New Kid On The Block Now A Dug-Out Veteran

First, a nasty jolt about how quickly time flies by. Jamie Smith, the galloping teenage right-back Graham Taylor introduced to first-team football out of the blue, is 51 tomorrow.

And another surprise while we’re at it: He is not known as ‘Jinky’ in the dressing room he now inhabits.

I was at the other St James Park on Saturday (ok, point taken, they are punctuated slightly differently), using a stay in Devon to make a first trip in more than 32 years to Exeter’s much-improved ground.

It was also an opportunity to catch up with football acquaintances. The visitors were Port Vale, who have Smith as their lead first-team coach and John Rudge as a home and away follower, usually in the company of the club’s owners.

Happily, we managed to locate them outside and spent generous time with both, separately, after Vale’s first League victory of the season had lifted them out of the bottom four in League One.

It was our first catch-up with Jinky for several years since he followed up a coaching stint in the Wolves academy by first striking up a working relationship, at Albion, with Darren Moore.

The duo have since worked together at Doncaster, Sheffield Wednesday and Huddersfield, winning promotion to the second tier with The Owls and then leaving shortly afterwards in a disagreement over football policy.

They were unable to prevent Vale slipping to relegation from League One in the three months they had in charge in the Potteries in 2023-24 but steered them to automatic promotion last season and are adamant that performances this term have generally been better than results.

On the horizon after Saturday’s home game against Mansfield is a Carabao Cup clash with Arsenal at Vale Park….now that’s a throwback to the Rudge years in charge if ever there was one!

Unbelievably, it’s more than 30 years since the 19-year-old Smith was unleashed as a senior player in Wolves’ home victory over Reading on the opening day of 1994-95, the same afternoon on which Neil Emblen and match-winner Steve Froggatt also made their competitive debuts for the club.

Smith had impressed on that summer’s tour of Sweden and Denmark and Taylor, who was still in the early months of his time back in the West Midlands, quickly let it be known that the Brummie was in line to start the season in the first team.

He went on to play 104 times for the club and then be rated as a £1m player in the 1997 deal that took him to Premier League Crystal Palace and brought Dougie Freedman and Kevin Muscat to Molineux in exchange. Palace are also the club against whom he memorably scored his only Wolves goal.

So who, we asked, was he still in touch with from his Wolves time? “I’ve seen Steve Froggatt around, we’ve faced Darren Ferguson teams of course and I’ve also bumped into Don Goodman when he has been working at games,” he said.

“But I’ve stayed more in touch with Neil Emblen, Dennis Pearce, Chris Westwood and Jermaine Wright.

“They were the lads around me in the exciting time when I broke into Wolves’ side for the first time.”

And, with that, he and his gaffer retreated out of the light rain, said a friendly farewell and stepped on to the coach for a happy trip home to North Staffordshire, accompanied by our good wishes for the rest of the season.