'Calm' Lee Bowyer has Charlton 'in a good place' ahead of play-off final

Of all the ways to describe Lee Bowyer’s career in football, “laid-back” would not be the most obvious choice of words. Neither, in truth, would “calm”. And yet here we are, on the first few pages of the second chapter of Bowyer’s sporting life, and the Charlton Athletic manager is finding that his old competitiveness is now supplemented by an unexpected serenity.

“I have learned about myself that I am quite a calm person,” he says, the words coming out slowly and methodically. “I am laid-back. I have learned again that winning is everything. When I came out of the game, I had lost that hunger. I took a step back from everything and my whole life changed. But coming back into the game has made me realise that I love the winning feeling.”

It almost goes without saying that few who knew Bowyer as a player were expecting him to pursue management at all, let alone do as well as he has done with Charlton in his first full campaign. “Never in a million years did I see that coming,” says Danny Mills, his old team-mate at Leeds United. In fairness Bowyer did not expect this either, and it is only a year since he said he was still unsure whether management was really for him.

Charlton’s performances this season, when they finished third and succeeded in building some much-needed bridges with their disillusioned supporters, have washed away most of those doubts. Their results have also made it clear that Bowyer, one of the notorious bad boys of British football in his playing days, is genuinely suited to the responsibilities of coaching.

After jumping from assistant to caretaker manager in March last year, Bowyer was appointed on a permanent basis in September. “The more we win the more I enjoy it,” he says. “There have been tough times but it just makes everything more worthwhile now that we are going to Wembley.

“When I came out of football I had no intention of going back in. I just loved playing and training, and that was it. I didn’t like travelling. At least when you travelled you had a reward at the end because you had a game to play. As a coach, the reward now is to watch the players improve as individuals.”

The ultimate reward for Charlton, should they defeat Sunderland at Wembley, will be a return to the Championship after three seasons in the third tier. A repeat of their dramatic victory over Sunderland in 1998, dubbed the greatest ever play-off match, would please the neutrals but Bowyer is choosing to look forward rather than indulge in nostalgia. “This club should not be in League One,” he says.

One of the great achievements of Charlton’s season has been the reconnection with a fanbase that has grown so exasperated with the ownership. The sense of collective loathing towards Roland Duchatelet — who says he will not be attending the match due to fears for his safety — remains as strong as ever, but at least there is now an identification with the players and their manager.

The atmosphere at the Valley last week, when Bowyer’s side won on penalties in a breathless semi-final against Doncaster Rovers, was proof of the uplift in mood. “To see everything improve like that, I’m really delighted,” says Bowyer, who is in talks over a new contract that would keep him at the club next season.

In the 42-year-old’s own words, it is a “fluke” that he is here at all. He was perfectly happy running his carp fishing lake in France when, in 2015, his former Leeds team-mate Harry Kewell asked him to help out with coaching the Watford under-21s.

“If he didn’t ring me, I wouldn’t be sat here now,” Bowyer says. “I saw players improve with the information I was passing onto them. There was a striker who was not really scoring many and then, all of a sudden, he was scoring every game. His mum came up to me after one of the games and said ‘thanks, you’ve made him better and he’s come alive again.’ It is rewarding in a different way. I thought, ‘this is good. I like this.’”

It is an image at odds with the Bowyer of old, the Bowyer who was convicted of affray in 1996 and charged with GBH and affray in 2000. The Bowyer who brawled with Kieron Dyer, his own team-mate, during a match for Newcastle United. He rarely presented as “calm” back then, but with age comes tranquility and now his considerable top-level experience is helping a team with increasingly lofty ambitions.

“It wasn’t the case when I took over, but now everyone is happy and smiling,” Bowyer says. “Our players, and the club as a whole, are in a good place.”