Jimenez scores for Wolves in a pre-season friendly against Villareal
Photo: Wolverhampton Wanderers FC
Is this the Wolves team to restore traditional greatness?
by Charlie Bamforth
The new shirts are rather yellower than the gold or indeed the old gold worn by the finest Wolverhampton Wanderers sides of the past, but as Wolves embark on their triumphant return to the top level the expectations are that the current squad might yield the fourth great team in the club’s history. The quality of football being played by Nuno Espírito Santo’s lads surpasses anything seen at Molineux for many a long season.
Sure, there have been a few high spots in the past 40-plus years, but rather more seasons of either despair or frustration, with far too many campaigns spent at the second level or lower still. Before Wolves precipitous plunge through the divisions starting in 1983-1984, the founder members of the Football League had spent only three seasons in the second grade since their promotion from the old Second Division in 1931-2. Many of us are quite clear that the club is back exactly where they belong.
The most recent sojourn in the third grade (2013-4) was far from the end of the world as it marked the clearing out of some complacent fat cat overpaid and underperforming players and saw the club once more focused on an upward trajectory. And now, following the investment of the Fosun International conglomerate and the installation of the erstwhile Portuguese goalkeeper at the helm, Wolves find themselves with a line-up widely predicted to be, at the very least, a top ten finisher in 2018-9.
To earwig on the players’ conversations it would, of course, be handy to have at least a smattering of Portuguese. From keeper Patricio onwards there is an abundance of talent from the Iberian nation. It is said there are more Portuguese picking up their pay packets from Wanderers than there are employed at Porto. In the likes of Diogo Jota, Ruben Neves and the like there is exquisite skill in abundance. Such players, with a degree of technical excellence as high as anything seen down the Waterloo Road for too many years, marry well with British Isles-based grit and determination in the likes of Matt Doherty, Conor Coady and Ryan Bennett.
Thinking back to the three Molineux sides that are held up as the finest to have graced the club’s 141-year history, then we now see a far greater dependence on acquired players. For the longest time the route to Wolverhampton greatness was through the youth and reserve sides, at least for the first two of Wanderers’ finest teams.
The first legendary manager at Molineux was Major Frank Buckley. It is held by many that, had the Second World War not intervened, then Buckley’s Babes, skippered by the redoubtable captain of England, Stan Cullis, and featuring rocks such as Tom Galley and Dennis Westcott, would have been the finest Wolves side of all time, probably despite of rather than because of Buckley’s odder ideas, such as injecting the players with extracts of monkey testicles.
Because of the hiatus of 1939-1946, it fell to the stern Cullis, now as manager, to truly bring the richest seam of golden glory to Molineux, with three League Championships, two FA Cups and diverse legendary European friendlies beneath the brilliant floodlights. Players like Bert Williams, Billy Wright, Peter Broadbent and wingers Johnny Hancocks and Jimmy Mullen feature on any true Wolves supporter’s list of Molineux greats, gracing not only the Wolverhampton side but that of England as well.
And, arguably for some, the third great Wolves side was that which was sergeant-majored into success by Bill McGarry, building it must be said on the groundwork of Ronnie Allen. During the early seventies Wolves were a formidable side, unfortunate insofar as clubs like Leeds, Arsenal and Liverpool were just that little bit more formidable.
But surely an outfit led by Wolves’ greatest ever skipper Mike Bailey and featuring the likes of David Wagstaffe, John Richards, Frank Munro, Derek Parkin, Ken Hibbitt and the mercurial Derek Dougan, would stand comparison to anything before and certainly since. If only Peter Knowles had learned how to reconcile his religious ‘conversion’ with the life of one of the game’s greatest ever midfielders, then who knows what might have transpired? “I don’t regret it” he was quick to say when I saw him at Burton Albion a year or two ago, referring to his retirement aged 23 in September 1969 to become a Jehovah’s Witness. Admirable devotion to be sure, but Wanderers’ cognoscenti have ever since wished Knocker might have found a way to keep wearing the shirt.
Back to the here and now. The denizens of the Steve Bull, Sir Jack Hayward, Stan Cullis and Billy Wright stands expect the very best this season. And should these far-yellower-than-gold-shirted heroes provide as much sustained excellence season-by-season as those great sides of old, then just maybe we might one day see a statue of a certain Portuguese coach outside Molineux alongside those of Messrs. Cullis and Wright.
