ROYAL ASCENT
Steve Kean’s footballing odyssey has taken him from Glasgow’s tough east end to managing a crown prince’s team in super-rich Brunei
WORKING in Brunei, Steve Kean made a point of flying his wife and children out from their Surrey home for a visit every six weeks.
A long way from his boyhood home in the east end of Glasgow, the former Blackburn Rovers manager never had to trouble himself with the cost of tickets.
‘It’s handy when the owner of the club owns the national airline as well…’ he admits.
DPMM FC were owned by a former goalkeeper who doubled as the heir to the throne. Every two weeks, Crown Prince AlMuhtadee Billah would summon his manager to his vast palace to discuss plans to turn the club into a major force in the Asian Champions League.
‘Working for a royal family who owned their own football club was a new one for me,’ Kean tells Sportsmail.
‘The Crown Prince owned the club and I would go to his palace every month to sit and talk about the team and the young players coming through. We would also talk about the foreign players I was trying to get in.
‘The whole of Brunei consists of Liverpool fans. Every one of them. They are Liverpool fanatics and I had played against Liverpool and taken teams to Anfield and managed to get results — so that was always a talking point.
‘Off the pitch, they were such a happy, respectful nation. The population is only 400,000, but just being able to have access to the Crown Prince and the Sultan was amazing.’
The official residence of the Sultan of Brunei is the Istana Nural Iman. Set on the leafy riverside sprawl of hills on the banks of the Brunel River, the Light of Faith Palace is the world’s largest residential palace. Buckingham Palace doesn’t come close.
‘It was a bit different from Dalmarnock Road in Glasgow were I grew up,’ laughs Kean.
‘The whole team were invited to the second son’s wedding inside his palace, which is the biggest single residence in the world. It was a strange old experience.
‘I saw it as something totally fresh. When I went they only had one team and they had never won anything. They didn’t have a reserve team, they didn’t have an academy. I didn’t see that as a negative, I saw it as a situation where I could go in and use my experience to set up an academy and reserve team to develop players who won trophies.
‘We won the Singapore Cup. We won the league for the first time. I initially went for a year and finished up staying for four. It was a great four years.’
Twelve months ago, Kean dug the passport out once more, moving to Australia to work as an assistant to former Hibernian midfielder Grant Brebner at Melbourne Victory before taking interim charge for the final games of the season. By a strange quirk, he was there when Ange Postecoglou — an A-League title winner at Victory — landed the job of managing Celtic, the club where he started out as a teenage reserve player with the likes of Derek Whyte and Peter Grant.
‘Ange moving to Celtic might have surprised people in other parts of the world, but not so much at Melbourne Victory,’ says Kean. ‘Ange is very, very well thought of in Australia and I had players I knew at Blackburn like Brett Emerton, who spoke so highly of him. You have Craig Moore, who has an Australian and Scottish connection, who speak very highly of him.
‘I was at Victory last season and some of the staff Ange brought in are still there and still think the world of him.
‘He is very well respected and a lot of people have followed his career and the way he coaches.’
While three defeats in six league games have eroded much of the early goodwill shown towards the Parkhead boss, Kean hopes the new man is granted the one commodity Celtic managers rarely get. Time.
‘I think Ange will put his own identity on the club very soon,’ claims Kean. ‘You can see the way he wants to play. I don’t think, even if teams press them, it will stop Joe Hart throwing or passing the ball out from the back.
‘Even if they lose a goal — and it happened at Victory that they lost some early goals when teams pressed them — he will continue to play that way.
‘I think that’s what the Celtic fans want to see, so long as they win. They want to see the team control possession and build from the back. But that takes time.’
When the A-League season ended, so did Kean’s time at Melbourne Victory. After rebuilding DPMM and leading the club to the best season in their history, his time in Australia was overshadowed by some of the toughest Covid restrictions on the planet.
‘I got out just in time,’ says Kean. ‘Melbourne is back into lockdown again. Sydney is in a long lockdown and I don’t even know if the A-League will start again. And if it does it’s probably going to be hard.
‘I was there for ten months and it was difficult because my wife couldn’t get in, my kids couldn’t get in. It’s so strict to travel in and out of the country and it was tough.
‘It’s hitting Australia hard and it’s in a bit of a mess unfortunately.
‘But when you get the chance, you have to take it. I worked a long time in Spain with Real Sociedad, I worked a long time in the English Premier League and Championship.’
For the last four years, Kean has worked with the SFA Coaching Education Department, helping players like Scott Brown to make the transition from playing to coaching. A graduate of the SFA course, Kean went on to coach Reading, Fulham, Real Sociedad, Coventry and manage Blackburn before moving overseas. Oddly, he has never coached a Scottish club.
‘I would be open to it,’ he admits. ‘You consider every one as they come up and it’s something I would certainly consider.’