The thought of becoming a coach had never entered the teenage Rhys Denton’s mind until he came across a magazine article about Noel Blake, who was then managing an England Under-19s side that included Harry Kane and Nathan Redmond.
“I didn’t even consider it because I didn’t know there were coaches who looked like me,” says Denton, now 32 and in charge of Reading’s under-15s academy side. “But when I saw that Noel was coaching in the England setup and having a massive influence on young black players who were making the breakthrough for their clubs at the time, I thought to myself: ‘If I can’t make it in football as a player, I want to be that coach.’ If you can visualise yourself in a job, it gives you something to aim for.”
