Happy To Be Proved Wrong Over Surprise Emergence

Did Gary Bellamy ever look round the Molineux dressing room 30-odd years ago and wonder which of his Wolves team-mates might one day make good managers?

If he did, he might have thought Alistair Robertson had the experience and fierce determination to lead as powerfully from the sidelines as he did when leading the team out.

Like the rest of us, he may also have seen the deep thinker that lurked in Mark Venus, possibly Keith Downing, too, and even himself. But how likely is it that Paul Cook would have featured high on his list of dug-out maybes?

“He wouldn’t,” Bellamy said this afternoon. “He had a terrific understanding of football and got on with everybody but his personality wasn’t what you might think is the usual one for a manager. 

“He was like a dumbed-down David ‘Digger’ Barnes, a left-back who I briefly knew at Wolves. He was hyperactive and still is from what I see on the TV.

“He never keeps still for one moment, which might explain why he was wearing nothing over his t-shirt when I saw him on the touchline in an FA Cup game this season – and that was in January!”

Bellamy and Cook are very different personalities; evidence that, in the search for the killer cocktail, there are any number of potential ingredients in the form of human characteristics.

Cook was, and is, talkative, outgoing, candid and, in his playing days at least, laddish. The defender, five years his senior, was one of the quieter dependables among Graham Turner’s lower-division marauders. By nature, he was more Nigel Vaughan than Mark Kendall or Andy Mutch.

But the two men are linked by spells elsewhere. At Chesterfield, to be precise. 

‘Bellers’ played more than 200 games for the Spireites and was a Fourth Division title winner with them before signing at Molineux for £17,500 in 1987. He went on to win two more lower-division championship medals here, plus the delightful bonus he picked up for playing in the side who won the Sherpa Van Trophy final at Wembley.

Cook’s playing career, albeit largely served at a higher level, was nothing like as honours-laden. He didn’t kick a ball for the North Derbyshire club either but has had two highly successful stints in charge of them in the last decade and a bit.

And there are perhaps more clues as to why one of them has had a long and still flourishing career in the dug-out and the other called time on his years in the game more than two decades ago after managerial stints at Chelmsford, Dover and Braintree.

I have known and liked Cook since the day he signed for Wolves in the autumn of 1989 but have barely ever had a conversation with him about anything other than football.

Bellamy has more varied interests, as Paul Berry informed us when interviewing him recently for a long piece in the Express & Star: “Born in Worksop, he represented Nottinghamshire at cricket at under-15 level and was offered an opportunity to continue with the under-18s, was a junior professional at Austerfield Golf Club as well as playing for Chesterfield’s reserves at football at just 14,” the piece revealed.

A similar-length article on the Liverpudlian would not stray into such territory. “Cooky might have had an interest in horse racing, I don’t know, but I don’t recall him playing golf or anything else on his days off,” Bellamy added. “It was all football for him – he wasn’t even that good at cards because I know I often used to take money off him!

“But he has done a tremendous job at Chesterfield and I’m delighted to see them back in the Football League as they have been out of it for too long.

“I still look out for all their results, although I tend to check on Wolves first and start with them when people down here where we live in Essex ask me to list the clubs I played for. It’s natural to give the biggest first, isn’t it?”