But he was viewed as an extravagant risk by the England managers of the day – Sir Alf Ramsey, Joe Mercer, Don Revie and Ron Greenwood – and, having been sold by Tommy Docherty at QPR, also fell out of favour with Brian Clough during a brief spell at Nottingham Forest.
Bowles would still finish his playing career in some style at Brentford (where he was also voted the club’s greatest ever player) before moving into after-dinner speaking, punditry and a betting column. During an interview with The Telegraph in 2016, Bowles’s daughter Andrea noted that he only ever had one job outside football, working for the family window-cleaning business when he was 15. “And my grandad sacked him from that after one day,” she recounted with a smile.
Bowles was only 64 when he was diagnosed with dementia and Andrea became his main support. “He always used to come here when he had nowhere else to go after he got kicked out by his latest woman,” she said, recalling how he abruptly arrived at her Manchester home in 2013 and then never left. “I could tell straight away he wasn’t right … just little things … but they began to mount up,” she said. Bowles’s final years were unbearably sad, but he and his family faced up to his dementia diagnosis with great bravery and he continued to make public appearances for just as long as possible.
QPR would regularly invite him to matches and, while he might not have understood everything that was happening, a still impish smile whenever he was introduced to fans pointed to an unbreakable connection.
Even when Bowles reached the point of being unable to speak or eat solid foods, Andrea would marvel at her father’s “superhuman strength” and restless energy.
There was, of course, also a trace of the supernatural about the way he played football, even if the man himself always seemed baffled by the fuss. “I played it for fun,” he once explained. “I didn’t think about it. I found it easy. I taught myself, knocking a ball about, up against a wall. I wasn’t really bothered about making money from football. To me it was like a Sunday morning game – you get there late, you put your kit on, and away we go… I just made it up as I went along.”
