Carlisle United was built on people like David Wilkes

You think of a club that is proud of its own but also outward-facing. You think of a place that nurtures. A place that, as a guiding principle, considers Cumbria and Cumbrians more than good enough.

You think of a club that recognises what adequate and good foundations look like. You think of a place where the game is, once all is said and done, about players.

You think about home-grown footballers and the pride that generates, and you think about the consistency of the people who develop them.

And you can’t think of any of the above at Brunton Park, any of it at all, without thinking of David Wilkes.

It is no exaggeration to say that the Blues as we recognise them, and as we’ve enjoyed them over recent decades, have been built on people like Wilkes, whose sudden death at 59 has stunned the club and the great many who knew him.

Who was there, sowing and watering the seeds of Carlisle United’s first widespread flowering of local talent? It was, more than anyone, Wilkes, whose legacy in a footballing sense will always, to a great and cherished extent, be those boys of the 1990s.

Before that decade, United had not been a place for growing your own, other than in a few isolated cases. It was not until the managerial reigns of Harry Gregg and Clive Middlemass that the Blues, in hard-up times, recognised what was possible and indeed necessary.

Wilkes joined under the latter, as a player in 1990, and was still a young man when he retired and moved into the off-field area that became his sporting life. He became a youth development officer at a club where such a role was early in the making.

Wilkes, front, was responsible for bringing through a host of talented home-grown players at Brunton Park

He represented the club in the community as well as on its own training pitch. His warm and friendly personality, blended with that soft accent from his native Barnsley, made him an immediately endearing figure around the place.

Coupled with his natural instincts and feel for working with young footballers, it happened to be a perfect fit. Youth team football was not the hyper-managed, EPPP-driven, heavily-documented and professionally sensitive matter it has to be today.

In the 1990s the talk was straighter and harsher, the divide between youths and seniors often brutally laid out, the chores earthier, the whole thing far removed from what might today be called the holistic way of things.

Wilkes was, then, even more precious to a generation of young footballers trying to survive this rough old world. He was a coach who bigged players up, made them feel good, offered a gentler hand. “He praised and encouraged me relentlessly,” said Matt Jansen, arguably the most talented of all Carlisle’s nineties crop. “He thought I was a superstar and told me as much.”

Jansen on his own would be enough for a youth coach’s CV. Yet at Carlisle, that generation was stunning. Rory Delap, Paul Murray, Tony Caig, Lee Peacock, Scott Dobie, Paul Boertien, Will Varty, Richard Prokas, Tony Hopper…many more of good name and good character, all encouraged and developed by Wilkes.

It is still too sudden and too raw to imagine this sort of reflection bringing comfort, but as the painful days go by, and consideration is gradually given to Wilkes’ professional life, this will be cemented as a timeless legacy. A great many of the lads he worked with, of different generations, have been expressing their sorrow since Thursday night’s dreadful news.

Wilkes was especially close to Mick Wadsworth, the director of coaching and fellow Barnsley boy who took Carlisle to glory in 1995. The two men dovetailed perfectly to foster a golden Brunton Park time.

As years passed, Wilkes’ work was plain practically every time United played, or each occasion they sold a young star for big money. It was there in his commitment to other coaching fronts, such as the dignified way he handled the surreal managerial situation which saw Wilkes and John Halpin pitched to the forefront by Michael Knighton following Mervyn Day’s sacking in 1997.

Wilkes, left, in Carlisle United's boot room in 2005 with apprentices Martin Graham and Terry Stewart (Image: News & Star)

There were later times away from United, but the sense of an appropriate fit again when, in 2005, he returned, to embed himself into the Blues’ youth development culture anew. There was a new breed of promising players, progressing at a club which was now under Paul Simpson’s excellent guidance: again, a culture where Wilkes could thrive in his understated, dedicated and also witty way, a club where he remained since, latterly as head of academy coaching; a great companion to and encourager of other, younger coaches over the years.

He was a serious football man but also a funny person, with a laugh that everyone at Carlisle United will find it hard to accept they won’t hear again.

He was a deft, mild-mannered operator behind the scenes but also, when the mood struck, a showman, as anyone who heard him roar out the verses to Billy Joel’s Piano Man in an office or dressing room would attest.

He was a friend both to people long-established at Carlisle and to the lives and careers of many men, women, boys and girls who passed through it: especially those boys who dreamed of football glory and in many cases got there.

And so, whatever permanent memorial at Brunton Park comes to pass – and there are unquestionably grounds for one – there will still be no greater mark than the memory itself of David Wilkes: who he was, how he was, what he did, who he helped, and how he made our beloved club so much of what it is.