Great Name That Was Lost To The Headline-Writing World

Monday, December 5: Here’s an obscure one…..does anybody remember Richard Flash? The Birmingham-born midfielder was signed three times by Graham Taylor, first for Villa’s Centre of Excellence, lastly for Watford when Kenny Jackett was also in the Hornets backroom team and, in between, as a 20-year-old for Wolves in the mid-1990s. Word reaches us that Flash, who didn’t make the first team at Molineux and was freed in the summer of 1996, is now a lecturer at Manchester University.

Saturday, December 10: Some game at Molineux! Wolves 4 Fulham 4. Have I ever seen a match of that score at the stadium before? There was a 4-4 draw at Swansea in the latter weeks of the latest Premier League adventure and I was lucky enough to witness Wolves 6 Rotherham 4 and Albion 5 Manchester United 5 in the space of a few weeks in 2012-13. But this one will have the historians poring through the records.

Sunday, December 11: Happy days for Chris Evans back in partnership with Steve McClaren at Derby…the Rams have won six matches in a row following today’s emphatic home victory over Nottingham Forest in the big East Midlands clash. Unusually, I didn’t manage to catch up with him on his successful early return to Molineux last month. On a similar theme, thank-you to Andy Thompson for pointing out recently that Rob Kelly is now part of Uwe Rosler’s backroom team at Fleetwood.

Friday, December 16: Had the briefest of words with 1958 FA Youth Cup finalist Les Cocker as he walked with wife Wendy along Newport high street this morning. Sadly, illness centred on memory problems prevents him from making more than very occasional visits to Wolves games these days.

Wednesday, December 21: Received an email out of the blue from Dublin from a distant relative of Maurice Daly, the Swedish-based Wolves player of the late 1970s. A family tree project is being pursued and the two men’s mothers are/were first cousins. A few more branches have apparently been added as a result of this contact.

Thursday, December 28: Will be watching with interest to see how Geoff Thomas’s 2017 unfolds. This remarkably resilient leukaemia survivor has already done so much in the cycling world to raise valuable funds with which to fight the disease and recently announced during an appearance on BBC TV’s teatime game show Pointless that he is to embark on massive rides in three different European countries in the coming year. What a fabulous example he is.

Saturday, December 30: Saw the usual smattering of former Wolves players at today’s home game against QPR, including Steve Daley and Paul Jones, but particularly enjoyed meeting up again with BBC Radio London’s Steve Froggatt – and talking about Wolves, Villa, Dean Saunders and Ron Atkinson, the latter of whom chatted with several of us at West Bromwich Dartmouth Cricket Club last night at the 70th birthday party of former Express & Star sports reporter Bob Downing.