Bluebirds was best time of my career
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JAY BOTHROYD... STILL GOING STRONG AT 37
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 the Echo.
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 per
formed 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 take the p**s.”
After narrowly missing out on the play-offs in his first season, Cardiff went one better the next year, finishing fourth in the Championship and reaching the fifth round of the FA Cup, too.
They navigated past Leicester City in the play-off semi-final and had a shot at glory against Blackpool in the final. There was a buzz swirling around the Welsh capital
It is then, though, Bothroyd’s bubble burst and what he describes as the most unfortunate moment of his career.
He hobbled off after aggravating a grade one calf tear just 15 minutes into the match and City went on to lose, agonisingly, 3-2.
“Dave Jones wasn’t happy with me,” he recalls. “We had a big argument afterwards.
“He was saying, ‘You could have had this painkilling injection!’
“And I was just saying, ‘No.’ I went to have a scan and the doctor told me it was a really bad injury.
“Me and Dave Jones have a great relationship, I still speak to him now.
“I was just frustrated, he was frustrated. It was just, all-round, a really unfortunate day for us.”
A decade on from that England callup and the ‘clown’ he proved wrong
THE next season, though, Bothroyd shot out of the traps. He scored 13 goals in his first 14 Championship games and Cardiff were on fire.
England boss Fabio Capello’s assistant manager Franco Baldini had been spotted at a couple of Cardiff games and, the day the national squad was due to be announced, he showed up at Scunthorpe away.
Newspaper talk was already rife that Bothroyd had a chance of getting an England call-up, but the striker knew that game, the day Capello would name his squad, he had a golden opportunity to put down a marker.
“This was the game I needed to perform in,” he remembers. “This was the game we needed to win.
“If any game was important, on a personal level, it was this one.”
He scored twice in a thumping 4-2 victory for the Bluebirds... he had done enough.
Bothroyd played the final 18 minutes of England’s friendly against France in November 2010, a 2-1 defeat. It was his only cap.
It was an extremely rare feat. Only Wilfried Zaha, while playing for Crystal Palace in 2012, has since played for England while plying their trade in the Championship.
Bothroyd is still the only Cardiff City player ever to play for England.
But the biggest takeaway for him from that night, though, was proving his old adversary McCarthy wrong.
“The biggest thing for me was, from where I was at, at Wolverhampton with that clown Mick McCarthy, getting changed in the kids’ dressing room with 16-year-olds, not being able to train with the first team, running around the pitch by myself, to three years later playing for my country, I looked at that like a kick in the teeth for him,” he says.
“He is like a C+ manager and I was with a better manager (Jones) who got the best out of me.”
Following that game, Stuart Pearce visited Cardiff’s training ground regularly to check on the player’s fitness after Bothroyd had sustained an injury, but he never made it into another squad.
Chopra ‘the predator’ and Cardiff City’s Kobe Bryant
ON the domestic scene, it was all about Bothroyd and Michael Chopra for Cardiff City fans. A partnership seemingly airlifted and dropped from heaven.
Bothroyd the tall, physical playmaker with an eye for goal and Chopra the deadly finisher sniping around the box. The perfect combination.
While it seemed like perfect harmony on the pitch, however, Bothroyd recalls the tumultuous nature of their relationship.
“It was funny, because we had a relationship where we pretty much argued every day,” Bothroyd laughs.
“We had banter every day.
“My wife became friends with his wife, but then he broke up with his wife, there was always something in Chops’ life. At Cardiff, there was always something happening, always something funny or some sort of argument.
“But me and Chops, on the pitch and off the pitch, we just seemed to hit it off.
“At the time, he was really alert and really sharp. He anticipated things so well. When the ball was played up to me, I knew where he was.
“It was like a sixth sense, almost. He was like a predator.”
It speaks volumes that Cardiff fans still pine for the days of Chopra and Bothroyd, a partnership so potent and rare it has never been replicated.
But while some might think it was some weird, inexplicable alchemy which brought the two of them together, Bothroyd points out that it was Jones and his shrewd eye for talented players and partnerships which meant that team was teeming with chemistry.
Every player had to be technically good, Bothroyd says, and there were few, if any, more technically sound than Peter Whittingham.
Bothroyd is clearly still shaken when he begins to speak about Whittingham’s tragic and untimely passing at the age of 35 just a fortnight ago.
“It’s so tragic,” he says. “I still can’t believe it.
“When I found out, I didn’t train for those couple of days. I was so gutted. He was such a great person and a great player.
“I am so upset he is not going to be able to see his kids grow.”
Bothroyd believes Whittingham’s iconic No.7 shirt should be retired by Cardiff City for good.
“I know it’s a different sport, but if Kobe Bryant gets his jersey retired because he passed away in tragic circumstances, why shouldn’t Peter Whittingham?”
The final season Bothroyd was at the club, Cardiff once again reached the play-offs, this time going down to Reading in the semi-final, and the striker left in search of Premier League football.
“I really, really didn’t want to leave Cardiff. It was probably the biggest decision of my career,” he says. “I just wanted to play Premier League football.
“I was really disappointed I had to leave Cardiff in the end, Cardiff is my club, I’m always going to love Cardiff. It’s where I’ve had my most success.
“I don’t follow any other club. Arsenal, because that’s where I grew up and my family are Arsenal fans. They gave me the gifts I have today.
“But, as a professional, Cardiff is the club where I enjoyed it the most.
“A great team, squad, manager, fans, I loved the city.”
Big in Japan
QPR didn’t go as well as he would have liked, he says as much. There was a ‘revolving door’ of managers and he found it difficult to score for a team constantly playing on the back foot.
In 2014, he made the decision to move out to Thailand to join Muangthong United before heading over to Japan in 2015 to sign for Jubilo Iwata, a second division side.
He tore it up there, scoring 35 goals in 56 games in two seasons, before moving up to J1 side Hokkaido Consadole Sapporo in 2017, where he still plays.
The forward is enjoying life there with his wife and second child. His first-born, 17-year-old Mace, still lives back in London and has taken a liking to rugby rather than following in his dad’s sizeable footsteps down the football path.
Bothroyd’s rugby knowledge is iffy at best and he doesn’t know in which position Mace plays, but his college feeds into Gallagher Premiership side Saracens. The former Bluebird, however, has other ideas.
“I need to get him into Cardiff Blues!” he laughs. “Nah, he loves it and is pretty good at it.
“I don’t really know the rules to be honest, I have to cringe at some of the tackles that happen, even at his age.
“The most important thing is he keeps enjoying it and developing.”
Bothroyd himself, 20 years Mace’s senior, is still developing. He is still ripping defences to shreds for Consadole.
He has 31 goals in 70 games for the club and it sounds like he is not stopping any time soon.
“I’m 37, but I always say when my body stops doing what my mind wants it to, that’s when I’ll stop,” he says.
“But, at the moment, I’m still sprinting past people and I’m still scoring goals.”
Now, Bluebirds, doesn’t that sound familiar?