he was subjected to which will always stamp a heavy blot on his time there.
“When I first came across it, it was weird,” he recalls.
“I remember, we played Inter Milan away and the manager called me and a few of the other black players into his office and said, ‘Listen, guys, I’m just marking your cards, when we go to Inter Milan, the fans are probably going to racially abuse you.’
“I didn’t really understand it. Because at the time they had Adriano, they had (Obafemi) Martins, they had Ivan Cordoba, all black players themselves.
“So, why were they racially abusing us when they had black players themselves?!
“Those people are disgusting people,” he seethes. “Ignorant and narrowminded.”
It was in Italy, though, where he met his wife Stella.
Bothroyd was friends with Al-Saadi Gaddafi, a Perugia team-mate and third son of former Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi, and it was through his Canadian masseuse he met Stella.
He was whisked off to Milan with the masseuse on what he was told was a shopping trip, but he ended up at a party one Monday night and that was that.
Stella is from Verona in northern Italy and it is there where Bothroyd encountered another gut-wrenching moment when he saw Nazi symbols emblazoned on the walls of the streets there.
It was all too unsettling and, understandably, he sought a loan move to Blackburn Rovers in his second season before heading back to London with Charlton, permanently.
After one season he was on the move again, this time to Wolves, but, following a successful first season, it all changed when Mick McCarthy took the reins.
“He started trying to annoy me,” Bothroyd remembers. “He took my squad number off me, made me train with (fitness coach) Tony Daley by myself.
“He was trying to force me out the door, making me do double sessions, he’s calling me at night telling me to come in and do bike rides through a forest, giving me some s**t bike going through terrain.
“He told me not to drive my car, don’t wear my cap, treating me like a kid. He was like a headmaster.”
The Dave Jones phone call and best decision of his life
IT is why Bothroyd describes a phone call from Dave Jones as the biggest blessing of his career.
“One morning I was going to training, driving up the motorway, and I get a phone call and it’s a private number and he’s like, ‘Hi there, this is Dave Jones.’
“I was like, ‘Dave Jones? Who is Dave? I don’t know Dave Jones.’
“And he said: ‘Dave Jones, Cardiff City manager.’
“’Oh, Sorry!’ I said. He asked where I was and I said I was on my way to training. He said he had been given permission to talk to me.
“He told me to turn my car around and get myself down to Cardiff.
“So, right there and then, I literally got off at the next exit and drove down to Cardiff. I didn’t end up going back to my house for three weeks! I just stayed at The Vale.
“The terrible situation I had at Wolves turned into one of the best decisions of my life.”
Not just for him, but for Cardiff fans. He scored 12 goals in that first season, hitting the ground running, with the Bluebirds finishing just outside the playoff spots.
“Coming from Mick McCarthy’s football, get it up to the front man or put it in the channels, it was a blessing and it was the best decision I ever made,” he says.
“We would go out for dinner with the wives, drinks with the boys, if we won the game we would go out and celebrate.
“Dave Jones said as long as we performed we could do what we wanted. If we didn’t perform he would come down on you like a ton of bricks.
“But the boys knew that and didn’t