Revolution of Wolves: A Premier League Trilogy 2003-2023

By Paul Berry and Johnny Phillips

Revolution of Wolves charts the dramatic progress of Wolverhampton Wanderers both on and off the pitch over the last 20 years, starting with the club' s first promotion to the Premier League.

From local-born benefactor Sir Jack Hayward to global investment conglomerate Fosun International, the boardroom changes have been matched by those in the dugout as Wolves went from a traditional English-based 4-4-2 team under Dave Jones and Mick McCarthy to a cosmopolitan European outfit under Nuno Espirito Santo.

The book brings us exclusive interviews with those at the heart of the story. Alongside all the promotion winners, managers such as Glenn Hoddle and Paul Lambert give their first interviews about their time at Wolves, and we hear the views and stories of the likes of Paul Butler, Paul Ince, Karl Henry, Sam Ricketts, Conor Coady and Ruben Neves as well as boardroom insight.

Revolution of Wolves is the most comprehensive and authoritative work ever written about the modern Wolverhampton Wanderers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Aug 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781801506465

Book preview

Part One

Chapter 1

Nineteen Years, 13 Days, 22 Hours and 20 Minutes

THE BUSTLING market on Peel Street, Wolverhampton, just next to the ring road, had for many years been a regular haunt for the surrounding local community. On this particular morning in late May 2003, a young artist was wandering among the stalls. He knew exactly what he was looking for.

‘The Wolves colour is old gold, but everyone knows that changes all the time with the different kits and different shades of gold,’ he explains. ‘In Wolverhampton there is a big Sikh community, and in the markets, you find people selling material that is the Wolves colour because it is a significant colour in their community.’

The colour gold is important in the Sikh community, and it features most recognisably at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India, the spiritual home of Sikhism. It is a colour that represents healing and deep happiness. Similarly, orange represents deep joy and bliss, and it is the colour of Sikh turbans.

‘The material was really cheap to buy; I don’t think it cost more than £1.50 a yard, it wasn’t much at all. So, at that price I bought plenty of it to make sure that we had too much. I laid it all out on the floor in my living room. At first I began spray-painting it but that started going everywhere so I changed to a paint marker, which was more like a marker pen. It was made literally the day before the game on the Sunday.’

Little did the artist know that his creation would become one of the most recognisable images of the most famous day in Wolves’ modern history. Toaster, as he prefers to be known in public, was in his mid-20s at the time. A Wolves season-ticket holder, he had been working on a mural for a venue in Worcester when his thoughts turned to making a banner.

‘The idea came about really close to the game. It was all a bit of a whirlwind as until we’d beaten Reading in the semi-final there were no plans for the play-off final, so it was all about getting tickets sorted at first. As a kid I used to take a small banner to games, and I’ve always been into European football culture. I was fascinated by those banners in Italy by the ultras and the tifo displays, which years ago I used to see snapshots of on the Channel 4 programme Gazzetta Football Italia. In Italy, you could buy this magazine called Supertifo from the newsstands and it would be collections of all the fans’ displays from the previous few weeks and I used to love the choreography of it. Because I painted for a living and could make letters and fonts, I knew I was capable of doing a good-sized banner.’

Toaster attended games with a group of mates he’d known since his schooldays. There was a thriving matchday pub scene in Wolverhampton, and they would often meet up in the Great Western or the Varsity before heading to Molineux.

‘An ongoing narrative of the build-up to the final was how Wolves always messed it up and it had been so many years of struggles, going on and on and on. Back then, it was seemingly a lifetime since we’d been in the top flight. We got talking about how long it had been. Then I had a look at the last game we played in the top division, and I remembered it being against Stoke City, which we lost. Wouldn’t it be fun to work out how long it had actually been between the last kick in that match to the play-off final whistle in Cardiff, we thought. It was easy enough to work out the years and months, then we looked at the days, which got trickier with the leap years. We didn’t want to get it wrong.

‘I remember finishing it off and having no expectations. I’d done a big banner, that was it. If we lost the game or were losing from early on, then the whole day becomes about Sheffield United and not Wolves. A victory makes the banner way more important.’

On 12 May 1984, Wolves lost their final game of a dreadful season, 4-0 away at Stoke. They finished the old First Division (its name before it became the Premier League in 1992) campaign bottom of the table with 29 points from 42 games, an incredible 21 points below Coventry City, the team who finished fourth from bottom, one place out of the relegation zone.

Nineteen years, 13 days, 22 hours and 20 minutes later, on 26 May 2003, Wolves lined up against Sheffield United in the First Division (which became known as the Championship in 2004) playoff final at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, with the famous banner displaying that exact time frame, either side of a wolf head logo and a toaster symbol.

Striker Nathan Blake was familiar with the venue. A Cardiff-born Welsh international, it was his country’s home ground, and he had been telling his team-mates that they would see Wolves fans everywhere as the coach made its way from the squad’s training base at the Vale of Glamorgan resort 12 miles west of the city.

‘As we came off the motorway and into town towards the stadium, it was just the red and white of Sheffield United fans,’ he recalls. ‘The lads were having a go at me, Oi, Blakey, where’s all the Wolves fans? I couldn’t work it out, but then as we came over the River Taff bridge and turned right into Westgate, it was just a sea of gold. It was wall-to-wall; even speaking about it now makes me tingle. You could feel it on the bus. Driving through those crowds, it was overwhelming. It just gives you that sense of a gladiator going into the arena with the crowd making you feel untouchable. We got into the stadium and the dressing room was buzzing.’

Midfielder Colin Cameron knew all about laying ghosts to rest in big games. He had scored at Celtic Park against the all-conquering Glasgow Rangers team to help Heart of Midlothian win the 1998 Scottish Cup, their first major trophy in 36 years.

‘When we got to the stadium, we went to have a look at the pitch,’ he says. ‘We walked up to the steps into the stadium, and I remember looking at my watch thinking, We’re an hour and a half before kick-off and this place sounds like it’s half full. It was a beautiful day; the sun was beating down. There were only about 5,000 Wolves fans in the stadium at that time, but the noise was phenomenal. I knew it would be some day, that we could enjoy ourselves and make the most of it if we played the way we knew we were capable of doing.

‘Then we went into the dressing room and by the time we went back out on to the pitch again to warm up the noise was unbelievable. And come the start of the game, the whole stadium was erupting as you had both sets of fans in. I remember my wife saying to me after the game that she was glad we hadn’t scored any more goals as she felt the stands moving with the fans bouncing around. We could feel the atmosphere of that one half of the stadium, with the gold colours as well, everything was right for us.’

‘I remember arriving at Cardiff Central station and it was just full of Wolves fans,’ recalls Toaster. ‘The sun was out and the day had that summer feel. I’d been to big matches before, but this felt different, it was really special. The adrenaline was next level. We got into the ground about half an hour before kick-off; we hadn’t even got a place to put the banner, we hadn’t really thought about it. It was just spine-tingling when you walked into the ground and saw the three tiers of Wolves fans. It was absolutely nuts.’

Twenty years on from the promotion season, Paul Ince looks out over the training pitches at Reading’s Bearwood Park from his office. Ince became the relegation-threatened club’s interim manager in February 2022 before being given the role permanently in May, after securing their Championship survival. ‘The fact I’m sitting here now, you couldn’t write it,’ Ince says, reflecting how life pans out.

‘Hang on a sec,’ he continues, before getting to his feet, opening the door and shouting across the corridor. ‘Al, come here!’

Ince took Alex Rae to Reading with him, as assistant manager, and now the pair are smiling as they recall the night they helped take Wolves to the play-off final, at the expense of their employers at the time of our interview. Rae had been the hero of the semi-final. The Scot’s 81st-minute goal in the second leg at Reading secured a 3-1 aggregate victory. It was not the best goal of his career but, by some distance, it was the most memorable.

‘I hadn’t been on the pitch long and I did a little pirouette to celebrate the goal,’ Rae explains. ‘There’s a little story about that celebration. About 45 minutes before kick-off, we all went out to warm up at the Madejski Stadium. The way we used to set up then with the fitness guy was that we’d begin near the touchline and run into the 18-yard box, spin around and run back to the touchline. We’d gone out early to get a feel for the place and there weren’t many fans in at all. There was a guy sat by the Reading dugout, and he came running along the front of the stand. It was always Paul and me who took the warm-up, partly because we didn’t want anyone to go too fast. As we’re running back towards the touchline this guy is getting closer, shouting, Ince, you’re an arsehole!’

‘There was no crowd in yet, so you could just hear him bellowing, Incey you’re shit, Incey you’re crap! and on it went,’ adds Ince. ‘I was just thinking, For fuck’s sake, will you shut up?’

‘I’m buckled over laughing, we were all battering Incey,’ Rae continues. ‘This fan gets to within about ten feet of us and he’s still screaming at Incey, who is raging, I thought he was going to hit him. We then move into the penalty area to do the stretches, just to get away from him. Incey gets us all together and says, If any of us score, make sure that fucker gets it, make sure he gets some abuse.

‘About two hours later I’ve scored the goal that secures it [the victory], and as I jump up to celebrate, I see the guy, and Incey is straight there with me too. We’re all pointing at him shouting, You mug! The guy is sat there with his head in his hands. It was great, a wee bit of karma, that little bit of retribution. This is the thing that gets me about football, it’s OK for fans to give dog’s abuse to individuals but as soon as you give a little back they are screaming blue murder. That was the highlight of the whole promotion run.’

For the final, Wolves based themselves at the Vale of Glamorgan resort for a couple of nights. The atmosphere was relaxed as a group of senior professionals and talented youngsters focused on the task in hand.

‘We got down to Vale of Glamorgan and we had dinner, and everything was OK,’ Ince says. ‘Then that evening I got a phone call from [goalkeeper] Matt Murray. It must have been about half nine and he just said something like, I’m a bit nervous, I’ve got the game on my mind. So, I rounded up a few boys, Blakey and a couple of others. All of a sudden there’s about seven of us in Matt Murray’s room, just talking. I was sitting there with a glass of wine, a couple of the lads had a little beer. Matty wouldn’t touch anything, but it was just to show that we were calm and that we’d be OK, and we were up until just after midnight.’

‘I remember Blakey and Incey being quite chilled,’ Murray recalls. ‘All I could think about was the game, though, I was so nervous.’

Murray was a product of the club’s youth system. The 2002/03 season saw his debut in the first team. An injury to the senior keeper, Michael Oakes, in late August had opened the door. Murray never looked back. But come the eve of the final, he was starting to feel anxious. Blake was in a far more relaxed mood and had invited a couple of his old friends to the hotel, including the Welsh athletes Christian Malcolm and Darren Campbell.

Campbell, an Olympic sprinter who would go on to win 4x100m relay gold at the Athens Olympics the following year, found himself chatting to Murray.

‘He helped me, I’ll never forget the chat we had the night before,’ Murray adds. ‘I always remember him asking me, Have you just arrived to this point where you are going to be plonked in a final tomorrow or have you been on a journey to get here? He asked what age I had joined Wolves and explained that since then, all those days, months and years at training, all the games I had played at every level, that was why I was ready for this moment. I had the tools for this moment.’

Blake was delighted to see his mate offering an arm around the shoulder of the novice keeper ahead of the match, ‘If Darren can help someone younger than him he will, he’s been in a situation in a race where he’s dropped the baton and it’s felt like the whole country was against him. He knows what it’s like.’

‘Darren explained that he trains and trains and trains, but his Olympics comes once every four years, with a ten-second race and a 20-second race,’ Murray continues. ‘A false start or a poor start and the race is done. He had all that pressure, but he told me it was all the positives in his career that had got him to that moment, and it was exactly the same for me. When he put it like that, I had the best night’s sleep you could imagine. I felt so relaxed. And the match itself? It was the most in-check with my game I’d ever felt.’

‘Matty’s performance was ridiculous; it’s not often that you win 3-0 and dominate like that but the goalkeeper gets man of the match,’ explains Joleon Lescott. Another Wolves youth-team graduate, Lescott had established himself as first-choice centre-back following his debut in August 2000. ‘Sheffield United had a really long throw so every time the ball went out of play level with the 18-yard box it would just get thrown in flat and feel like a corner. But because Matty was so dominant we just got out of the way every time we heard Keeper’s. The throw just wasn’t working for them; they ended up having to throw it back into the midfield as Matty was dealing with everything so well.’

Wolves were an unstoppable force in the opening 45 minutes of the final. Mark Kennedy had given them a sixth-minute lead before Blake made it two on 22 minutes. Kenny Miller’s strike in the final minute of the half ended the match as a contest.

‘At half-time, when we came off 3-0 up, I turned to Nayls [Lee Naylor] and said, We’re up,’ Lescott continues. ‘Calm down, man, he said, but I was just convinced we were up, and I don’t usually get like that.’

‘It’s interesting hearing that,’ says Kennedy. ‘Because I actually came into the dressing room and said a prayer. I was thinking, Please, please, don’t let us mess this up. I was really worried about not seeing it through.’

A penalty save from Murray early in the second half stifled any hope Sheffield United had of getting back into the game.

‘I was pleased about the penalty save because Matty was so nervous the night before,’ Ince adds. ‘Once Matty saved the penalty I couldn’t see us getting beaten. Was I nervous for the fans? No, my history wasn’t with the Wolves fans, as much as I love and adore them, I didn’t know about the 20 years of hurt. I knew about the importance of going up and the hurt from the previous year when they should have gone up, but if you start thinking about what it means to the fans you’ve got too many things going on in your mind.’

‘There are very few times as a manager where you get a warm glow in your belly,’ says Dave Jones, the man who masterminded it all. ‘I had that warm glow all week. I could tell by the way they were training. If we turned up on the day, I knew Sheffield United weren’t good enough to beat us.’

‘I got tickets for loads of my mates – one of them had been watching me for 20 years, playing for all my clubs and for Wales at the Millennium Stadium,’ Blake recalls. ‘His words were, Nathan, I’ve never experienced an atmosphere like that before. When the fans were singing ‘Hi Ho Wolverhampton’, you could feel the stadium swaying, the stand was actually swaying. When he said that I wished I was a fan.’

Catherine Hickman was working in the club’s media department at the time. As the match drew to a close, she needed to get pitchside to film some post-match interviews for the club’s in-house channel, Wolves TV. She was escorted out from the press box on the upper levels of the stadium, through the concourses and down to the tunnel area, but then the problems began.

‘The stewards said I couldn’t stand in the tunnel,’ she explains. ‘I told them I needed to reach Dave Jones at full time to sort the post-match reaction for Wolves TV, so a big discussion took place among the stewards and they came back to me and said, We’ve found you a seat. They took me through the tunnel to the side of the pitch and turned right and pointed to the Sheffield United bench. The seat they found was a couple of rows back from the pitch on the bench for their backroom staff. The Sheffield United staff just looked at me as if to say, Who the hell is she? and it felt very awkward. When the full-time whistle went everybody on the Wolves bench was going crazy and I just had to sit on my hands. It was bizarre, everyone next to me was really disappointed and I just wanted to get out on to the pitch with Dave and the players. It felt like I had to wait ages to get out there but, in reality, it wasn’t that long. Professionally, it’s probably the greatest day that I’ve ever had.’

Captain Ince and the man he succeeded in the role, Paul Butler, lifted the trophy in front of tens of thousands of Wolves supporters including owner Sir Jack Hayward, three weeks before his 80th birthday, whose millions of pounds of investment had made it all possible.

‘The best thing about that was seeing Sir Jack,’ Butler recalls. ‘We’d spoken about it a week before with Dave saying that if we did manage to get up, we wanted him to come down to the pitch and join us with the trophy. But he was adamant he wouldn’t come down and do it. But then, it might have been Jez Moxey [Wolves chief executive] who persuaded him, and we saw him walking down after the final whistle. He stood on the pitch in front of masses and masses of Wolves fans, that was the best bit. That colour of gold and him stood there. We walked off thinking, He’s fulfilled now. Whatever happens in his life, he’s got his wish. Seeing him afterwards in the dressing room he couldn’t say anything to us, he was just stood there. I don’t think it had sunk in that we’d gone up on the day.’

‘I remember going back into the changing room,’ Ince continues. ‘All the lads were jumping around going mad, screaming and hollering, and I’m just sitting on a massage bed getting my calves massaged, cool as anything, with a can of Stella in my hand. Matty came up to me and said, Are you not excited? I said, Yeah, I am, Matty, but I’m fucked! I had half a bottle of wine last night, it’s roasting hot, I’m 34 and my legs are knackered, I just want to sit here and watch you guys savour the moment. But deep down I was buzzing, and then we had the party afterwards.’

There was one unlikely visitor to the dressing room as the celebrations continued. Blades manager Neil Warnock had been sent off at half-time by referee Steve Bennett for his conduct towards the match officials, but now he found time to congratulate the victorious team.

‘They were all cheering and I went in and said, Listen lads, you deserved that, it’s a great club, I hope you do well,’ Warnock reveals. ‘The only thing I would say about that game is that Michael Brown missed a penalty early in the second half and if he had scored that, it would have been a different game, it would have been close. When he missed that, I just thought, Oh, bloody hell, that’s it.’

The celebrations at the Vale of Glamorgan resort went on long into the night. ‘The club had already booked rooms for the players and families to go back there. It was a big show of faith from Sir Jack that they felt it was our time as well,’ Cameron recalls. ‘My daughter was there as well. I’d split up with her mum by then, and I was due to go to a caravan park in Cornwall for a week’s holiday with my wife and daughter after the final, so they came to the afterparty. It was pretty special; Beverley Knight came to sing as she was a Wolves fan. Needless to say, my wife had to drive the next day.’

‘I remember when Manchester United lost to Everton in the FA Cup Final at Wembley in 1995,’ Ince adds. ‘You always have to organise a party, and I remember what it felt like turning up after losing the FA Cup Final. But that night at the Vale of Glamorgan, everyone was on fire, all the smiles on everyone’s faces. All the people that matter, the ground staff, the kit men, that was the most enjoyable thing for me; it was a collective. They are special, special moments.’

Lee Naylor, the final member of the youth-team trio with Lescott and Miller who played in the final, headed off in a different direction, ‘Joleon, Kenny and I decided to go back to Wolves for a night out. It was actually a bit quieter than I thought it would be, but there were still quite a few people out and they just couldn’t get enough of us. It was free drinks all night.’

An open-top bus tour was arranged in Wolverhampton, with one member of the team away from it all in the more sedate surroundings of Perranporth, a small seaside town on the north coast of Cornwall.

‘That’s my only regret, in a way, that I wasn’t on the open-top bus they had in Wolverhampton,’ Cameron concludes. ‘But I only got to go on holiday with my daughter once a year and that was precious to me. Maybe some Wolves fans won’t accept that, and I do regret it a wee bit as we had done the same thing at Hearts when we won the cup, and it’s a great feeling, but it’s all about priorities. At the caravan park people were oblivious to the fact that I’d played in the play-off final the day before, which I loved as we just relaxed and enjoyed it. It was from one extreme to the other; the euphoria of the day before to the peace and quiet of the caravan park.’

For the national media, Toaster’s banner had become the symbol of Wolves’ return to the big time. ‘I woke up the next morning in a bit of a daze, having had a fair few drinks on the train back from Cardiff,’ he remembers. ‘None of my mates went to work the next day and the whole game was replayed on Sky Sports so we all arranged to meet up and watch it. I nipped out beforehand to buy some papers to read the reports and three or four of them had a photograph of the banner. I couldn’t believe it; these weren’t the local papers, it was the national press. Then on the Wednesday morning, a guy from the Daily Mail phoned me up wanting to do a story. It was all quite full-on.’

As intriguing as the time stamp referencing Wolves’ time away from the top flight was the logo of a toaster that had been added to the end of the banner. The creator has used it to preserve his anonymity ever since.

‘Do you remember Question of Sport when they had a mystery guest round and the theme tune to the montage was There Are More Questions Than Answers by Johnny Nash?’ he explains. ‘That was what I wanted to do, something that was recognisable but didn’t mean anything and would just get people asking questions. That would be our signature. It was almost an afterthought as I’d bought too much material at the market, so I put the wolf head badge on one end and then the toaster logo on the other.

‘Over time, it progressed to doing other banners for the club; I never saw that coming. When we were in the Premier League and weren’t doing very well, I did another one that just said Believe. I never set out for it with a grand plan, it was all a bit organic really. When we went down to League One there was a bit of a negative feel around the club. Wolves’ marketing manager approached me about doing another banner to get some positivity among the fans, so I did one that said, This is our love and it knows no division. The idea for that came from a place of having personally seen Wolves in all four divisions. Lots of fans had been to all 92 league grounds following Wolves, it’s quite a unique history, so it referenced that as well as the recent relegations at the time. That banner went along the length of the Stan Cullis Stand.’

The play-off final day captured the imagination of all who were there; a city-centre stadium packed to the rafters with an atmosphere enhanced by the close proximity of the stands to the pitch. It was Wolves’ first final of any description for 15 years, since the 1988 Sherpa Van Trophy (now the EFL Trophy) win as a Fourth Division club.

‘I can’t believe how they fitted that stadium into the space, with the River Taff running right next to it,’ remembers Toaster. ‘It’s so close to the train station, too, it’s just a great location. That day was spectacular. We drank in the Borough Arms on the main drag in town before the match and I actually went back there a couple of years ago just for old times. I was on a train journey and had a wait at Cardiff station so I thought I’d tick a box and bring back some memories, so I nipped out of the station for a drink in there. There was nobody else inside apart from the bar staff, though. It was just me and a pint.’

Chapter 2

The Battle of Burnden Park

‘I WOULDN’T say it was a good goal but, in terms of importance, the second goal in the play-off final has to be my best for the club. A proper striker’s goal,’ says Nathan Blake. As the Welsh international wheeled away to celebrate scoring against his former club with his room-mate on away trips, Shaun Newton, even with just 22 minutes on the clock it was clear that Wolves were putting years of frustration behind them.

Blake knew how it felt to win promotion to the Premier League. The play-off final win secured his third elevation to the top tier.

‘I found that level pretty easy to play at,’ he suggests. ‘I had a decent record against Wolves. I don’t sit down with my kids and tell them about my career, but recently my son showed me a video someone had put on YouTube of my two goals at Molineux for Sheffield United [in January 1995]. One of them was a nonchalant lob from outside the box, my son was buzzing at it, but I never imagined when I was scoring those goals I’d actually go on and play for Wolves.’

Until he signed for Wolves, from Blackburn Rovers in September 2001, Blake’s perception of the club was formed by the part he had played in one of the division’s great rivalries of the 1990s. For a decade before their play-off final victory, Wolves’ reputation went before them.

‘Do you remember the Battle of Burnden Park?’ he adds, with a smile. On 18 January 1997, a 21-man brawl between the players of the two Wanderers – Bolton and Wolverhampton – epitomised the animosity that had built up between the two clubs. It was also emblematic of the lost years of the 1990s that promised so much but delivered so little for Wolves supporters.

‘I’d gone from Sheffield United to Bolton at the end of the previous season. I didn’t realise there was history between the two clubs. That summer when the fixtures were released, Colin Todd [Bolton manager] kept prodding us about the Wolves games, telling us these stories about the fixture. I bet you’re gonna let Wolves steamroller you, are you gonna let them beat you up? We went into that game psychotic, basically. It ended up kicking off.’

Mark McGhee’s expensively assembled Wolves team arrived at Burnden Park in fourth place with their First Division title hopes alive, but they left with a 3-0 defeat and the scars of a battle. Goalscorer Blake was at the heart of the dispute, after an apparent foul on him by Wolves defender Dean Richards went unpunished in the penalty area. Bolton midfielder John Sheridan became embroiled in a dispute with Mark Venus about the decision not to award a penalty, which left the Wolves man with a bloodied face. Only Bolton defender Bryan Small stayed out of trouble, with punches being thrown at will. The two captains – Guðni Bergsson and Steve Bull – were instructed to calm their teams down, but just a few minutes later Bull and Bolton defender Gerry Taggart were seen aiming head-butts at each other. Even the Bolton mascot, Lofty the Lion, ended the day with a Football Association disrepute charge after goading the visiting supporters during an ill-judged touchline walkabout at half-time.

The tone had been set before kick-off when Bolton striker John McGinlay came out on to the pitch on his own to salute the Wolves fans, after his two goals at the same venue in May 1995 condemned the visitors to a play-off semi-final defeat. McGinlay was the pantomime villain, loathed by Wolves supporters for those goals, the second of which came shortly after he punched opposing forward David Kelly in another fracas but was not dismissed for the offence.

‘We had got to the stage with Wolves where it was just meant to be,’ McGinlay recalls of the second game in 1997. ‘They had tried everything to beat us, and they were kicking us that day, but we could scrap as well. I think that was an all-or-nothing game for them going for the title and they lost it that day.’

‘My experience was that Wolves were a team who always spent money but never did anything,’ says Blake. ‘We had heard they’d booked their summer holiday before the date of the play-off final, basically suggesting they were going to get automatic promotion. That was the one thing that stuck with me when I was at Bolton. When I came to Wolves that story was confirmed by somebody when I asked about it. Wolves was just this club that promised a lot but never delivered. I had got promoted to the Premier League a couple of times already and it wasn’t a problem for me coming to Wolves with that history.’

Wolves fans, by contrast, were wearing the scars of a decade of stagnation by the time Dave Jones arrived at Molineux in January 2001. After Graham Turner had joyously lifted the club from their 1980s nadir with a double promotion from the Fourth Division to Second Division, spearheaded by the goals of Bull, the team had hit the buffers.

Sir Jack Hayward bought Wolves in May 1990 for £2.1m and quickly set about rebuilding both the decrepit stadium and the squad. The first substantial outlay on the team came in preparation for the 1993/94 season when Turner signed Geoff Thomas from Crystal Palace, Kevin Keen from West Ham United, Peter Shirtliff from Sheffield Wednesday and David Kelly from Newcastle United. The arrival of Thomas was a coup; an established England international, he was being courted by both Arsenal and Manchester City. But after a bright start, a season-ending cruciate ligament injury at Sunderland in September derailed Wolves’ promotion plans.

Thirty years on, Thomas has still not forgotten the tackle from defender Lee Howey which changed the course of his career. ‘I still think about it, because what happened at Wolves was one of my biggest regrets in football,’ the midfielder says. ‘Getting injured at Sunderland wasn’t in my control, it wasn’t me going in for a silly tackle, I was the victim of a blatant bad foul. We had gone 2-0 up, I had scored a goal I was really proud of, which I celebrated with the fans. That’s football, it happens, but I was pretty much out for two seasons trying to get my knee right and I always have that regret that I couldn’t play a part in the next step for Wolves.’

Turner’s men did not win any of their next five games, and by November fans were calling for his head. Bull, who had missed most of the early part of the season through injury, came to the rescue with a hat-trick at Derby County to help keep his boss in a job, but by March, with the season seemingly meandering to another mid-table finish, a 3-0 defeat at Portsmouth spelled the end for the long-serving manager.

‘When the money started coming to the club he lost it,’ Bull admits. ‘The money was overpowering the manager. We played Portsmouth away that night, then [chairman] Jonathan Hayward came on to the bus after the game and had a right go at Graham in front of the players. He was gone after that.’

The arrival of Graham Taylor, his first job since a chastening experience as manager of England, was heralded as a new beginning. With Molineux completely rebuilt on three sides and more lavish spending on the team coming that summer, it appeared that Wolves were equipped for the Premier League.

Ahead of the 1994/95 season, the seven-figure arrivals of wingers Tony Daley and Steve Froggatt from Aston Villa meant Wolves were installed as promotion favourites. Yet again, though, injuries struck with Daley making just one substitute appearance all season, and Froggatt’s bright campaign came to an end in December when, like Thomas, he was the victim of a bad tackle.

‘I played with Tony at Villa; I knew how devastating we could be as a pair,’ Froggatt recalls. ‘His career at Wolves just never got started. I don’t think I ever started a game with Tony while I was at Wolves. He had horrific injury problems and that was a massive blow for the club. Tony was at his peak, he was still lightning quick and if he had been fit that season, we would have won the league by about 20 points.

‘I got snapped in half during a game at Reading by Scott Taylor, who went on to play for Wolves. It was a bad tackle, but we didn’t think it was a serious injury. It was only when I tried to make a comeback in training that I just fell apart and they realised I’d absolutely knackered my ankle and I had to go through an ankle ligament reconstruction. That was me out for the rest of the season. That season just ended in enormous disappointment because we were absolutely flying. At the time we thought we’d be back fairly quickly, but it turned out that a lot of us had major injuries. If Graham had kicked a black cat 100 times he wouldn’t have had any more bad luck than he had that year. Everyone could see at the start of that season what a good team we were. Sometimes injuries are the difference between success and failure.’

‘We really thought we were going to do it that year,’ Bull adds. ‘We battered Bolton at Molineux in the first leg of the play-offs, but Peter Shilton [by then aged 45] had an absolute blinder for them, saving all sorts of shots. We still thought we had enough, but then it just never happened for us at Bolton. John McGinlay should have been sent off after he smacked David Kelly. It was a horrible night.’

After that infamous play-off defeat in May 1995, Taylor was sacked less than six months later, in November, with rising discontent in the stands after a mediocre start to the following season. ‘I was actually lying in hospital at the time, I had a blood clot problem as a result of my ankle operation,’ Froggatt continues. ‘When Graham got sacked, I knew it was the worst decision the club could have made because there were still quite a lot of us missing. I was devastated, it was probably one of the lowest points of my career. I was on the sidelines, watching the team not get promoted and then the following season Graham gets sacked. I thought it was the inexperience of the chairman.’

Sir Jack had appointed his son, Jonathan, as chairman in 1992 at the age of just 35. ‘I think he [Jonathan] buckled far too easily,’ Froggatt adds. ‘Graham went on to do really good things after he left Wolves. To give him just one full season was never enough. Jonathan was such a lovely, lovely man but not a football man. I think if you had a proper football man in place, Graham would not have been sacked, they’d have given him more time to try turning it around. It was a huge lack of experience, I think.’

Next up was Mark McGhee, a 38-year-old manager with a growing reputation in the game, poached from Leicester City in acrimonious circumstances. Like Taylor, he was afforded relatively big sums to spend on players such as Simon Osborn, Steve Corica, Iwan Roberts, Keith Curle and Adrian Williams.

‘When I worked at West Ham, the two clubs you wanted to be on the phone asking about a player were either Blackburn Rovers or Wolves because of Jack Walker or Sir Jack Hayward,’ recalls Richard Skirrow, Wolves’ club secretary between 1996 and 2016. ‘You just felt they had money. Not that that meant they weren’t going to try and negotiate a good deal, but you knew the money was there.’

Skirrow arrived at Molineux midway through the promotion push under McGhee during the 1996/97 season, a month before the Battle of Burnden Park. Wolves had to settle for a place in the play-offs after unfancied Barnsley pipped them to the second automatic promotion spot. McGhee had made few friends in South Yorkshire following a comment made to the Sports Argus, a Birmingham-based sports newspaper, during the run-in about which club was most fit for promotion. ‘I would guarantee that most of the Premiership clubs would like it to be Barnsley,’ he said. ‘They might fancy the prospect that Barnsley would be annihilated next season and thrown to the sharks. They probably think they would go straight back down.’

Barnsley’s players revealed that they pinned McGhee’s quote to their dressing-room wall as inspiration during the promotion push. It was not the first time McGhee had come across as arrogant, having written off Birmingham City as ‘a very ordinary team’ ahead of a local derby the previous season.

‘I think he was still relatively inexperienced in management and hadn’t had any real setbacks,’ Skirrow suggests. ‘He was the next bright young thing really, one of Sir Alex Ferguson’s protégés from Aberdeen. He’d had no setbacks, so if he thought Birmingham were an ordinary team, he’d say Birmingham were an ordinary team. And if he thought Wolves were a better bet for promotion than Barnsley and more likely to survive in the Premier League, and of course they should be, then he said so.’

As lesser lights were promoted while Wolves watched on, it became apparent that the club was not experienced enough at boardroom level.

‘Sir Jack not being in the country didn’t help,’ Skirrow admits. ‘Jonathan being geographically distant was not ideal. He was based near Berwick in the borders and would spend a couple of days a week at the club. He was a farmer who had had to make some hard-nosed decisions in farming, but he was also a football man. He was on the Football League board at the time. But with the distances, it’s not a great model for running a football club.’

Skirrow recalls many a late-evening phone conversation with an enthusiastic Sir Jack, desperate to offer any advice regardless of how practical it was.

‘I’d get phone calls from him at 10pm or 11pm because he was in the Bahamas. One of the little snippets that still tickles me is when we were talking about players once, it was during the 1998 World Cup, and Sir Jack said, If we knew where he was, we could get this Davor Šuker in. Sir Jack must have thought he was a Croatian sheep farmer who could be plucked from obscurity. "We do