Community Engagement The 1970s Way
John Richards – a highly frequent visitor to the Express & Star sports desk to keep supporters updated on the Wolves squad’s movements.
Struggling to cope without weekend matches in this freakishly long gap between Wolves games? Longing for the visit to West Ham to come round a week on Friday?
At least there are international matches for us to home in on and, in particular, to analyse the contributions of Wolves players to them.
We have delved into the archives to try to learn what the squads of yesteryear got up to when confronted by such spells of inactivity – not, in their case, through games played by countries but when club football fell foul of the weather.
We picked out the early weeks of 1978 and a time when Wolves played only one first-team game between a 3-1 home victory over Everton on January 21 and a 1-0 February 25 defeat at Leicester.
And in the course of our research, we were very quickly reminded how visible the players used to be in Wolverhampton and West Midlands life.
Having spent a few days at Southport at the end of the January and staged a golf tournament among themselves that saw Geoff Palmer and manager Sammy Chung finish first and second respectively, they opened up to supporters on how they spent their time after frost and snow hit two or three weeks later.
The insight came via John Richards’ Sporting Star column – a popular weekly round-up that was as much about off-field Molineux goings-on as those on the pitch.
With the February 18 home game against Villa called off at 9.30 on match day, JR headed for the studios of what was then known as Radio Birmingham to help out with John Wile on the afternoon sports programme, Albion’s FA Cup tie at Derby having been postponed, too.
By coincidence, the Wolves-Albion game had been called off the week before – a thumbs-down that led to the Wolves striker dodging DIY duties by going shopping instead. There were no such near misses for Kenny Hibbitt when the Villa game bit the dust. He was pictured by ‘The Pink’ playing darts with wife Jane at Penn Golf Club while Geoff Palmer welcomed the photographer to capture the less-than-dramatic sight of him washing up!
Much better than washing up…..Geoff Palmer shows what he would much rather be doing. Picture by Dave Bagnall.
The break in games and assortment of alternative time-filling activities came in the second half of a season in which Wolves hovered with the drop following their winning of the Second Division title the season before.
But they pulled well clear in the final weeks, possibly feeding off the excellent team spirit that no doubt came with all that community-mindedness.
In another of his columns in that same period of mid-winter, Wolves Heroes’ co-owner wrote of a Monday meeting at Dunstall that the club had part-sponsored. He and Palmer were among those who went along to present commemorative cigarette boxes to all the race winners, including legendary trainer Fred Rimell.
During the same week, the Wolves squad played the Chronicle Fiesta darts team – another indication of how happy they always were to mix with their supporters.