A Club Divided?
I stopped having a season ticket at Wolverhampton Wanderers in 2005. This wasn’t an easy decision. I come from a family of Wolves supporters who have attended matches since the 1920s to my knowledge and I had a season ticket for 17 years going back to a half season ticket in the Division Four Championship season…and (for fellow Wolfs) yes I WAS at the Chorley game!
There was a Wolves specific reason for my non-renewal. In two words Glenn Hoddle. His stultifying boring football coupled with his lack of respect for the club and its supporters (not attending tribute dinners for ex-players etc) meant at that time as far as I was concerned, it wasn’t ‘Wolves’ at all I was watching. I guess there was also ‘context’ in that our one season at that time spent in The Premier League 2003/04 had seen us crash to earth with a big bang.
You see I went to my first Wolves match in 1976. That was just seventeen years since we had last been English Champions…think of that today Liverpool fans and how you must feel you have a right to be successful more than 20 years since your last Championship. So I was brought up fully expecting us to maintain our record of being one of the 10 most successful English clubs (check your stats up to 1980 ish) and to regularly challenge for league and cup honours. I could write off the Bhatti era and our extraordinary tumble from top league to Div Four as an extraordinary one off. The Steve Bull-inspired renaissance and the years of frustration and stagnation under Sir Jack Hayward was merely and surely a hiatus before the mighty Wolves reclaimed their rightful place at the top of English football.
Then we got promoted in 2003.
It came as an absolute shock to realise that ‘smaller clubs’ such as Bolton, Middlesbro, Birmingham, Blackburn, Fulham, Reading et al were pretty much on a par with us and in some cases likely to be more successful in the medium term, given established Premier League status. What had happened you see was that Sky/Premier League came along just at the wrong time for Wolves. We were at a low ebb when the ‘EPL’ started in 1992 and thus our natural ‘place’, I think, is now somewhere between 15th and 30th in the English League rather than indisputably top 15 as it was for the first 100 years or so of the professional game. Clubs with longer Premier League membership have more money, can pay higher wages, and ergo are likely to be more successful.
So in essence I think football has lost some of its competitive bite. The economics of the game is such that finishng 11th in the Prem, I think, is broadly equivalent to winning the old Football League Championship for a traditional ‘big’ provincial team like Wolves (or Albion, or Forest, or Sheffield clubs, or Derby, or Sunderland, or Leeds, et al) If you can’t win the league is there any point competing or at least in avidly following your team?
Maybe my decision to stop having a season ticket does at least seem rational given the narrative above. The Premier League, is, essentially a ‘World League’ that happens to be in England. My hunch is that there are far more 5-0 drubbings in the top flight than the other three divisions combined. I also think that Wolves beating Chelsea or Man U or Man C or Liverpool (as we did all of them last season) is probably more of a shock than Plymouth or Hereford beating Wolves, such is the gulf in resources amongst Premier League clubs.
I have only been to Wolves once this season, our abject defeat vs QPR. Aside from 2005/06 when I only visited Molineux twice I have got into the habit of going to 8-10 games a season, mostly at the ‘business end’ after Christmas. It is great to pick and choose games and I have started to play more sport and it is so much better for one’s mental health not to have to invest your emotions solely on how 11 footballers perform in determining whether you have a good weekend or not. Put it this way I used to envy the ‘I haven’t missed a game home or away for 10 years’ merchants; now I merely pity them.
This isn’t to say that I no longer have a deep emotional attachment to the Wolves. I do. After all Wolverhampton Wanderers are just about the only tangible connection I still have with my home town. I still feel this lump in the throat every time ‘me babbies’ emerge from the tunnel at Molineux and the insane pride I felt when my daughter was with me last year to see us beat Chelsea and Albion was well…insane.
So…given the history of Wolves which has basically been a 30 year period of decline and stagnation it really troubles me that fairly large factions of our support seem more than dissatisfied with simply the best thing to ever happen to Wolves in the 35 years I have supported them…Mick McCarthy. Those of you who follow the game will know that this guy came in to the club in 2006 and has dragged it up by its bootstraps from a threadbare squad predicted to be near the bottom of the Championship to a team playing its third straight season in the top flight…something Wolves last achieved more than 30 years ago.
Much of the dissatisfaction appears to stem from the fact that he is perceived to have favourites such as Karl Henry and will not play in-form players such as Adlene Guedioura and Adam Hammill. I wouldn’t argue that some of this criticism is justified. Funadamentally, my question to the ‘McCarthy Out’ lobby is what do you think the effect of playing different players would ultimately be? I think we might finish 12th or 13th rather than 15th or 16th. In other words it won’t make a great deal of difference. We have a fantastic manager, our players are never, ever associated with unsavoury off the field antics you read about amongst other clubs’ players and with the brief exception of the lower division teams under Graham Turner for the first time in 35 years I feel that the players care as much as I do. Bluntly if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.
I really have enjoyed seeing this Wolves team take shape under Mick McCarthy. It would be lovely to think that football fans (not just Wolves supporters) could take a view that looks at the big picture rather than the most recent game. To Wolves fans in particular ‘what do you think changing the manager would actually achieve?’ Because if you think we are suddenly going to become a top half Prem team on a regular basis I am afraid that ship sailed in 1995 as soon as John ‘McGitley’ poleaxed David Kelly with his elbow and then went down the other end and scored the goal to put us out of the play-offs. Yes, I do have a long memory; it would serve all of us better if other people took a similar view.
