Successive away trips to Liverpool and Manchester United offers, especially with Wolves’ current predicament, a sobering reminder of the challenges of the Premier League. For Richard Flash, being scouted by clubs of that calibre was once the norm. The footballer-turned-academic talks to Paul Berry.
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A conversation with Richard Flash feels a bit like taking a journey through a footballing Who’s Who of the 1990s.
He once lived and roomed with David Beckham. Was praised by Paul Scholes and Gary Neville. Is in contact with his footballing heroes Bryan Robson and John Barnes. Was once challenged by Sir Alex Ferguson to become the next Ryan Giggs. Was signed twice, including for Wolves, by Graham Taylor.
He may not be a household name in the world of football. But he most certainly could have been.
Without a luckless series of injuries, and the associated physical and psychological effects, life could have been very different. With a fairer wind Flash could have become one of Fergie’s fledglings who lit up the Premier League at Old Trafford.
But there is no bitterness or regret. Nothing of the sort. Just positive reflections on how the various experiences he enjoyed, and people he met, have given him the ammunition to take forward.
Now a Course Lecturer in Sports Business and Management at the University Campus of Football Business (UFCB) in Manchester, Flash’s research interests include English-based footballers of African and Caribbean descent.
And that research, now featuring a website and X account and including compiling a ‘one to 11’ of the first black players to represent different clubs, has refreshed and reignited and his passion for the game. A new flame has been lit.
“I’d say I had some difficult times in football, and probably fell out of love a little bit, but with the research it’s all coming back now,” says Flash, now 49.
“I’m getting the feelings back like when I was a kid, back home in Birmingham, supporting Villa with Gary Shaw, Peter Withe, Tony Morley and the rest.
“I remember them winning the European Cup when I was eight years old, and then my brother taking me to Villa Park for the first time to see them play. It’s like re-living my childhood!
“And now, alongside my work as a lecturer, doing this research is great, and gives me the opportunity to raise awareness and educate on the experiences of black players, where they have come from and what they have achieved.
“Asking those players what they did to overcome the barriers they experienced, how they overcame racism, and using the contacts I made from football to build those conversations.
“In my spare time, this is what I am doing, and what I can see really developing over the next decade or so.”
More on that research later. But what of Flash the footballer? And indeed, Flash the Wolves player?
It was Taylor who signed him in the summer of 1995, as he headed into his second full season at the helm at Molineux. And would later sign him for Watford.
And that stemmed from having seen him as a young player training with Aston Villa as a teenager.
Getting into football via support from his mother, Flash excelled playing for schools in the Birmingham inner cities and also in local five-a-side competitions, soon leading to being scouted by, and training with, both Aston Villa and Birmingham.
As a developing player, Flash had the lot. A box-to-box midfielder with plenty of skill and an eye for goal, he enjoyed playing football, but wasn’t overly fussed about pinning his colours to a club.
Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal, Tottenham, Nottingham Forest. They were all tracking Flash’s progress. But in the back of his mind, he was also considering another career, maybe in business or accountancy. Football wasn’t the be-all and end-all, along with a natural shyness to his personality that left him happy to settle in surroundings which were the most comfortable.
It was Manchester United’s Midlands’ scout Geoff Watson who ultimately made the breakthrough. He spoke to Flash’s mother, and didn’t put on any pressure, offering the opportunity to train with United in the holidays, and play for their feeder team in the Midlands, Manchester Eagles.
Flash was already attracting plenty of attention. And when he still wasn’t massively keen to put pen to paper on schoolboy forms, even with a club like United, their boss Ferguson sent Lee Sharpe to his school for a TV feature which was also designed to try and tempt him into signing.
“I was in the same age group as people like Michael Appleton, Terry Cooke and David Johnson,” Flash explains.
“We’d go up and train in the school holidays and you might see Fergie or Brian Kidd who would say ‘hi’, and then we’d watch the youth or reserve teams play a game.
“I remember the once sitting with ‘Johnno’ in Sir Alex’s office, when I was probably 14, just the two of us and the manager.
“He was telling us that, in four years’ time, we could be like this player they had at the time called Ryan Wilson – Ryan Giggs of course – Fergie was telling us that we were good enough and had that sort of potential.”
Johnson decided to sign on the dotted line there and then but, unwilling at the time to give up the similar opportunity he was enjoying at Villa, Flash chose to hedge his bets.
By the time, a year or so later, he decided to put pen to paper on schoolboy forms at Old Trafford, he had already suffered the first of his injuries, a fractured kneecap playing locally in the Central Warwickshire Youth League.
Over the next year, despite not feeling completely right due to the injury, Flash continued to impress sufficiently to land a YTS contract and, joined fellow Brummie Cooke in heading up to Manchester to share digs, with a certain David Beckham as the occupant in the room next door.
“It was funny because as big as United were, and the size of the achievement that it was, I didn’t really get the hysteria,” Flash reflects.
“Maybe it was because of my name as well, and only a couple of years ago, I was at an event with Darren Moore who told me I was the Brummie who everyone was looking out for to go and really succeed in the game.
“The problem was, that injury had affected me not just physically but also in terms of my confidence.
“I just didn’t feel like the same player that I was before and I knew in my head that I wasn’t 100 per cent.
“And then, I got injured again, around six to weeks in at United, playing for the ‘B’ team, when my knee dislocated again after a movement.
“I was out of football for the next year-and-a-half, having three different operations as they took fragments of cartilage away and then tried to stimulate some growth.
“At the end of my second year as an apprentice I was playing football again and Fergie was willing to give me another year to try and prove myself and show my talent.
“But by this time, I had fallen so far behind those other lads, the likes of Beckham, Scholes, Butt, Gillespie and Neville who were a year older.
“We were in the same dressing room, the second dressing room at The Cliff training ground, and they were all great with me, but I had barely been able to play football.
“Myself and Terry used to practice with Beckham, sometimes in the evenings under the floodlights at The Cliff, when we’d go down and he’d be pinging balls to us across the pitch.
“As I was injured, I’d just be throwing the ball back, but you could see from his touch and his delivery, and same for the likes of Scholes, just how far ahead they were.
“When I was fit, I tried to use everything I’d learned from watching those guys, and tried to be as positive as I could, but it just didn’t happen.
“There were good moments in there, and I remember being praised by Paul Scholes for scoring a goal from distance, and Gary Neville for the way I marked Ben Thornley in one particular practice match, but all the time it just felt like I was playing catch-up.
“Eventually, the decision on a new contract came down to between myself and my good friend Michael Appleton, and he was further advanced than me and got the deal.”
On recommendation from Ferguson, Lou Macari offered the opportunity of a trial with Stoke City, but Taylor then made his move, and Flash decided on joining Wolves.
This was the summer of 1995, when Wolves had just missed out on the play-offs after defeat against Bolton, with Taylor aiming to tweak his squad to go one better. Unfortunately, however, that following season got off to a disappointing start, and two months in Taylor had handed in his resignation.
Under Mark McGhee, life was never quite the same as Flash found himself one of those younger players whose potential path to the first team became more challenging. The same happened after Wolves at Watford, when Taylor, as General Manager, signed Flash, only for later Molineux boss Kenny Jackett, in the Hornets hotseat at the time, to prefer the younger players he had brought through the ranks as youth coach at Vicarage Road.
“That’s football,” Flash reflects philosophically.
“It’s nothing against anyone as a person but some managers fancy you as a player and others don’t.”
His memories of the Wolves squad at the time are sharp as a tack. The aura around Steve Bull, the established names like Don Goodman, John De Wolf, Tony Daley and David Kelly, other young hopefuls Jamie Smith, Jermaine Wright, Dennis Pearce and Dean Richards.
“I think coming from Manchester United, there was this perception around me of what I was expected to produce, and Graham wanted to make use of my speed and skill so put me on the wing,” Flash recalls.
“I still had the physical attributes and Wolves did help me with my confidence but having made a decent start in pre-season I then cracked my ankle which needed a cortisone injection.
“I got back and was playing in the reserves and knocking on the door of the first team but then the next injury came along when I fractured my cheekbone playing against Blackburn.
“I remember it was a time when there were actually three of us who had fractured our cheekbones, and myself, Dean Richards and Mike Stowell were featured in the matchday programme wearing Phantom of the Opera masks!
“Myself and Mike were actually next to each other in the hospital when we were in for our operations.
“I actually really liked all the physical and athletic stuff. I was still a young player and I had a good engine and would often be near the front of the bleep tests and exercises like that.
“But I was one of those players who Mark and the coaches Colin Lee and Mike Hickman didn’t really take to, and so at the end of the season, without having played a first team game, I was on the move again.”
Watford brought further injury problems as well as a lack of opportunity, but when that particular chapter came to an end, a sign of Taylor’s exceptional people skills came when he wrote to every single League One and League Two managers – without Flash’s knowledge – to champion his claims.
Having previously made a handful of appearances on loan with Lincoln City, it was Plymouth where he moved permanently, but after several more outings, this time as a wing back, he dislocated his other knee, and, at the age of just 22, his playing days were at an end.
And it was then, perhaps in keeping with those earlier thoughts about considering a career away from football, that Flash returned to education.
He completed a degree in Sports Management, which he followed up with a PGCE and a Master’s in Business Administration, all financed by working behind the bar at what is now the Lost & Found pub in Birmingham.
That led to a position as a fitness manager in the Sports Centre at the National Indoor Arena, before then moving across to the GOALS five-a-side franchise, which then included moving to Tipton to open and managing the centre in Willenhall.
It was hard work, and varied work, with tasks effectively including being a pub landlord, a financier with the cashing up, an events manager running functions such as birthdays and weddings, and a diplomat resolving conflicts both on the five-a-side pitch and in the bar!
Ultimately, however, the world of academia was calling.
He landed the role within the UCFB then operating at Burnley, helping grow and develop the course and becoming its first academic department head when launching a new campus at Wembley in 2014.
His skills learnt both in football and business have perfectly combined, not to mention being able to utilise so many of his footballing contacts to come and deliver guest presentations to his students, where he is now based, at Manchester’s Media City.
It feels like a match made in heaven, not only with the teaching but also research, and the aim of highlighting the impact and championing the experiences of black players through recent history.
That will include interviewing one of his heroes – John Barnes – along with many others, including former Wolves defender Bob Hazell, and another hero, Bryan Robson, on his memories of playing with the Three Degrees – Cyrille Regis, Brendon Batson and Laurie Cunningham – at West Bromwich Albion.
In the long term, there are hopes to turn his ‘One to 11’ features into a resource for schools, whilst Flash also volunteers for the Show Racism The Red Card charity, including helping with workshops run by the Manchester United and Liverpool Foundations, most recently at Anfield, alongside Barnes, Mark Walters, Michael Thomas and Howard Gayle.
There are other high profile figures such as Emile Heskey, Noel Blake and Hope Powell with powerful stories which Flash is also hoping to share.
“I am finding that the worlds are colliding because with the contacts I have in football, it opens doors in terms of the academic side, being able to speak to so many different former players,” he explains.
“I experienced a little bit of racism during my career and have experienced some stuff in life, but not as much as others, and especially now in the digital age as well.
“It was actually sitting and watching the Euro final a few years ago, and seeing what happened to the black players who missed the penalties, that stepped up my interest.
“Take my good friend Michael Appleton for example. When we crossed the line, both of us could be criticised for not playing well, for being rubbish, or your Mum’s this or your Dad’s this.
“But only one of us would be criticised for the colour of our skin.
“It is in telling those stories, via sit down interviews with these players, which I am aiming to do as part of my PhD, as well as working with kids in schools about overcoming racism, in the same way as the workshops delivered by Show Racism The Red Card.
“It is becoming a real passion, almost being like a historian of the African and Caribbean players who have come to England, and like I say, is bringing back a love of football by being able to share their incredible achievements.”
A hugely rewarding and worthwhile venture, which will undoubtedly play its part in not only championing the key contributions of black footballers, but helping educate both schoolchildren and the students learning their trade at UFCB.
Not to mention learning about Flash’s own story of strength and resilience having effectively been released by three separate clubs, including Wolves and Manchester United.
The comeback is often greater than the setback. For nearly 30 years, Richard Flash has been putting that into practice.
