Bitten by Wolves by Johnny Phillips

Author:Johnny Phillips
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitch Publishing
Published: 2019-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

THE SECRETARY

Working with Wolves

RICHARD SKIRROW is enjoying the early years of his retirement. The day before meeting up to talk through the highs and lows of two decades as Wolves’ club secretary, he travelled from his home in Stafford to go walking with a group of friends in the Cheshire countryside. It is something he tries to do most weeks. Making the time to enjoy such regular days of getting away from it all was never really possible in a role that, at times, became all-consuming. There are certain jobs where the employee is effectively on call 24/7. The secretary of a professional football club at the upper levels of English football is almost always on call. Such as on Friday, 29 July 2016.

‘I’m part of a fantasy football league with a group of friends, whereby each player can only be bought by one person so you have to get together for an auction every year, and it’s a chance for a catch up over a drink,’ Skirrow explains. ‘I got a phone call from Lin Kennings, chief executive Jez Moxey’s PA, at 3pm to say that Kenny Jackett had been dismissed. The new manager is going to be appointed. It’s Walter Zenga. Aside from being a great Italian goalkeeper, I could not recall what Walter Zenga had done in management. There was going to be a senior management meeting at a hotel in Wolverhampton at 8pm that night. I wasn’t in the Wolverhampton area so that was not an option for me. “Can you liaise with the club’s solicitors about his contract?” Lin asks. Well I’d already had two pints, and I was just finishing another.

‘I said, “I can’t drive, I’m over the limit.” So I went out into the car park and stood there going back and forth on the phone with the club’s solicitors to draft a contract. Our solicitor was also away, on family business. I couldn’t believe that the final draft was needed so urgently. “He’s going to want his people to have a look at it. It will take well into next week,” I thought. But it didn’t, he signed it there and then that night. So I finished off Zenga’s contract on the phone in a pub car park. It just seemed bizarre.’

Skirrow completed the detail with the club’s head of football development and recruitment, Kevin Thelwell, and the club solicitor, who was finally contacted on the telephone. It was a crazy few hours in the life of a football secretary.

Zenga was one of the more short-lived managerial appointments during Skirrow’s time at the club. It was an employment that began during Mark McGhee’s tenure in December 1996 and finished at the end of Paul Lambert’s period in charge in May 2017.

A key employee at the highest echelons of the company, Skirrow was involved in just about every level of the club’s business at some stage or another during his time at Molineux. Born a Yorkshireman, but brought up in Greater Manchester

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