Back in his hometown Glasgow to promote his forthcoming autobiography, Bobby Williamson nods in the direction of Central Station.
“I was sitting looking out the hotel window the other night watching drunk people arguing with themselves,” he says, quietly shaking his head.
The former manager of Kilmarnock and Hibernian has spent the last 18 years establishing a new family, a new life, in Uganda, then Kenya.
Nairobi is Kenya’s cosmopolitan hub, a landscape far removed from Easterhouse, the east end housing scheme where he spent his days kicking a ball around the streets. Built with no shops and no sports facilities, local youths used to kill the boredom by hanging around street corners and joining gangs known as the Drummy, Aggro, Torran Toil and Bal Toi.
Describing it as an ‘explosive mix of frustration’ Williamson was blessed by a stable, happy family to lean back on for protection. Peering out of his city centre hotel last weekend, he witnessed the social decay on the streets and wished Mother Glasgow could place a protective arm around the shoulders of the people he saw.
“I was sitting looking out thinking, ‘what’s going on here? What has happened to this place?’
“They were shadow fighting in the street and there was a woman just sitting on the doorstep with a can of beer in her hand swigging away.
“I hear it’s even worse round the corner under the bridge at Central Station and when I look at my home city now I have to say, I’m disappointed.”
Starting out as a goal-scoring striker with Clydebank, then Rangers, he won a Scottish Cup as Kilmarnock boss. His last job in Scottish football ended when he left Hibs to manage Plymouth Argyle in 2004. He is 65 now and there is no sign of a man planning to return home and spend his twilight years in the land of his birth.
“Glasgow seems a bit run down and when I look at the pot holes and the traffic works, it looks a bit of a mess at the minute.
“I grew up in Easterhouse and back then I didn’t know any better. I don’t think I could come back here and live now.”
There was one job which might have persuaded him. When Steve Clarke stepped down as Scotland manager, Williamson was infected by what he calls ‘a wee bit of World Cup fever’.
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A former manager of the Ugandan and Kenyan national teams, he asked a Guinean agent in London to forward his CV to SFA chief executive Ian Maxwell and copy him into the email. The application was doomed when he scanned the CV and realised that his UEFA coaching licence had lapsed a decade earlier.
“I withdrew my application the day after I submitted it. I told my man to get on the phone to Maxy and tell him that I was ineligible for the job and that was the last I heard.
“If they had given me any encouragement I might have had the licence refreshed, but I don’t think me coming in would have impressed any Scotland fans.”
He tried his best to apply a coat of lipstick to his pitch by recruiting former Rangers team-mate Ally McCoist and his old Hibs players Scott Brown and Kevin Thomson as his corner men.
“Normally I don’t hear back from Coisty for weeks, but three hours later he comes back and says, ‘I’m in.’
“I spoke to Scott Brown and Kevin Thomson after that and they were all up for it...
“Unfortunately I then had to let them down, but I wasn’t terribly bothered to be honest. The job is a poisoned chalice.”
He wishes Sebastien Pocognoli well in his first game against Slovenia and has no issue with an overseas candidate landing the role, but can’t get his head around the data analytics utilised by the Scottish FA to benchmark candidates.
“That’s a lot of nonsense. Hearts pulled Derek McInnes and the current coach in because everything added up on the computer.
“That’s just absolute nonsense, because you can either do the job or you can’t do the job.”
He knows how that kind of talk is perceived by a generation of fans tutored to speak the language of transitions, overloads and false nines. Granted a hero’s welcome at the official launch of his book in Kilmarnock on Tuesday night, Scotland supporters seemed less enthused by the prospect of his return.
“Somebody actually said that they would rather have Bobby the barman from Still Game than Bobby Williamson,” he laughs.
“I killed myself at that but told my kids, ‘don’t be reading social media on this stuff because I am going to be slaughtered.’
“I would be called a dinosaur if I got back in because I would put defenders back on each post to make the goal as small as possible [at corners].
“Look, it’s academic because I’m not going to get back in anyway.”
He marked his 65th birthday by undergoing treatment for skin cancer and, after a series of life-threatening brushes with the big C, the old fires no longer burn so bright. He went to Parkhead to watch his old club win the latest Old Firm game and spent the 90 minutes marvelling at the man absorbing all the stick in the Celtic technical area.
“I look at Martin [O'Neill] going back in his seventies and you can only admire him because he has put himself back in the firing line.
“I was at that Old Firm game and I’m looking at him thinking, ‘why does he want to do this? Why does he want to put himself through this in his seventies?
“I tried coaching and I liked it but sometimes when you are in the game you want out, while sometimes you are out and you want back in.”
Speak to former players from the 70s and 80s and so many have the same tale to tell. They watch modern football, with players passing the ball from side to side and backwards, and they no longer recognise or relate to the game they used to play at a high level. It bores them to tears.
“I say to myself, ‘if he passes that back to the keeper after 10 passes, I’m putting the TV off,” says Williamson.
“When I played, our fans were on our backs if we took five passes in our own half.
“They want the ball played forward, they want to see opportunities created - and so do I.”
During his time as manager of Hibernian, Williamson famously took a call from a journalist before a game against Kilmarnock. The whys and wherefores of what was said remain a matter of friendly dispute, but a headline duly appeared quoting Williamson advising fans to go to the cinema if they wanted entertainment.
“That was a lot of s****” he says now. “Everybody believes that but if you read the article there’s no mention of those words at all, that’s just what sub-editors do. They try and catch people’s attention with a headline.”
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Some headlines are more welcome than others when a man has a book to sell. An extract from ‘Out of Easterhouse’ appeared this week telling the tale of the day a drunken altercation with his old Ibrox pal McCoist in Australia ended in a career-threatening broken leg.
For four decades Williamson had stuck with the story that he brought the injury on himself by scaling a fence. The truth will always out.
“I actually spoke to Coisty before I put that in the book.
“I sent him what I wrote and I said to him, ‘you okay with that?
“He never got back to me and so I put it in.
“Coisty texted me this morning to ask how long I was about to see if we could catch up for a beer.
“But it’s a waste of time going for a beer with him because you go in and he is mobbed by folk wanting autographs and selfies. You end up standing in a corner drinking yourself like the pub saddo…”
He keeps one selfie in his phone to whip out and show people whenever they ask about his run-in with cancer.
On the screen are two men enjoying a glass of Guinness. One is Kenyan and a picture of health while the other is pale and emaciated, a forced smile failing to disguise how painfully thin he is. It takes a second look to establish that the skin and bones in a pale blue shirt is, infact, Bobby Williamson esq.
“I had a tumour in my nostril, in the nasal cavity.
“I had to have it removed and then I had 37 radiation treatments which destroyed the left of my face.
“When I saw that photograph I looked terrible, absolutely terrible.
“People would say to me, ‘you look brilliant.’
“What a load of nonsense, they were telling me lies.
“Gradually I built myself back up and put weight back on again.”
All his facial hair disappeared during the radiation treatment. While he now sports a healthy, salt-and-pepper beard, his hearing has been badly affected. More than once he asks for a question to be repeated.
“It’s so frustrating for me and for people trying to talk to me.
“I keep asking folk to repeat, repeat, repeat. It’s hard enough in Kenya because a lot of people don’t understand my accent already.”
While the original cancer has been in remission for seven years now, he returned to hospital last month to have a skin tumour cut away from the outside of his nose.
“I just had the stitches removed a week before I came back to Scotland.
“They got 97 per cent of it out with only a couple of bits left, so I had to go back in to have that cut out as well.”
He reports all of this in tones which relay no hint of self pity. While Africa has brought one life-threatening challenge after another, he gives thanks for the love of his family and the simple comforts of life in Kenya.
“That’s where I live now. My daughter Siorse was born in Uganda, but we relocated when she was young and she is 13 now.
“Her friends are there, she goes to school there and my wife still has friends she went to school with.
“She is settled and has a decent job and I just watch a lot of Netflix and go to the pub…
“People think the sun is splitting the skies every day over there, it’s not.
“But, I’ll tell you what, it’s more sun than you get in Glasgow. And these days it’s where I call home.”
*** ‘OUT OF EASTERHOUSE, The Bobby Williamson Story’ by Bobby Williamson (Pitch Publishing) publishes 12 October 2026, RRP £25.00
