Steve Bruce on loss, grief, football and looking forward again

Thursday lunchtime, two days before Blackpool’s trip to Northampton Town, and Steve Bruce’s training ground office, with door wide open, is a busy place.

Assistant Steve Agnew is opposite his manager, as are the club’s sporting director, David Downes, and the chief scout, Dean Hughes. They talk enthusiastically of budgets and opponents, and joke of training mishaps and missed targets.

Forward Niall Ennis approaches cautiously and is teased mercilessly over his polite request for a service station drop-off after the weekend’s game. “You’re on the bench Saturday now,” chuckles Bruce, who will soon see Ennis starring in a 2-0 win at Northampton that just about keeps League One promotion hopes alive. Others come and go, with apologies for using the printer.

It is a vibrant scene, regularly punctuated by laughter, but one that Bruce will have struggled to picture in the depths of autumn.

“There were times when I thought about not coming back,” says the 64-year-old. “I’m sure people would’ve totally understood, but sometimes football has given me a little bit of an escape from it all.”

Bruce and his family continue to grieve. It is five months since daughter, Amy, and son-in-law Matt Smith, the 35-year-old former Leeds United and Fulham forward, tragically lost their son, Madison. Bruce took the call that turned his life upside-down when arriving early one morning at Blackpool’s training ground.

“There’s still not a day where it doesn’t affect you,” he adds. “I still find Friday a difficult day because that’s when it happened. Even though it’s a day before a game, when you’re building up, I find Fridays so difficult.”

Madison, one of Bruce’s four cherished grandchildren, was just four months old when he died at home in October. Bruce was immediately granted compassionate leave by his employers at Blackpool and would only see it right to return after missing three games to be with his family. Son, Alex, 40, also stepped back from his coaching duties with League Two side Salford City, where Smith had finished his playing career last season.

“It’s been the tragedy of all tragedies,” Bruce says. “Anyone going through the same sort of grief, I feel for them. It’s horrendous that a fine, young, healthy baby boy doesn’t wake up one morning. We’ll never come to terms with that. It’s agony.”

Bruce’s four and a half decades in professional football ensured a rush of well wishes in the weeks that followed Madison’s death. He points to a bottle of red wine on his desk, a gift from another manager.

“You become a bit reclusive because people don’t know what to say to you,” says Bruce. “Everyone from within the game has been in touch to send their condolences and they’ll always start with ‘I don’t know what to say’ and quite right.

“I’d be exactly the same. I’ve had so many well wishes but they’ll know there’s not a lot in life that can happen to you that’s worse. Losing a child is the ultimate in grief, believe me. All these people who are going through similar with a sick child, I used to look from afar and think: ‘How the hell do you cope with that?’ You just have to try and find a way.”

Energies are focused on Madison’s three-year-old brother, Lennon, who is described as a “shining light” for the family. A tight unit has grown tighter. “Amy and Matt will have their moments, just like we all do. We just have to try and support them best we can.”

Bruce was told by Blackpool in October to take as long as he needed to recover, but football has unknowingly played its part in piecing his life back together. It is a club close enough to his Cheshire home to commute to daily and the modest Squires Gate training ground, next to the town’s airport, has warmth and familiarity. Grief cannot be conquered quickly but it can be distracted. Football management, all that Bruce has known for the last quarter of a century, brings that opportunity.

“Was it a sidetrack to the grief?” Bruce asks himself. “Possibly. The people here, who I work for, were fabulous and I didn’t want to let them down. They told me to take my time. I was away for a month or five weeks, whatever it was. It probably affected these guys (at Blackpool) as well.

“I didn’t think about football at all for a while. It was that moment when you’re a parent and all that matters is trying to help Amy, Matt and my good lady, Janet. I don’t know how you get through it or what helps you, but maybe time helps you to try and mend. It doesn’t leave you; you just cope. There’s always a reminder around the corner.”

Bruce says he still has his “dark moments” but it was not obvious from his outlook as the League One season heads down its final straight.

Blackpool are the 13th club he has managed since those first coaching steps were taken with Sheffield United after a playing career that included three Premier League titles and three FA Cups as a stoic central defender with Manchester United.

Blackpool may also be Bruce’s final club. There was a point where he thought West Bromwich Albion, the club he managed for eight months in 2022, might have been, a feeling that hardened with each month he was out of the game.

Bruce with son Alex while at West Brom in 2022 (John Early/Getty Images)

“I’d never been out for more than three or four months,” he says. “I had a lot of offers in the first few months and then the phone goes quiet on you. Then you realise you’ve hit a certain age and it’s a young man’s game.

“The phone might never ring again and, to be honest, I was OK with that. I had every intention of thinking that I’d done my bit, but I missed the everyday environment and the challenge. I needed a purpose.

“That’ll go for anyone coming to retirement age. You’ll get there and wonder if you’re enjoying (retirement) as much as you wanted to. You’re supposed to ride off into the sunset and enjoy the rest of your life but it’s not always that simple.”

Bruce had conversations over the vacant Republic of Ireland job at the back end of 2023 and was interviewed for the role of Jamaican national team manager when it eventually went to Steve McClaren last year. International football, with its reduced day-to-day intensity, carried appeal.

“The one I was closest to more than any was Jamaica,” he explains. “They’ve got very good players and they’ve got a good strong chance of reaching the World Cup. I thought it would be a great challenge. I thought long and hard about it and there was a stage where I thought I was close to getting it. They obviously went down a different direction in the end and gave it to Steve. Fair play to him.”

Bruce accepts he would have considered himself retired when this current season kicked off, but the sacking of Neil Critchley at the end of August presented Bruce with a chance to return in early September. A two-year deal with Blackpool began with the prize for League One’s Manager of the Month after four straight victories.

“The one thing I’m determined to do is to enjoy it,” says Bruce. “I’ve always believed, even to this day, that if you’re happy within your work then it gets the best out of people.

“I took this job because I wanted that reason to get up in a morning and achieve something and that still applies now. How lucky have I been with football? It’s given me a wonderful life. I can’t charge around the training ground like I used to but I’ve got young people around me, Richard Keogh and Stephen Dobbie (Blackpool’s first-team coaches), who are giving me the legs and energy.

“I had to ask myself, ‘Will I still have the enthusiasm for it?’ but what I’ve enjoyed is the honesty of this level. I still enjoy the challenge of getting the club where it wants to be.”

Bruce has the distinction of being the oldest manager in English football’s top four divisions. Kevin Nolan, the 42-year-old Northampton manager who Bruce bettered on Saturday, had not even made his professional debut when Bruce was starting out in management in 1998. The weekend was the 1,070th game as a manager and Bruce has witnessed first-hand the shift to modernity.

“Management is a little bit different now,” he says. “We have sporting directors and the role of a manager isn’t the same, when you used to be involved in every last little thing. It’s changed.

“Recruitment in any football club is still key. You need to get that right, that link between a sporting director and the manager. Look at my old club Newcastle. I was delighted for them. Yes, they’ve had money but by God they’ve invested well. They’ve brought in excellent players and that’s the key.”

Bruce was badly bruised by experiences at Newcastle and West Brom, the two jobs that preceded Blackpool where personal criticisms stung. Aston Villa, too, was not always much fun once a cabbage was aimed in his direction.

Bruce with Graeme Jones in his time at Newcastle (Owen Humphreys/PA Images via Getty Images)

The easiest step would have been to walk away but there are ambitions to end management on a high with Blackpool. With just three defeats in the last 22 League One games, they are up to 10th after the weekend and still have the faintest hope that a seven-point gap can be bridged to the play-offs with eight games to play. The fifth promotion of his career, following the two won at both Birmingham City and Hull City, remains the target.

“I still get that buzz on a Saturday afternoon or I wouldn’t be here,” Bruce says. “I still want to win. I was absolutely devastated last weekend against (Leyton) Orient. We deserved to win handsomely and didn’t.

“It was still beating me up on the Monday. At my age you think, ‘Come on’, but it was a pivotal part of the season and had we beaten them it would’ve put us in a really strong position going into the last 10 games.

“We’re close here to having a really decent team. It might not happen this season but as long as the owner wants me to we’ll have another crack next season and see if we can get better. I’ve got it in my mind to look at the summer and having a team that can compete at the top of the division next season.”

Bruce is looking forward again. Not always — but he is trying.

(Top photo: James Baylis – AMA/Getty Images)