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"Mighty Brian Flynn helping Wrexham back to the big time"

Daily Mail article today -

Mighty Brian Flynn helping Wrexham back to the big time: 'Experience is being there and having done it'

*Brian Flynn knows Wrexham inside out having had a 12-year managerial stint*
*He is now assistant and using his experience to guide them towards promotion*
*Wrexham are now the longest-serving members of the National League*
*Flynn says: 'If you’ve been down the road before, you can guide them’

Brian Flynn did not generally take the limelight during a 12-year managerial stint which, from 1989, delivered Wrexham a string of extraordinary*FA Cup*giantkilling feats and promotion to the third tier. He is 5ft 3in tall and was not one to get in the way.
Only when he left were the accomplishments and stability he delivered perhaps fully appreciated. Poor financial stewardship and indifferent management saw a precipitous slide out of the Football League 10 years ago.
Wrexham are now the longest-serving members of the National League and have seemed damned in their attempts to get out of it.
They lost the 2013 Conference play-off final to a Newport County side whose owner had just won the National Lottery. Managers Dean Keates and Sam Ricketts have built genuine promotion prospects in the past two seasons only to be enticed to Football League posts, at Walsall and Shrewsbury respectively.

The club’s fourth managerial appointment in a year was by far the biggest gamble.

The prior experience of Bryan Hughes, linchpin of the club’s run to the 1997 FA Cup quarter-finals, was a brief spell in joint charge of Scarborough Athletic in football’s ninth tier. But there has been a clarity about his selections in the past month, not least the inspired recruitment of Flynn as his assistant and mentor.

A crowd of more than 7,000 — double the numbers Flynn knew in his heyday here — demonstrated the mood of optimism about his first game back at the club, where he delivered so many great years.
‘Experience is being there and having done it,’ the 63-year-old reflected. ‘If you’ve been down the road somewhere and you know which way to turn, then that is how you can guide them.’
Though there were rumours of a formal introduction, Flynn limited his time on the grass to the warm-up and was up in the stand when the teams walked out. Wrexham’s visitors know all about precipitous declines, too.
Chesterfield were Wrexham’s opponents in that FA Cup quarter-final — Hughes’s last match for Flynn’s team before moving to Birmingham City, who he had helped eliminate in an earlier round. They had been staring down the barrel of a third successive relegation before John Sheridan, re-appointed manager in January, steered them to four wins out of five.
Sheridan’s players had the best chances of a first half in which veteran forward Marc-Antoine Fortune looked the most substantial threat. The defensive foundations which Keates first built here were subjected to an exacting examination. Shaun Pearson and Kieran Kennedy made crucial interventions to keep Fortune out.

Wrexham look a less ponderous side under Hughes, whose introduction of forward Ben Tollitt to the starting line-up has raised the question of why the 24-year-old, on loan from Tranmere, had been there in the first place.
Tollitt’s gait and slight stature recall to mind Karl Connolly —another Liverpudlian forward, who served Flynn so well in the giantkilling years. But he struggled to find a goal threat. When Stuart Beavon burgled some possession and sent him through on goal, keeper Shwan Jalal was out to repel him.

It seemed that Wrexham’s promotion aspirations were to take a dent until Luke Young arced in a cross from the right on the hour for midfielder Akil Wright, who navigated in a header of great technical class.
It was Wrexham’s first attempt on goal and Hughes’ fourth win in five.
‘We did what we had to do,’ said the 42-year-old manager, whose side are two points clear at the top. Flynn was nowhere to be seen. In one discussion of how he might communicate from the stand, he spoke of ‘walkie-talkies’. It all sounded a bit 1990s, though that will do Wrexham nicely.