A final flourish?
And who we could drag down with us
There have been a few gems on the Wolves On This Day account this week, I’m glad you all enjoyed them as much as I did.
Can we talk about that penalty decision against Blues in 1996? I can’t think of a better way to put it than Sheafy here…
I mean… what on earth?! Mike Stowell should probably be stronger under the cross but he does get a fairly harsh shove in the back from Kevin Francis, who then proceeds to be two-footed by… thin air. It is an astonishing decision against us (you can find it at around 1min30 of the full highlights below), but to be fair to him, the ref looks like he’s rolled out of The Stile just in time for kick off.
He certainly wouldn’t fit in among the milk monitors forced upon us in 2026 - although I’m sure VAR would find no reason to overturn that particular howler.
I know a lot of you enjoyed the footage of our 1972 UEFA Cup win over Juventus, a result that isn’t really spoken about much these days but quite possibly the last of our great European nights under the lights at Molineux - with all due respect to Crusaders, Pyunik, Braga, Besiktas, Bratislava and Olympiacos who came to town in 2019-20. You have to feel for poor Danny Hegan, whose thunderous strike will forever be attributed to Frank Munro on commentary.
Our 3-1 win at West Ham in 2010 will always hold a special place for me personally. It was my first proper away day with the old man, a short journey down the road from Essex after school for an unbelievable night at Upton Park. I remember being perched on the seat to get a good view of the pitch, Ronald Zubar’s rifling effort right in front of the away end, and some auld fella endlessly singing…
Jingle bells, jingle bells
Jingle all the way
Oh what fun it is to see
The Wanderers win away
There were still seven league games to play that season but that night felt like our Premier League status was all but confirmed. We ended up picking up seven points (four draws and a win) from our final seven to see us comfortably survive, finishing in 15th - which brings us onto…
Seven games to go… a final flourish?
There’s no dressing it up - we’ve not been very good at finishing seasons lately. In the past four campaigns, we’ve registered just six wins from a combined 28 Premier League games, three of which were under Vitor Pereira last season (and our form fell off a cliff during the final four games under our esteemed former transfer mastermind).
This pattern can’t be a coincidence. With the exception of 2018-19 (57.14 win %) and 19-20 (42.86 win %) under Nuno, the wheels tend to fall off dramatically as the days get longer and the team look ahead to their summer holidays. Those dismal end-of-season runs have bled into the following campaign and (coupled with very average summer market dealings) cost Lage, O’Neil and Pereira their jobs.
It’s not always been miserable in Spring, though. We lost just one of our final 19 games on our way to play-off promotion in 2002-03, Sammy Chung’s heroes of 1976-77 held their nerve with just two losses from our final 12 league games to see off Chelsea to the second division title, and of course Stan Cullis’s swashbuckling champions of 1953-54 pipped Albion (who had occupied top spot for the majority of that season) to deliver the club’s first league championship with a brilliant final flourish.
Will Rob Edwards have posters of Messrs Billy Wright, Bert Williams and Peter Broadbent plastered around Compton? It’s unlikely, but this squad should not be short of motivation heading into these final seven games, even if relegation is a certainty - by the way, our friends at Opta say we now have just a 0.06 per cent chance of survival after the draw at Brentford (you can read my thoughts on the ‘supercomputer’ in last week’s newsletter here).
We are the kingmakers of this fight for survival. Just as Moriarty had Sherlock Holmes teetering over the edge at Reichenbach Falls, we have the perfect opportunity to drag our rivals down with us. Just look at our remaining fixtures:
West Ham A (18th position)
Leeds A (15th position)
Tottenham H (17th position)
Sunderland H (11th position)
Brighton A (10th position)
Fulham H (9th position)
Burnley A (19th position)
It’s a shame we don’t meet Pereira’s Forest in that run, because I’m sure there are a lot who believe that he deserves a relegation on his CV after the mess he left us in. But the prospect of Mr Marinakis giving him a summer to destroy another Premier League squad may be no bad thing, either.
No Wolves manager has bettered Nuno’s tally of 13 points from the final seven games of 2018-19 (check out my snazzy graph below, which admittedly took far longer than it should have to put together) but it’s not too far-fetched to say we can reasonably expect results from each of the seven games remaining and carry some much-needed momentum into the Championship next season - even if the team that begins the campaign looks drastically different to the squad that end our Premier League stay.
How many points do you reckon we’ll pick up from those seven games? And which clubs will join us in the Championship next season? I’ll plump for 10 points, with Spurs and Burnley coming down with us.
Picture of the week: Rob Edwards’s scouting mission
Casting his eye over West Ham at Villa Park there, with the most recognisable ‘unrecognisable’ former Wolves star Stephen Hunt - although they never actually played together during their professional careers.