Just a regular night in the popular sports bar, with a few commuters popping in for a quick post-work snifter, others readying themselves for a more sustained session on the beers, and several donning belated Halloween fancy dress.
From one table in the middle of the pub, the hubbub of conversation is punctuated by regular explosions of raucous laughter. A stream of one- liners, and relentless mickey-taking and nostalgic storytelling. Even without knowing, you can almost guess that these are former footballers. It’s the unmistakable ambiance of pure and unadulterated dressing room banter, recreated some three decades on.
Stuart Leeding, Dave Read, Steve Morgan and Andy Harnett were together within the youth ranks at Molineux some 30 years ago. Part of a Band of Brothers setting out on the long and winding road to pursue their dreams both in football and in life. They are joined by Daz Taylor, not a Wolves youth player at the time, but a close friend of them all. They haven’t met up for a while. But it feels like it was only yesterday. Their shared experiences are such that they are always intertwined.
The fact is, none of the quartet made it at Molineux. None even managed to forge a professional career at football league level. But they will always, always, have the memories.
“Just imagine it,” says Leeding. “At that age, and all you had to do was play football, and have a laugh with your mates. Every single day. The fitness side, the banter. What more could you ask for?”
“We were living the dream,” adds Read. “Back then you could say absolutely anything to each other and get away with it!”
“The banter we had was something else,” says Harnett. “Even now, I think we can just look into each other’s eyes and it all comes back and we can relive it all over again!”
“I played for my local football club and the one I support, and I don’t think there is ever anything that can beat that,” Morgan explains.
Over 90 minutes, appropriately, the quartet go through those old memories. The good, the bad, and the ugly. There is way too much discussed to be included here. And some not necessarily fit for public consumption. But the team spirit, togetherness, camaraderie. It’s like it has never been away.
They are even more boisterous than the group in fancy dress.
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Ask about their career paths before landing a YTS spot or apprenticeship at Wolves and a host of well-known local clubs are mentioned. And some well-known local coaches.
Leeding, a left back, Read, a central midfielder, Morgan, predominantly a right midfielder who sometimes covered as sweeper, and Harnett, a target man centre forward, all enjoyed similar routes to Molineux via either established junior or representative teams.
Black Country Bullets. Romulus. Dovedale Dynamos. Cresswell Wanderers. Forest Star. Lichfield Social. Albion Rovers. Lane Head Strollers. Just some of the clubs enjoyed along the way coupled with the representative league sides which propelled the four into the shop window to attract the attention of Wolves.
Coaches who played key roles in their respective developments include Mel Beechy and Tony Painter whilst Morgan’s Dad ran Black Country Bullets. And legendary scout Ron Jukes was also involved in the respective, and very different, journeys that took the aspiring young players through the School of Excellence, training at Castlecroft and the gym in the old Molineux Hotel, to the two years as full-time scholars, and, in some cases, professionals.
For all of them, being able to represent Wolves, for all bar Lichfield-born Read their home city, was paramount. Leeding, perhaps the closest to breaking into the first team having also narrowly missed out on the FA’s School of Excellence at Lilleshall, also had interest from Manchester United and Arsenal before effectively agreeing a five year deal at 14 which was a mixture of two years as a schoolboy, two more as an apprentice and one as a professional.
“I had been going to Wolves, Arsenal and Manchester United during the school holidays, but the age that I was, staying with my home club was always my first choice,” he admits.
Read’s Dad was good friends with former Wolves defender John Pender, which was one notable factor in his signing, while Harnett and Morgan were both impressing in league and representative football in the area, and are both Wolves fans.
If the quartet’s journeys were very different, one similarity which they all reflect on with complete confidence, is that they never really felt they had a chance to establish themselves at Wolves.
It was an era when very few players came through the ranks to reach the first team, also partly because of the rebuilding job needed in the late Eighties that prompted Graham Turner to engineer a fairly direct route to redemption after the turbulent travails of the previous three years.
“I think what stood out for me during our time was that not many youth team players were making it through to the first team,” says Harnett.
“It felt like a lot of people just weren’t given a chance.”
“I remember going to a Friday night game at Molineux between Wolves and Scarborough, which finished 0-0,” adds Morgan.
“I was in an executive box with my mum and dad, and I remember my mum asking Ron Jukes how many players on the pitch had come from the youth team.
“His reply was, ‘would you like another cup of coffee, Mrs Morgan’?
“She pressed him again and he said the answer was none, there just wasn’t the opportunity to be part of the first team set-up at that time.”
As to that style of play, for Leeding, at left back, it was made crystal clear.
“Training for me was always about opening my body up and just playing a channel ball down the line for the forwards to run on to – simple as that.
“That is how I was coached, just chuck it down the side, which is how it worked for the first team who had Bully (Steve Bull) and Mutchy (Andy Mutch) up front.
“There was no chance to express yourself and play the ball inside.
“If the central midfielders came looking for it, I just had to ignore them.”
“We know,” chips in Read with a chuckle.
“I was never guided in any shape or form in terms of playing any football.
“As a central midfielder, we didn’t really get in possession, the full backs had to hit the channels and we had to squeeze up and try and win the second balls.
“There were no real instructions, apart from to do that dirty work!”
It was a system which didn’t suit the technical midfield players such as Read and Morgan.
For Leeding it began to come naturally, and for Harnett, too, a target man developed as a foil for a clinical strike partner, he knew what he had to do.
“All I did was run, run and then run some more,” he admits.
It was a style to which they had to become accustomed. And, as Leeding suggests, it probably hindered chances of developing into more versatile all-round footballers. Which eventually led to their release.
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But the one thing all of them can remember, in almost minute detail, is the day they were let go. The day their dreams were shattered in one short conversation.
For Harnett, who still talks with pride of the day he was asked to captain the youth team, it was a case of seeking out the decision. Coming to the end of his one-year professional contract secured after two years as a YTS, he hadn’t been featuring in the reserves. So, he went to see Turner, and, with other strikers such as Scott Voice and Steve Pierce coming through the ranks, he knew his time was up.
The other three, however, had more reason to think they were going to be successful.
“I’d had the chance to go to Doncaster on a permanent deal just before the Christmas, a few months before I was released,” Leeding, who had a second professional year added to his initial contract, recalls.
“But around that time Graham had spoken to me when Mark Venus had hurt his back, and told me I should be his first choice left back.
“He said he couldn’t play me, as the club were in a difficult position and the fans might have a go and ruin me, but I was thinking, ‘well that’s up to me!’
“And then just a few months later, I was gone.
“He called me in, and said something along the lines of that he should be keeping me but that I would do him proud whatever I did from there.
“I drove out of Molineux, to the KFC on the Penn Road, pulled up in the car park and burst into tears.
“I had no inkling that it was coming, and I had no plan in place – there was nothing like that in those days – and I just felt like my world had gone.”
Morgan had played for the reserves against Aston Villa just a couple of days before hearing his news. Which had been sufficient to give him hope.
“I was released on the same day as Ready, and never really knew it was coming,” he explains.
“I will always remember, putting on Football Focus that weekend, and seeing Stuart Slater, who was a similar player to me, who had moved from West Ham to Celtic at the time for one-and-a-half million quid.
“He was talking about nutrition and all the work that had gone into him at West Ham to build him up, and straightaway, I was thinking, ‘I don’t remember experiencing any of that!’”
“I went home and my Dad helped me write to all the other league clubs to see if I could get a trial, but I ended up going into non-league with teams like Worcester and Moor Green, and eventually Willenhall.”
For Read, a regular in the reserves, and captain at youth team level, all the first team professionals had been joking with him about what sort of wage demands he would ask for, let alone whether he would actually receive a contract.
“I went in last, and had been hanging around all day,” he recalls.
“The senior pros like Bully, Nicky Clarke and Shane Westley had been bantering me and telling me I was definitely going to get a contract.
“The only words I remember the boss saying was that it wasn’t a nice time to be doing this and that he had made mistakes before and that he could be making another one here.
“And that I should focus on trying to prove him wrong like Carlton Palmer had done previously.
“My head dropped, I didn’t listen to anything else as Graham spoke to my Dad, and I remember coming out the room, looking at my Dad and just telling him I was sorry. Sorry that I hadn’t managed to get a pro deal.
“I felt I had let him down, and my Mum, they had helped me so much that it wasn’t just about me not making it, it was going to affect them as well.
“I cried all the way home and will never forget walking back in and seeing my Mum, who had probably been expecting me to get a contract, and didn’t know the decision.
“My Uncle and Auntie were there as well, and, when I told everyone I hadn’t got a deal, they thought I was winding them up.
“It definitely affected me later on, as it did all of us, because it feels like everything we had worked for had just gone in an instant.”
All four admit the setback of rejection at Wolves affected them, and it was difficult to transition to normal everyday life.
All continued to play at different levels of non-league, whilst Harnett also spent time on trial with Hamm United in Germany, and their enjoyment of football endured.
Leeding describes his ‘best year in football’ as being winning the FA Sunday Cup with Marstons, and Morgan recalls success with Sunday team Priestfield in becoming the only one from Division 2 to beat six Premier League teams to win the Charity Shield competition.
Read also enjoyed a spell in management at local level in Lichfield, and is also one of those highlighted by later Wolves goalkeeper Matt Murray as playing a key part in his development in the junior section at Lichfield Social.
In terms of jobs away from the game, Leeding was initially putting up blackboards in schools before working for Severn Trent, starting a business in Turkey and then returning to join the emergency services. Harnett was one of several released players to initially work in a Pork Pie factory, before now working with Biffa Waste for South Staffordshire Council. Read has his own window and conservatory business and Morgan works as a B2B UK-based courier.
All agree that the rejection at Wolves affected them in one form or another, even years down the line, with the support now offered to young players released by professional clubs not in existence during their time.
Clubs would help circulate their names across the league to see if anyone was interested but, if that came to nothing, it was left to those players to start afresh and go out and rebuild their careers, all on their own.
“After being released I had no pride in myself or the job I was doing, and there would have been anxiety and depression for sure,” says Leeding.
“What we had was absolutely brilliant, and then, all of a sudden, it was taken away.”
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Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
Despite memories of some challenging times faced during their playing days, and perhaps more pertinently after they were released, all four put across the impression that, given the opportunity, they do it all again.
Not just to savour playing football at Molineux and so many other Football League grounds across the country, but the fun, frolics and dressing room camaraderie which accompanied it.
“I remember the once I got my Mum to phone Harny (Harnett) and tell him that she was David Instone’s PA from the Express & Star and that he wanted to do an interview with him,” says Morgan.
“She told him he had to be smartly dressed, and the next day he turned up and was sat waiting in the Players’ Bar in his shirt and tie whilst we were in hysterics on the other side of the room.”
All recall Leeding’s habit of dropping to the floor for a stint of press-ups in the dining room – “he was like a robot,” laughs Read – as well as tales of trips abroad, including one when they were handed permission for a couple of drinks only to be castigated in the local press for a ‘lack of discipline’ when they returned.
There were also positive memories on the football side, including a run to the FA Youth Cup quarter finals before defeat against Tottenham at White Hart Lane, and the strong support of the first team players, which also extended to being invited to the odd social occasion in the bars and clubs of Wolverhampton!
They also joined in the now legendary Friday pre-match training on the North Bank Car Park, although Harnett breaking his wrist after being pushed to the floor actually brought an end to that particular pastime.
These were still the days when each apprentice was assigned ‘boot boy’ duties for a senior professional, as well as other daily and matchday responsibilities which all formed part of their grounding and building of character.
“When I started, I had three jobs, getting the boots cleaned, the first team kit in and running up the stairs to Mrs Clamp (mother of former Wolves midfielder Eddie) for the laundry,” says Harnett.
“There were some days I didn’t even get to training!”
There are mixed reviews of Turner and his coaching team of Gary Pendrey and Paul Darby, perhaps understandably given the environment and challenges for young players of that era, but all are united in their appreciation of their youth team coach, former Wolves midfielder Barry Powell.
All were delighted back in 2018 when Powell was able to join them for a reunion in Birmingham, when those that could make it lined up for the camera, sitting in the same positions as for a team photo all those years ago.
Several also joined together and donned the boots again for a charity football tournament at Lichfield City, while the name of former Wolves historian Graham Hughes – and memories of him walking down the tunnel saying ‘apple pie’ – raise plenty of smiles.
As they now reflect, of course there are some regrets and ‘what if’s’.
“When we were there, I’m not sure we realised how lucky we were,” says Read. “I am not sure I took it all in and thought about what was happening and where it might lead.”
“I do look back and wonder if it could have been different, if maybe I’d taken a different decision, but now I will never ever know,” adds Morgan, who was recently invited back to one of Peter Crump’s talks at Wolves Museum due to having been used as one of the ‘models’ for the Bukta kit launch when an apprentice.
Above all, however, there is still that sense of togetherness, of shared experiences and memories which still give Harnett a ‘tingle’ when bringing them back into the conversation.
“Even though we don’t see each other too much now, we all know that we are only a phone call away,” says Leeding.
Wolves played such a huge part in their lives, and still does to an extent, with all the memories. They are still that band of brothers with so many shared experiences to cherish.
They didn’t make it, and didn’t manage to fulfil their dreams at Molineux, but they got so much closer than the thousands of others who share that same ambition.
Interview over, I leave them to it, with the sense that it’s going to be a long night. With plenty more fun and laughter.
There is so much more to catch up on.
