Ben

Whether it’s a stunning central midfielder from Lille or a bewitching beauty from Bridgnorth, it’s the hope that will eventually kill you.

Much like online dating, transfer deadline day has a knack of kicking you in the knackers at the very moment you contemplate stroking them.

Both promise big and even whisper the words you want to hear, but the net result is usually the same, involving a pre-occupation with a mobile phone notification that never comes.

Renato Sanches looked a bit too good to be true from the images, rather like those ‘top picks’ on a notorious dating site that you know are out of your league before you swipe right, but you do so out of futile hope anyway. (One out of 200 might settle for a ‘nice bloke’, you never know).

Renato’s dodgy knee might have made Wolverhampton more appealing, as better looking suitors would see it as baggage, a bit like the ‘sapiosexual’ description on a pout-laden profile which I’m usually prepared to look past.

A conversation or two must have followed: ‘What’s a yoga-loving Portuguese like you doing on here on transfer deadline day?’ ‘Wolverhampton isn’t too far from France, you know? I’m not a massive fan of South Wales either. Or advertisement boards. Sunday lunch in a country pub with open fire Renato?! It would be my pleasure.’

And at that very moment, like a fair few other prospects over the past few weeks and months, they vanish in a puff of smoke and up the flue of a wood burner you were snuggled in front of together, in a quaint little village that remains out of reach in your mind’s eye.

Just over three years ago, Wolves Blog was told by ex-sporting director Kevin Thelwell that we’d be emulating Tottenham Hotspur, with ambitions to gatecrash the top four (a reference we were asked to dampen down for fear of raising too many eyebrows too soon).

When speaking to Thomas and I, Thelwell said: ‘Fosun are very ambitious. Uber ambitious. This club is in a very different space. I think Fosun want to see the club become a very strong Premier League team.

‘They are not in it for generating money off some transfers. It is all about being a successful Premier League team and winning things – over time.’

Maybe it’s just ongoing FFP constraints, but achieving a profit of £6.2m (in: £21.3m / out: £27.5m) this summer and persisting with just three recognised central midfielders – one of them 35 years old and past his majestic vintage – smacks of a lack of ambition at best. At worst, it’s a refusal to give your new manager the tools to do a job that he looks more than capable of carrying out.

And still lurking at the back of my mind is the sale of Diogo Jota, who is now Fosun case law in selling one of your best young players for profit, no matter the rationale attached to that particular sale. As a result, we’re supposed to count our blessings that Neves and Traore haven’t gone the same way as well?

Thelwell added: ‘Their vision is to be a top Premier League team so we have to produce. We need to make sure we’re not only capable of playing in Premier League but of achieving something in the Premier League.’

Maybe finishing seventh twice and a European adventure is what he was on about, but as I take my seat at Molineux this season, I still see the mound of wasteland behind the videowall between the Steve Bull and South Bank, when at the bare minimum we were promised another temporary stand by now.

In February 2019, Jeff Shi himself said: “The most important thing is to have enough capacity. 40,000-50,000 is not a problem by my understanding. Wolves is like a sleeping giant.”

But a call for fresh investment six months on and a geopolitical standoff between China and the west means that I can’t help but worry.

After so many rejections during the transfer window, you’d have thought that I’d have toughened up by now.

In the absence of a reply, I’ll sit tight and hope for the best. Remember, they’ll have a million other things on and they’ve already said that they like us, so chill. We can see that they’ve read our messages too, so have faith!

“I think Wolves now is in the group where we will keep it forever,” said Jeff in September 2019.

So try not to overthink things and live in the moment, folks. Something good will happen when you’re least expecting it, you know?

It’s just that when the silence becomes deafening like this, I have a pretty good idea what’s coming next.

Life is never one linear line towards happiness, is it?

Full of highs and lows and ups and downs, to the extent where Molineux marketing slogans were once designed around a roller coaster, weren’t they?

Sometimes the needle plummets like it used to in the days of Burrda. Double dips and dipsticks.

Sometimes it just flatlines altogether following hours of Glenn Hoddle tedium.

The toughest challenge is placing where we are right now, in a society crying out for guidance; a fan base in need of being spoon-fed, dare I say. The younger generation have never had it so good, but probably resent being told so? The older generation a bit longer in the tooth for Fabio Silva ‘star boy’ memes that ‘yer bald Da’ would never understand?

Should we buy a shirt? Should we baulk at the price? Is it a nice design? It isn’t what it used to be, is it?

A ham-fisted membership scheme is the latest pipe bomb to be lobbed into a fractious fan-base that I can honestly never remember being so divided.

See more

Shirts for those that can afford it, cheaper version for the rest. Membership plus for the privileged few, free for all for the rest. @Wolves scoring own goals from the commercial department. Sad to see.

— Mijas Wolves (@MijasWolves) July 20, 2021

If it’s not a generational thing then it’s two sides of the same coin in desperate need of landing on their chosen side. Heads we win, tails you’re a twat. Both obsess about owning the consensus and both have to be correct, in a sign of the times that has rarely depressed me more.

Much as I want the shadow stripe Manders memories back, they’ve long since flickered away on a dog-eared piece of paper. Like the litter on the breeze; like the lovers on the streets.

The younger generation wouldn’t get it any more than I got Peter Knowles floating on air in a crew neck shirt that really was old gold. Hardly their fault and hardly a surprise that they just don’t relate to us old gits anymore?

Trying to assume the high ground is just pointless though, because we’re never going to agree on anything, barring one common theme…

…We all love the Wolves in our own wonderful way.

Loyalty counted for something once, when Steve Bull gave us his career from 1986 to be precise. The youngsters couldn’t embrace that zeitgeist as they just weren’t there to feel it. And in today’s society where snakes run most asylums, the very notion of loyalty is alien anyway.

That we’ve been in the Barclays League Div 4, or the Zenith Data Cup, or the Anglo Italian Trophy in the back of a Sherpa Van is literally irrelevant now. Those days have gone and they’re not coming back. I’d die for those days. Stupid eh?

In their place is something colder, non-descript and a damned sight more successful – a bit like our new replica shirt come to think of it.

Despite the noises coming from Bruno and a potential new era of progressive football, I feel I’m stuck in a dip now, somewhere between a mountain and the deep blue sea.

The vibrant effervescence of a vital young fanbase would feel differently I’m sure. And if the club wants to tap into its positivity to move Wolves forward then it will do so with my blessing. Put some respect on their names and all that, and who cares where they’re from (colourful Wolver-hampur-ton or not!)

The strength of the wolf is in the pack, but if the lame old stragglers at the back can’t keep up like this old wheezing dog, then it’s time to set them free.

Maybe the heavens knew something we didn’t when the news burst through the clouds.

Did you ever feel the pain, as it soaked you to the bone?

Nuno was meant to live forever, not fade away in a throwaway tweet on a smartphone.

‘This Sunday will be Nuno Espírito Santo’s final game in charge of Wolves’ were words that cut me to the core. Nuno was a light that would never go out, wasn’t he? Not by mutual agreement. Not yet.

The stars always aligned when it came to Nuno, who was never a rock and roll star in my eyes, but more a Modfather of Molineux. He didn’t just allow us to dream, but demanded we did, before whisking us away on a journey that transcended the here and now.

It was some ride, wasn’t it? Another space and time, between the cracks in the pavement and the constellations in the sky. Where Ruben Neves’ volley still shimmers; amid the floodlights and psychedelia as Jota muscled his way past Shaw. All of the lights!

Mine and Dad’s usual spots in the Billy Wright Stand were more like seats on the Starship Enterprise, and we strapped ourselves in for lift off. That those same seats gather dust these days – with big red crosses slapped across them – is a picture too poignant for words.

Statistically, Nuno’s win percentage was the most successful of any manager in our history, but the results came secondary to the lustre that seemed to envelop him.

The way he’d emasculate an uninformed reporter with those dark, dismissive eyes, or serenade us with his piston-fist pumps beneath those swirling Molineux skies.

My first memory at Pride Park was so clear, when I realised that all that Championship bindweed we’d been knotted up in for so long was about to be cut away by a head coach with razor sharp tactics. 

It was an otherworldly experience for three glorious years, until a virus from a dystopian world sucked all the goodness away.

By the end, I’m not sure I was looking at the same manager, who was the shell of the man who caused carnage in a Bristol City directors box and induced an old foe to blood spitting fury in Cardiff. Nuno could barely summon up the energy to kick a water bottle in anger at times, muttering up at the heavens instead after another on-field calamity. Resignation had set in, it seemed.

In the final fixtures, his team was trolling its former self, failing to score in the first half of 30 Premier League games in a damning statistic and generally blighting the Premier League with a tedious style of play that looked no better whatever he tried to do with it. Maybe it was the right time to part on good terms like these, because a bitter ending would have been too depressing to contemplate.

Maybe he was saddled with players he didn’t want? Or we sold the ones he did? Or ‘The Project’ is now a pipe dream?

There’s so many questions that will occupy our minds for now, rather than the fireworks, light shows and that beautiful paradigm we’ve left behind. Better to have burnt out than fade away.

“When I came here it was to build something and create an idea and a philosophy, to build an identity. It’s more than a football pitch – it’s a club, it’s a city…it goes beyond prizes,” he once said.

If history measures Nuno on anything, then I hope it’s this quote and not those feeble set pieces at Goodison, or the conceded kilometres at home to Burnley the other week. Hadn’t we run to stand still?

It mattered little in the grand scheme of things, because Nuno didn’t just build something like he promised, but he constructed it in a galaxy far away – via Belfast, Braga and Barcelona; When streams were ripe and swelled with rain and dreaming was for free.

If we ever revisit that cosmos then I’d be amazed, but that’s not really the point anymore.

Better instead to take each game at a time when the new season gets here, just like the great man always told us to. By which time, the autumn winds will blow chilly and cold.

A love once new has now grown old.

If I had a wish, I wish that I were a lad; walking to Molineux holding hands with my Dad. It’s another cold Saturday at twenty to three, but the cold doesn’t matter when it’s my dad with me.

“Pork scratchings; Pound a bag!” booms the butcher.

Dad cranes his neck to listen to the team news over the tannoy, from a vantage point behind the burger van.

‘Number one, Mark Kendall; number two, Gary Bellamy; number three, Andy Thompson; number four, Floyd Streete; number five, Ally Robertson; number six, Phil Robinson; number seven, Nigel Vaughan; number eight, Phil Chard; number nine, Steve Bull; number 10, Andy Mutch; number 11, Robbie Dennison.’

“Strong side that, Benny boy. I fancy us today,” Dad muses, between an extended puff of his Panama cigar.

We shuffle towards the John Ireland Stand entrance at the front of a queue that stretches to the sky. Pipe smoke pervades and the turnstile ticks like a metronome, or was it the hands of time? Dad squeezes through to the other side and I can only see his back through the barrier; the back that bore my weight when he’d carry me along Waterloo Road as a boy.

The turnstiles tick louder until they wake me from my sleep. Tick, tick, tick. The metronomic ticking is too deafening to ignore and at 7am, I realise it’s my bedside alarm and a flashback to 1988 cracks beneath my eyelids.

Time to get up. Time to realise that I can’t go back to the happiest days as a football fan, no matter how hard I wish I could. The world turns faster than Adama Traore these days, no matter how much we wish it could slow to a Dennison saunter.

When details of a Super League were announced on Sunday night, it only confirmed what my alarm clock shouted at me a few hours later. The game has gone. But it had vanished long before six shameless clubs snatched the final remnants away.

Town final, Staw Distribution shadow-stripes and a vice-like grip of dad’s hand – all sponsored by Ruby Red Records – was my idea of heaven. Nightmare on Elm Street? Bully’s Revenge!

No matter how many times I shut my eyes, I can’t get those days back.

The Super League wouldn’t want them anyway. They’re long gone and while they’ll always be priceless to me, they’re not even worth a Goalden Goal ticket to them.

I can still feel the buzz of a last-gasp Paskin winner at home to Plymouth; I can still hear the laughs of the brethren as Dad rips out a fart at the Victoria Ground, Stoke, while shaking off the drops on a concrete wall.

At Vale Park a few miles away, Gary Bellamy nods in the winner and I’m thrown to the front of a delirious away end like a crumpled Balti pie tin. Glorious golden memories swirled in Manders Paint and Ink.

Nowadays, the only screams I hear are from conniving players who’ve been hit with all the force of Nigel Vaughan, never mind Keith Downing. The latter would be outlawed anyway, unable to compete by the letter of the law, which is replayed a thousand times until they find an angle they were craving to begin with.

When goals are disallowed for offside when the ball is passed backwards (Leicester City last season) then you know we’re banned from competing anyway. Mike Dean hammered home the point at Turf Moor when Europe was in our grasp later that season.

VAR has subordinated clubs like ours at the expense of The Cartel ever since they demanded it be introduced in the first place (to stop players like Willy Boly from scoring illegal equalisers with their arms against teams like Manchester City).

The Premier League has always danced to their tune and now they don’t like what they’re hearing, quelle surprise. Let The Cartel get on with it, I say. I hope they drown in their own greed.

I miss Blundell Park way more than I’d miss the Etihad anyway, and I haven’t been able to go there in decades. The Pontoon Stand banged at my eardrums way louder than Old Trafford ever did.

Inject Bovril into my veins, funnel visions of the Two Step Dance Academy through my eyeballs and take me back to the good old days.

They’re not so far away, you know? If these self-serving, soulless bastards take away the very facets of the game I hate the most, then they’re welcome to them. Maybe we can reclaim the best bits, instead? The bits I only dream about.

Keep what you’ve got, by giving it all away.

Reclaim, reset and reintroduce terracing for a start. Clamp down on cheats, fuck VAR off and let’s referee games properly, free from the constraints of Stockley Park.

Let the six go, leave them to it and let us fall back in love with the Beautiful Game like we did when we were kids.

It had nothing to do with that lot anyway.