Richards claimed he had little to do with the tactical side of Warley's turnaround, instead focusing on the man-management side of the game and letting manager Luke Armstrong have the final say.
"I mean, come on, Big Meeks energy! I would like to take all the credit but I can't," Richards said of ending Warley's barren run. "The manager, Luke, he's brilliant. The only thing he was struggling with, or not even struggling but second-guessing, was the formation. He wanted to play 3-4-3 or 3-5-2 and doing that based on the players he had, but all players growing up, certainly at my age, were used to 4-4-2 or 4-3-3. It was a bit easier. When you play three at the back, the wing-backs don't know whether to push on higher or drop a bit deeper. So getting them in positions they're familiar with, you know who your best players are, you know they're going to work hard for the team, and they got the win. And that wasn't down to me, that was more me encouraging them and getting the best out of them. I said before they went out, 'I want to see everyone give 100 percent today', and they got the win."
Armstrong claimed that Richards' 'infectious enthusiasm' was key to Warley's change of fortunes, and the ex-defender agrees that this was probably a fair assessment of his impact at the club.
"Yeah, I think so! You know me, the way I do my punditry with a bit of fun, but giving people belief as well," Richards added. "There's always two sides to a story. So when people say, 'he should be doing this better', I always try to look at the reasons why he's not done it better. I think it's easy to say, 'he should've got there', I look at the details of why it's not happening, is his head in the game or is something going on in his life where you can tell it's playing on his mind.
"It was more about whatever's happened before, last season was last season and you can't change that now, but this season all you have to do is go out there and enjoy it, give 100 percent. Because they've actually got some very good players as well and it's just about them believing it. A big part of football is confidence and when your confidence is low, it feels like you can't do anything, so I thought giving them confidence and letting them believe they're good players...they went out and got that win! So it's all good.
"It was more of an 'at last' rather than 'oh my god we're really bad and now we've won'. They'd been in a lot of games that they'd lost, but whether it was little bits of concentration or whatever...the opposition hit the bar in the last ten minutes and previously that might have went in. They needed a little bit of luck but they saw out the game. It was more relief than anything, it was 'we're not as bad as people make out, we're actually good players'. I'm looking forward to what they can do in the future."
You can watch Micah Richards' involvement with Warley FC for Specsavers' Best Worst Team campaignhere