Former Wolves midfielder Alan Ainscow reflects over a cuppa

“We’ll have a brew and a chat, just chew the cud you know, just so everyone is kept in the loop,” he reveals.

“There are usually maybe 10 or 11 of us, including the likes of Joe Royle and John Hurst, and it’s always good to catch up – it gets us out of the house for a couple of hours!

“We’ll also have a little bet around the Everton and Liverpool games on the weekend, just guessing the score and so on, and having a bit of craic about what might happen.”

This week, that pre-match discussion will therefore feature two of Ainscow’s former clubs as Wolves travel to face Everton at Goodison Park on Saturday afternoon.

For very different reasons, his time with both weren’t the most memorable of his extensive playing days – and any personal career highlights reel would include far more action from his spells with Blackpool, Birmingham and Blackburn.

But what both Wolves and Everton fans could always rely on with Ainscow is that he left everything out there on the pitch. He was one of those players who would give us all, blood, sweat and tears, to do his best for the team. Whatever their fortunes and whatever their results.

That sort of attitude and focus has also been one which he has sadly been required to draw on in later life, through a series of different health challenges.

He is living with prostate cancer, having gone public on his 2013 diagnosis to raise awareness amongst men of potential symptoms, and also needed to have a stent fitted after suffering a heart attack three years ago, just prior to lockdown.

We speak just after he has completed his daily exercise routine as he recovers from knee replacement surgery a couple of weeks ago.

Ainscow, who turned 70 last month, appears to be dealing with life’s hurdles with the same sense of unassuming determination as that which he carried throughout his football career.

“It’s just life, isn’t it?” he says.

“You get to my age and we are all often talking about this sort of thing and people not being well or struggling with something.

“It was ten years ago that I was first diagnosed with prostate cancer and I’ve been on different drugs and I still have an injection every 12 weeks.

“I was on a trial for a few years but had to come off that after the heart attack, but fingers crossed everything seems to be ok.

“You just have to get on with it, keep waking up in the morning and keep going and getting out and about.”

And the memories certainly remain firmly imprinted on the Ainscow consciousness.

Memories of a lengthy career spent largely in the top two divisions of English football, comprising over 500 appearances at senior level.

And which, even if his time with Wolves was far from the most successful in terms of the club’s results and seemingly inexorable plunge towards obscurity, were still enjoyable enough in terms of getting the chance to achieve his childhood dream of playing football.

It’s a dream which might never have come to fruition had he had been successful in an interview to be an apprentice at a printing factory after coming out of school in Bolton without any O-levels.

Having not got the job, he returned to school to re-sit his exams, also believing that representing Lancashire at football might help attract the previously uncaptured attention of scouts from the professional game.

Still, the continuing silence was deafening in that respect, and so, the trademark Ainscow persistence came into play, as he explains.

“A mate who I was at school with lived next door to a guy called Roy Hartle, who had played for Bolton and was scouting for Blackpool.

“I was badgering my mate, pestering him for weeks and weeks, to go and ask him if I could have a trial and, eventually, he knocked on Roy’s door.

“He said he would come down and watch me, and after that he got me a trial for Blackpool’s ‘B’ team.

“After a few games, there were two teams selected for a final trial at Bloomfield Road, from where eight players were picked to be apprentices, and shortly afterwards I was sent a telegram to say that I was one of them.

“It was always said that my brother was a better player than me, but I was adamant that I was going to become a pro footballer – and that was it!

“I just wasn’t going to give up.”

By this time, at 17, Ainscow was given a year’s contract as an apprentice. Before he even managed to turn pro the following summer, he had played in what was only the second ever Anglo Italian Cup final as Blackpool, who had just been relegated from the First Division, took on Bologna, who had just finished fifth in Serie A, on their home turf.