Richards Accepts ‘Fastest Way Down’ Challenge

Football’s wonderful capacity to help shore up communities and change lives for the better continues to be spelled out loud and proud.

In the week that we read about John Richards’s excitement – and, yes, unease – about joining in the charity abseil from the top of Molineux’s Billy Wright Stand in eight days’ time, news also reached us about how four former Wolves players of a different vintage have supported a money-raising push more than 90 miles away.

While Wolves Heroes’ co-owner will be breathing hard and recording an increased heart-beat as he embarks on his testing challenge, the contribution elsewhere from three of his successors in gold and black and one of his predecessors was much more passive.

But the efforts of Jim Barron, Jackie Gallagher, Mick Gooding and Phil Chard in attending a Peterborough United nostalgia night at Stamford Football Club in Lincolnshire was greatly appreciated by organisers of the appeal to fund a statue to Posh legend Tommy Robson.

All four served the club (and Wolves) in their playing or coaching days, with Barron having grown up as a contemporary of Robson’s in their native north-east.

The keeper missed out on playing first-team football for Newcastle, the club he supported as a boy, but Robson – no relation to either of the Bryan ‘Pop’ Robsons from that part of the country – played around 50 times for the Magpies before amassing a colossal Posh tally of about 500 matches.

The figure is a club record, which explains why efforts are under-way to have a fitting tribute standing outside London Road to a man who also played for England Youth and Chelsea.

Robson ended his playing career at Stamford, hence the choice of venue for ‘A Really Posh Evening’ that Backpass magazine reported on in its latest issue. He died at 76 in 2020 after a battle with motor neurone disease.

The event raised £6,800 and was also attended by members of the family of Billy Kellock, the ex-Wolves and Posh forward who died in March.

Kellock was briefly a 1982-83 Molineux colleague of Richards, whose appearance at next Friday’s Wolves Former Players golf day will seem a breeze compared with what awaits him the following day in his latest community-orientated deed.

The task awaiting him and 70-plus other dare-devils, who include various staff members from the Wolves Foundation, is succinctly spelled out by this Internet meaning of the term ‘abseiling’ – descending a rock face or other near-vertical surface by using a doubled rope coiled round the body and fixed at a higher point.

To gauge John’s ‘pre-descent’ thoughts, we direct our readers to this article by Paul Berry, John To Hit The Heights Again | Wolves Former Players Association (wolvesfpa.com).

Richards has joked about the abseil being his initiation ceremony in his early months as a club vice-president and revealed that his best football mate, Kenny Hibbitt, will be among those to watch with bated breath as he is staying over after playing in the golf.

Anyone wishing to sponsor Wolves Heroes’ co-owner in his efforts to boost the Foundation’s coffers can do so via this link Wolves Foundation: Molineux Abseil 2024 (enthuse.com).