The perfect couple!

It must be nearly two years to the day since this blog was set-up, and since being lured into its clutches, I never foresaw a breaking news announcement quite like this one.

It’s more romantic than a Robbie Keane homecoming, more inevitable than a Christophe Berra shirt tug and its implications are more significant than Stephen Hunt’s goal on May 22.

Thomas Baugh has got married.

The lifelong deal was signed in St Bart’s church, Penn, and its ramifications cannot be underplayed.

No longer will our most prolific writer be able to pour his heart over a blog for three hours, wistfully reaching for an old programme to cross reference.

The programmes will be in the loft for a start, and the wife will be getting rather bemused that he’s outpouring his emotions behind a computer for three hours, compared to 10 minutes behind the arse cheeks at bedtime.

Not that I’m speaking from experience…

…I’ve never got near the arse cheeks in 11 years.

Tom puts his best shirt on for his big day!

Typical of me to lower the tone when paying tribute to the most beautiful wedding I have ever had the honour of being invited to.

Effortlessly classy, endearingly intimidate and triumphantly romantic from start to finish, Thomas and Jen’s wedding was, well…perfect.

Just perfect. And while us blokes aren’t always the best at portraying their feelings (apart from on here!), I want Tom to know how privileged I was to be invited, in the same room of so many welcoming friends and family.

All of them knew Tom and Jen for 15 – 25 years or more, whereas the imposter at the back knew him from an idle remark about Nenad Milijas 24 months ago.

Hi-ho Wolverhampton was a great 1st song choice!

It’s inappropriate to feel a sense of regret on such a beautiful day, but for one second I genuinely did…

…Regret that this blog wasn’t around 15 years ago so I could have known a special friend for longer.

Anyway, enough of all that!

I hope you will all join me in raising a glass to Tom and Jen and wishing them all the very best for the future.

Oh, and finally…You’re left with me for two weeks now, as the lovebirds are off on their honeymoon. Hooray!

With 25 consecutive days of Sky Sports ‘breaking news’ bars failing to break any worthwhile Wolves news whatsoever, the time has come to stop watching it.

Whilst I marvel at the flawless aesthetic beauty of Charlotte Jackson, Natalie Sawyer, Hayles McQueen and company, they insist on breaking news that I couldn’t give a shit about.

View from the now demolished North Bank

Look into my eyes ladies. Don’t look at what I’m doing with my right hand, just look into my eyes and tell me something interesting for once.

Nope? Fair enough.

So with no news to excite me, I had a stroll down Waterloo Road to look at those diggers in the North Bank, just to see how things were shaping up.

And there it hit me. There is a topic that needs discussion after all. Call it an ode to the North Bank.

With the 1992 North Bank now reduced to rubble, what are your five favourite goals to be scored at that end from ‘92 until Sunday May 22 2011?

With the lion’s share of those 19 years being stuck in the forgettable, turgid middle ground of Ensleigh, this straightforward task actually took some thinking!

But thinking I have done and I’m here with my five favourite North Bank goals (from ‘92 to ‘11).

What are yours?

1. Bully v Blues (1996)

North Bank, South Bank, Nou Camp, Bantock Park, anywhere…

…This goal could have been scored on a muddy Sunday morning postage stamp, or an iconic global amphitheatre.

Raw enough and beautiful enough to grace either and the only goal I know to mature so beautifully that you could trade everything we have today for that one moment in time.

Osborn, lobbing a ball through to our hero as Michael Johnson treaded through treacle. Bully, defying 90 minutes of derby day intensity latched on as if the clock had struck three.

Those hands, suspended, as our hero raced through and slid the ball into the far corner of the North Bank net, cue a cacophony of noise that I’d never heard before, or since.
To argue that one solitary goal could airbrush a generation of underachievement sounds crazy.

But it wasn’t one solitary goal. It was much more than that.

2. Shaun Newton v Reading (2003)

Thinking of sheer noise to greet a goal, nothing comes close to that Bully effort, apart from possibly one.

When playing Reading at home in the play-off first leg, Shaun Newton smashed home a goal that did more than just propel us to Cardiff. It seemed to shift that stuffy air of melancholy around Molineux that we’d been clinging onto like some sort of security blanket for 20 years.

Paul Ince – inevitably involved – got hacked down in the box for the most blatant penalty in living memory, only for the ref to wave it away (with the game on a knife-edge at 1-1).

The cheating bastard! For a split second it all came back. The McAteer shinner for Bolton into the top corner of the very same net. We’re doomed again. Cursed! How can he do this to us?

…Then within a second the ball squirmed out to Newton on the angle and he smashed it into the top corner – while we were still on our feet screaming ourselves hoarse at the ref.

A crazy moment of exasperation followed by unbridled jubilation, eventually followed by numerous conversations down the pub afterwards, along the lines of:

“What if Newton hadn’t have scored that? We’d have been robbed. Screwed over. Again.”

Well he did score, we weren’t robbed and Newton proved that by grabbing fate by the scruff of the neck, the landscape can be different.

3. Stephen Hunt v Blackburn (2011)

For the riches at stake and the implications of this goal going in, it really should be number one on the list.

At the moment Hunt set himself to wrap his little left peg around the ball, I honestly thought it didn’t matter.

Pick this one out!

It could sail into the North Bank car park for all I cared. I thought we were down whatever happened, convincing myself that footballing gods were far more important than actual goings-on at Old Trafford and White Hart Lane.

Footballing gods punish a performance like the one we had put in, so I was spiralling down the plug hole, thinking we’d gone.
Thank God I wasn’t playing!

It was another slow motion moment and it wasn’t so much the goal itself that I was watching, more the reaction of the North Bank itself.

Yes the roar was huge, as they all knew the gravitas of it all, unlike the thicko here!

But the roar went on, and on, and on. A bit like a woman having an orgasm, apparently.

4. Bully v Bradford (1998)

‘He’s done it! He’s done it!’ screamed Dad to anyone who would listen.

Bully had indeed done it, scoring his 300th goal for the club at the North Bank end in one of those familiarly painful home games that all seemed to merge into one.
Bradford were playing in white on a Tuesday night if memory serves, and Bully was at the back post in the dying seconds, scuffing a horrible, half hit shot that dribbled into the corner. (wasn’t he a sub that night too? Might have been dreaming that bit)

Looking back on it, it couldn’t have been more inappropriate. Even the commemorative posters sold by the Express & Star afterwards captured Glenn Crowe in the shot. Or was it Dominic Foley?

It kind of summed up that forgettable era, which Bully would punctuate with magical, memorable moments like these.

5. George Ndah v A****n (2001)

This goal proved that the good guy can sometimes prevail after all.

After Matt Carbon maliciously assaulted George at the Hawthorns 18 months or so before – snapping his leg and triggering a woeful chain of injuries for the striker – Ndah got one back.

On a pouring mid-Sunday afternoon, George set the wheels in motion for an almighty thrashing of the Albion.
Running down a long ball (I think?) his searing pace put him in behind the onrushing keeper, leaving himself with an empty net on the angle of the box, 20 yards or so out.

He instinctively turned and agonisingly rolled the ball into an empty North Bank net.

And who was failing miserably to hack it off the line in a last ditch effort? Yep, you’ve guessed it, clogger Matt Carbon.

This was not so much a spontaneous Bully roar, but a slow burner, with decibels growing with every revolution of that unassuming little Mitre.
The goal was a bit like a parent watching their child ride their bike for the first time.

That ball’s journey began unconvincingly, barely gathering momentum, but eventually reaching its destination to the almighty relief – and crazed delight – of us all.

For a career curtailed by so much misfortune, didn’t George give us some memories?!

As my wife passed Molineux to do the weekly shopping at Asda, my little boy’s face dropped.

“Mummy, look! Daddy. Football. Diggers. No. WAAHHHHHH.”

“Don’t worry son,” she said. “They’ll build a better stand. They are making it stronger and bigger.”

To infinity...within reasonable means

Fighting back the tears and wiping the snot from his nose, he whimpered: “Will it be ready for when Daddy comes home from work?”

God bless him. The poor little man is only three years-old and he’s already crying about the Wolves.

And while the cheeky monkey knows far more than I sometimes give him credit for, he is blissfully unaware of what really goes on behind those diggers.

In Arthur Smallman’s black and white world, he says what he sees. He sees a new Lightning McQueen jumper and he says he wants it.

He sees a Buzz Lightyear space rocket and he positively yearns for it, until I give in and buy him the bloody thing to shut him up.

It’s a familiar tale. We all say we want Jamie O’Hara and we are told we will get him within the week. A month or so later and we’re crying like babies, casting Jez a doe-eyed look, pulling at his trouser leg to show us some compassion.

‘Put O’Hara back on the shelf and stop being naughty. Leave him alone,’ says Jez, as a transfer saga that was meant to be sorted within seven days still rumbles on.

While I am not wailing to the shade of purple quite yet, I am mildly pissed off that this deal is drifting on for so long, when the player said he wants to stay, the manager says he wants to buy and the delectable Danielle says she loves the Midlands.

It wouldn’t be so bad if the stingy father-figure was keeping quiet about everything else, but he chooses not to, with quotes like this one last week:

“I cannot say for certain, but I would be very surprised if we did not stay up last season with our wage bill at least in the bottom three of the Premier League.

Compare that one to this one on March 19th 2009: “If you draw up a table of the average over three years of where teams finish and then correlate that to their wage bill, they’re going to be very well aligned.”

While I appreciate the sight of a tightly run ship, I much prefer the vision of the first page of the Premier League table and wonder how we might get there with contradictions like these. Moreover, I WANT O’HARA!

When my little lad cries over that Toy Story spaceship I tell him to be patient. It’ll be his birthday in two weeks after all.

I’m more than prepared to do likewise myself. But if little Arthur caught sight of some Pingu Poundland alternative under the bed, he’d be having kittens. A bit like me when I heard we were linked with Luke Chambers from Nottingham Forest.

So like a screaming little brat who wants his favourite toy I would just like to know what our expectation levels really should be next season, and what the hold-up is with O’Hara?

While every parent appreciates a Primark bargain or two, shopping in this store all of the time can lead to only two things:

1. Items that are wrecked within a month.

2. A child who everyone will presume was dragged up in Sandwell.

Although it’s universally accepted that Wolves need to introduce some new faces to the defence, I’ve had more than a few discussions recently pondering whether we could do better with the players we already have.

These are the headline questions that seem to crop up most often:

Zubar - talented but error-prone

Can Zubar play in the center?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t Ronald Zubar brought in as a central defender? If so, maybe it’s about time he was given a chance to show what he can do in that position? He possesses all the attributes you’d want from a top draw centre back; quick, agile, strong in the air and more than adequate on the ball. Yes, he’s error prone, but with an experienced head alongside him, could he find that level of consistency that would elevate him to another level?

Can Zubar play left-back?

OK, if Ronny’s not your cup of tea at centre back, what about down the left? He’s always done a decent job for us at right-back, despite the odd calamity here and there, so maybe he could be the long term answer to our never-ending problems down the opposite flank? Maybe I’m biased because I absolutely love the guy, but lets not forget he was a French U21 international and played in the Champions League. He’s by no means a mug, even if he does let himself down from time to time.

Can Elokobi play in the center?

We all love Big George don’t we? For all his shortcomings, he’s probably the dictionary definition of a ‘cult hero’. Sadly though, his distribution is too often appalling and he has the turning circle of an articulated lorry. So what do we do with him? Well, much like Zubar, he could be pushed into the middle. He’s strong, quick (when he gets going) and decent in the air so perhaps his weaknesses wouldn’t be as obvious when part of a double-act in the middle? We’ve tried it a few times and he’s done OK, but maybe his lack of height is too big an issue?

Can Mouyokolo get a run in the team?

Perhaps the most obvious question we’re all asking ourselves. Only managed four appearances in his first season and looked well below-par in at least two of those (the defeats against Bolton and Blackburn). But he hasn’t managed to get properly fit yet, struggling through last year’s pre-season before picking up a series of niggling injuries and vanishing into thin air. He came with a big reputation and a big price tag, so surely we’re within our rights to expect better? At the very least it would be nice to see him properly at it and given an extended run at some point.

Can Stearman find consistency?

Personally, I think there’s very little to choose between Berra, Craddock and Stearman, so I usually have no preference over which of them is in the side at any one time. However, Stearman’s natural ability is there for all to see and he’s the one player out of that particular trio who could really go on and find another level. With Jody surely entering his final year at the club and Berra short of that all important yard of pace, Stears is no doubt the horse to back but sloppy mistakes too often make him a liability. If he can cut those out, we could have a future England defender on our hands. Easier said than done though obviously given that we’re now three seasons into his Wolves career.

Changing lanes

The back four that started the final game of the season against Blackburn read: Foley, Craddock, Mancienne and Elokobi.

If we signed nobody, but got everyone fighting fit surely a back four of Foley, Mouyokolo, Stearman and Zubar could do better?

New personnel is obviously preferable, but shuffling the deck and changing lanes might also help.

Agreed?