He was seen mainly as a right-winger but barely a third of his Wolves appearances were made while wearing the no 7 shirt. There were one or two promising scoring flurries in his Molineux years, too, but figures of a different kind have occupied him in more recent decades. David Instone set out for Warwickshire and a long-overdue meet-up….
Tim Steele arrived early from a business meeting, sporting a warm smile. Well, he always was quick, VERY quick, and unfailingly cheerful.
Our chat began with a familiar Wolves Heroes enquiry: “Have we bumped into each other anywhere else along the way or was it at Molineux in your playing days that we were last together?”
We agreed after some deliberation that we hadn’t had any chance reunions, so it was indeed 31-plus years since we had been face-to-face. Sir Jack’s McAlpine workforce, hard hats and all, were still around then and not only was it a time before the building of the Jack Harris Stand….we were also pre-Thomas, Keen, Kelly and Shirtliff. Gee!
“There’s a lot of catching up to do then,” said the winger signed from Shrewsbury in the latter weeks of the 1988-89 Third Division title-winning season. Thankfully, his memories from way back are clear ones and largely happy.
Steele spent just over four years here, totalling 85 League and cup appearances, a quarter of them as a substitute, and chipped in with nine goals.
Along the way came some out-of-the-blue words of praise from Bobby Robson, the embarrassment of missing the coach for an away game and the opportunity to demonstrate his speed in an organised sprint challenge at Molineux. Obviously, there was plenty to go at over our winter cappuchinos.
Not long into our 90 minutes together – it had to be that time span, didn’t it? – I reminded the 57-year-old how Paul Cook had remarked on the occasion of his team-mate’s departure in 1993 about how nicely he had chosen his words in an Express & Star interview.
“I loved my time at Wolves and if I spoke then about how proud I had been to play for the club, it was very much from the heart,” Steele said.
“I joined at a good time with about three months of 1988-89 to go and with promotion for the second successive season looking likely. The attendances were going up and up and everywhere we played, we took big followings and gave clubs their biggest crowd of the season.
“The big disappointment was losing in the area final of the Sherpa Van Trophy to Torquay. We battered them really as the second leg went on but were two down at half-time and that was the night when the goals just wouldn’t go in.
“But it was great going up to the Second Division. I had played quite a few games at that level for Shrewsbury with David Moyes and Nigel Pearson among my team-mates and we’d had success against clubs like Manchester City, Middlesbrough, Sheffield United and Leeds. Along the way, I had obviously done well enough for Graham Turner to sign me for the second time and spend £80,000 of Wolves’ money.”
Steele, on the right wing, was the more highly-charged, spring-heeled compliment to the gliding elegance of Robbie Dennison on the left. He scored one of his side’s six at home to Gillingham in his first start and, although he was never going to appear prolific playing in the same team as Steve Bull and Andy Mutch, he had two fruitful spells in front of goal.
Having once scored for Shrewsbury in a friendly against Wolves, he returned the favour by netting home and away in a 1991 Rumbelows League Cup tie against his old club in a flurry of five goals in as many weeks. Almost exactly a year earlier, he had struck three times in a month, with Newcastle among his victims in both sequences.
“Mutchy was out for several months with a back problem in 1990 and I had a run of games alongside Bully,” Steele added. “I was obviously regarded mainly as a winger but I enjoyed that spell and managed to put a few chances away.
“My pace could be useful because there tended to be some space available while defenders watched the main man. It meant I was in the danger area much more rather than trying to go past full-backs to get crosses in.
“I was disappointed the following autumn when I was doing well and scoring one or two and Graham Turner signed Wayne Clarke on loan. I lost my place for a game at Southend and, although Wayne was injured there and didn’t play for the club again, things tailed off for me with Paul Birch doing well on the right.
“I’d like to have had more specialist coaching to be honest but we only had one way of playing – that was to knock the ball down the channels for Bully and Mutchy to run on to and for me and Robbie to try to get crosses in for them.
“As well as taking me to Wolves, Graham had signed me at Shrewsbury after Ron Jukes spotted me in schools football. I think I gave him the hump at times, though, because I was often messing around, having a laugh.
“Mutchy, Nigel Vaughan, Gary Bellamy, Mark Kendall, Phil Chard and myself lived in the Telford area and shared lifts when we could. This one Saturday (the day of the Hillsborough disaster at the Liverpool v Nottingham Forest FA Cup semi-final), I was sat in my car waiting outside Vaughany’s, not wanting to knock the door as it was early.
“Eventually, I realised he’d left and when I got to Molineux, Barry Powell was surprised to see me and said the team had already set off for Aldershot. I had to drive half way there before catching them up and receiving a load of mickey-taking from the lads when I finally got on the coach.
“I’d probably looked at the wrong team sheet or report time or something….that was me! Anyway, I was left out and didn’t figure much in what was left of that season, athough I did start in the second leg against Torquay a few days later.”
Substantial spells on the sidelines became an unwanted aspect of Steele’s Molineux tenure. Not until late February of the club’s reintegration to the second tier did he break the monotony of reserve team football and start a 1989-90 League game but inclusion against Watford was followed by the boost of hearing that Bobby Robson had been impressed with him while in the West Midlands on pre-Italia 90 Bullywatch.
A further 25 appearances came in a decent 1990-91 contribution before he departed on a stretcher against relegation-bound Albion in the April with lateral knee ligament damage – an injury to which insult was added in the form of a booking.
Then, in 1991-92, we barely saw him at senior level following his replacement during a December home win over Sunderland. But an even bigger setback lay around the corner.
“We were playing Villa in a pre-season friendly on the day in 1992 when the Stan Cullis Stand was officially opened,” he added. “I went into a challenge with Kevin Richardson and Steve Staunton which ended with me getting blocked and sandwiched.
“I felt my knee go and thought it was serious. Then it seemed to settle down a bit and I started to hope it wasn’t so bad. But it blew up the next day like a balloon. An exploratory operation a few weeks later showed I had torn my anterior cruciate ligament.
“That’s a huge injury now, even with all the advances in medical care, but it was even bigger back then.” Oh well, we did say early in this piece that Tim’s memories of Wolves were largely happy, not totally happy. Following a refill of his cup, he added: “I didn’t kick a ball in the first team again until going on as a sub in the February.
“I got on in another three or four games and my last match for the club was at Derby on the final day of the season. I knew I would be released but my knee still didn’t feel right when I signed for Frank Stapleton at Bradford that summer.
“I played a dozen or so games up there, then 30-odd after Greg Downs took me to Hereford, where Graham Turner came in and found me on the payroll! Along the way, I’d had a loan spell with Stoke, whose keeper Peter Fox must have liked something about me. After he had been made manager of Exeter, he and Noel Blake took me down there in 1996 and I did all right for a season by playing 25 matches or so. But I was 30, with a suspect knee, and decided it was time I looked for something else.”
If you stuck a few pins into a wall-map to show the key places in Steele’s life, many of them would be close to each other; Shrewsbury, Wolverhampton and Telford from his time in these parts and several cities and towns in Warwickshire that are even more familiar. He was born in Coventry, raised in Bedworth and now lives in Nuneaton, where he runs an accountancy business with his wife, Julie.
Conveniently, his drop into non-League football was just up the A5 with Tamworth, then of the sixth tier, in which he largely reinvented himself from the flier Wolves fans had known.
“I had lost a yard of pace by then and could only really run in straight lines,” he said. “Twisting was very difficult. But I had acquired plenty of football intelligence and used that to compensate for not being anything like as fit as I had been.
“I played a lot of games as a central defender and sweeper and loved it. I had a really good four or five seasons at the club, winning some player of the year awards, and we had our time in the spotlight as they are now.”
So, how fast had he been in his pomp? Well…..quick enough to be Wolves’ nominated representative in the Rumbleows Sprint Challenge and to have a decent stab at qualifying for the latter stages of the competition, which were to be held on League Cup final day.
“I had been a good athlete in my younger years but would have preferred it to be over 200m rather than 100m,” he said. “We had the area heat at Molineux, where the space in front of the John Ireland Stand offered plenty of room for a track to be marked out, and where the referee Jack Taylor was organising everything.
“I was finishing really strong and think I crossed the line in third, which meant I just missed out on going to the final stages at Wembley. But it was good fun.
“The lads at Tamworth wouldn’t have recognised that in me. I’d had to modify my game a lot by then and I enjoyed doing that.
“The younger ones looked up to me as a senior pro and I was the players’ rep at the time, sorting out the bonuses when we reached the first round of the FA Cup. We nearly beat Exeter as well – they equalised in stoppage time and then beat us 4-1 down there.
“The finance director was so impressed with how I’d advised him on cashing in on programme sales, bar takings and other aspects of the Cup run that he offered me some accounting work and that set me off on my second career.
“I went to university in Birmingham to get properly qualified and have earned my living from that ever since, doing Barry Powell’s tax returns at one point!”
Steele never played against Wolves after leaving them but has retained a foothold in the game, both through doing his coaching badges and by following the careers of his sons. Trials at Birmingham and Villa have not led them to the League ranks and both – Joshua aged 23 and George 18 – now play for Atherstone Town in the Midland League Premier Division.
Dad keeps an eye on their careers and also on events at The Lamb, which we will hear much more of in the coming days. So it’s opportune that we close this piece with more talk of numbers – the ones on those famous balls every time an FA Cup draw is conducted.
Thanks to Mark Hughes and Dion Dublin, team 53 will play team 40 next Sunday and we can be sure Tim Steele and the country at large are looking forward to Tamworth v Tottenham a whole lot more than Ange Postecoglou is in his current state of grumpiness.
With his business hat on and even before the furore over ticket prices, Tim added: “They should make half a million off that. What a great draw!
“The chairman probably wishes it was at Spurs but it’s still a huge money-spinner and a great chance for the players to put themselves out there after the wins over Huddersfield and Burton.”
Bristol City v Wolves next weekend and Turner’s Wolves against Cambridge more than three decades ago pale by comparison with this ultimate little v large tie. The Lamb is occasionally bigger than The Wolf.