McFly Memories Stirred For Froggy
Steve Froggatt in personal-trainer mode.
Unaccustomed as we are to describing events that unfold on TV reality shows, we should not let the outcome in the Australian jungle a couple of days ago pass without recording that it was good news for one former Wolves player.
One of our early stories on here more than a decade ago described how Steve Froggatt and David Kelly gave a team-mate a lift home from a 2007 charity cricket match in Cheshire – and only realised half-way through the journey that the quiet lad in the back was McFly drummer Harry Judd.
“We felt pretty bad not knowing who he was,” the winger told us at the time. “What made it worse for me was that I had taken the kids to see the band at the NEC a few weeks earlier.
“We realised that the girls at the cricket hadn’t gone to watch us but we hadn’t noticed who they were congregating round. Our only excuse was that Harry was wearing a hat.”
The oversight didn’t stop Froggy embarking on a friendship and working relationship with the Essex-born Arsenal fan, who was seen as a promising batsman before dedicating his time to music and who himself is no stranger to reality TV.
Among other celebrity screen appearances, Judd has since been crowned as the 2011 co-winner of Strictly Come Dancing and finished runner-up with his mother in BBC’s Race Across The World; neither of which had aired when one-time Molineux team-mates Froggatt and Kelly turned car-share hosts to help him out.
And clearly no harm was done through the duo’s oversight in failing to identify a star colleague to whom they hadn’t been introduced at the game.
Around six months later, Judd asked Froggatt – a spring-heeled flier down the left during his 1994-98 spell at Molineux – to help him with a training programme when he was preparing to run the London Marathon.
Froggy the Wolves flier in the 1990s.
“It wasn’t easy when they were on tour in Australia, or even staying in hotels in the UK, but I advised him by email and phone where necessary on his diet and training programmes and he came to Birmingham a couple of times in a Limo to see me!” the one-cap England international told us.
And now for a revelation that is all the more newsworthy after fellow band member Danny Jones’s success in holding off Coleen Rooney’s claims to the I’m A Celebrity title this weekend: “Once, he brought Danny from the band and we went running in Sutton Park together. That’s obviously a bit of a highlight for me from my post-football career.”
So did Froggy watch Jones win the recent series Down Under? “Yes! Everyone keeps telling me we’re twins!”
There hasn’t been contact in recent years between these stars from different sectors but the ex-England under-21 international’s advice to the pair obviously struck the right chord. Judd’s first book, published in 2017, was called Get Fit, Get Happy.
Froggatt turned 50 last year and after several years of working as an estate agent with Ned Kelly (that’s the long-time striker, not the Aussie outlaw!), has recently bought a wellness business with his former Wolves and Villa team-mate, Tony Daley.