Ashley Westwood parks his Royal Enfield motorcycle and dashes up to the third-floor bar in one of Bangalore's more hipster neighbourhoods. Every Indian motorist faces hazards whenever they merge on to the crowded, dusty streets but the Englishman's risk was greater than most. Before landing in India last June to manage the nascent I-League team Bengaluru FC, he had never ridden a motorbike before.
This trial by fire reflects the most recent risk Westwood's taken during his football career. Only two years after ending his 18-year playing career in England, he left for India, where his first job in charge of a top-division team has resulted in BFC being crowned I-League champions in their inaugural season.
"We haven't accomplished anything yet," he says with the well-rehearsed gravitas of an accomplished manager. "We've won the league but if we don't build on it then it's all for nothing."
Still, it is an achievement not only unprecedented in India but as unlikely as anything in professional sport. It seems to have surprised everyone but Westwood.
At the age of nine he and his family left his hometown of Astley, on the outskirts of Manchester, and moved to Saudi Arabia, where his father "did something in computers" for the National Commercial Bank. As with most expats, they lived in a gated community so shielded from the outside world that young Ashley rarely attended school. "I just remember playing football with my brother and sisters on the clay pitches that were in the compound. Even then I was always really determined to win, no matter what the game was."
The Westwoods moved back to Astley 18 months later and at 15 Ashley was spotted playing right-back for his club in Leigh by the Manchester United academy, who offered the young defender a one-year contract.
"I wasn't the most naturally gifted footballer," Westwood says. "I've just always had a really strong belief in myself, never got nervous in a football situation."
At 19 he took a major risk by refusing to sign a new two-year contract at United. "I wanted to play first team. I was 10th-choice defender, so I couldn't see me getting a game at Man United. I went to Crewe Alexandra and within three seasons I'd played a hundred games on the first team."
Over the next 15 years Westwood played for 12 different teams in the Football League. Successes included a stint with Bradford City, who were promoted to the Premier League his first season there.
By the time he had finished his playing career, aged 35, he had earned his Uefa A coaching licence. Under the guidance of his old friend, former Portsmouth manager Michael Appleton, he quickly became an assistant at Blackburn Rovers before being sacked along with the rest of the coaching staff in 2013. But Westwood kept driving his career onward.
"I was watching games whenever I could and keeping an eye out for coaching positions. Then the one came up at BFC. I went from one of the 15 biggest clubs in England to the 150th-ranked country in the world, with a brand new club that had nothing in place whatsoever."
The BFC owners, JSW Group (Jindal Steel Works), had identified a UK model that Westwood's young, determined style promised to deliver. Familiarity with Asia, meanwhile, underscored his willingness to work in India. His time spent in Saudi Arabia, coupled with two short playing stints in Thailand and Vietnam, convinced him he knew Asian football and was not intimidated by the cultural differences. "The owners could see that I wasn't going to come here and leave after a month."
This conviction diluted the risks associated with leaving England for India's notorious bureaucracy and the I-League's down-market reputation.
With only three months before the first game, Westwood arrived at the team office to find one desk thick with dust. From there he was responsible for setting up everything from the kitchen to the players' showers. He single-mindedly created a complete football culture for his team, a system that until now had not existed in the I-League.
"All the players live together in an apartment block. They bus to the stadium for training in the morning. They eat breakfast together then start training. Some days they don't leave the club until four o'clock. Then they go home, reload and it's back to work the next day."
Westwood is first in and last out. He worked for more than 20 years in the best league system in the world, in his opinion, and believes it's what sets him apart from the other managers in the I-League. That's about as close as he gets to boasting.
How did Westwood's commitment reflect on his family? "I told my wife 'I'm going to India and you're not coming,'" he says. His wife, Huma, a former probation officer, stayed in the UK before finally joining Westwood in November, with the I-League season already in gear. "When you're sleeping at the training ground and working 24 hours a day you don't have time to work on a marriage."
By mid-season, Westwood had led his team to the top of the I-League table, where they stayed until winning the league in their penultimate game in Goa against Dempo SC, holders of four league titles in the previous seven years.
"The owners just wanted us to stay out of the bottom three and build from there. We went for all the players that nobody wanted, apart from Sunil Chhetri, the India captain who was signed to make a statement. But even he had to adapt to our programme and he nearly ended up leading the league in goals.
"We give our players all the tests they use in England and now our fitness is nearly up there with the Premier League average."
What does BFC's success mean to the league? "Other teams will try and take on board what we do," Westwood says, with a grin. "But they don't know what we do."
He will now have the responsibility of leading BFC into qualifications for the Asian Football Confederation Champions League, a competition for which no Indian team has ever qualified. His faith in his team and his managerial system could take them far into the tournament.
"They're all good lads and everything's just clicked. We have players from all different states who do everything together, no cliques. The foreign players were brought in not just based on their playing ability but they had to be able to adjust to this environment. And nobody wants to leave. It's fun to watch."
It has also been fun watching the fan base grow. In only 10 months, Westwood took BFC from having no supporters to sold-out home crowds to carrying the league trophy through the streets of Bangalore in a victory parade for thousands of fans, chanting phrases such as "Westwood's Blue Army!"
He's cagey when asked about what the future holds for him. With one more year left on his contract and the owners already offering to extend it, he says he has been around football long enough to know that you can never tell what is waiting around the corner.
"I just want to keep working hard here. If that leads somewhere else, fine. I'm not picking up newspapers. If you can be successful in India I believe you can do it anywhere in the world."
As an exclamation point, Westwood was named coach of the year at the end of the season by the Football Players Association of India. "I wanted to be a winner, which didn't always pan out. You start to mature and you realise what you should have been doing 10 years before. Now, as a coach, I have a new lease on life; a second chance to not make the mistakes I made as a player."
For Ashley Westwood there appears to be very little risk of that.
