Is it ok if Steve rings you at 5pm? That was in an email from Tim, from the PR company of our shirt sponsors, Sportingbet.com.
Because the other half of Steve’s name happened to be Bull, in my opinion our greatest player in the last 30 years, I decided that yes, it would be fine for the man that most Wolves fans refer to as God, to give me a call.
Bully was ringing me to tell me about his involvement in the club’s new promotion, the “Wolves accumulator”, which is being run in conjunction with Sportingbet.com.
When Steve rang we spent a couple of minutes chatting about the promotion, which is both free and superb and I’d urge you to pop along to the sportingbet.com website to have a butchers at it. We then debated for ten glorious minutes about the current Wolves team with Bully admitting he does always predict Wolves results with his heart rather than his head!
Of course I idolize Bully, like I’m sure a lot of you do, and I couldn’t let the opportunity go by without saying to him that I wish he was in his prime now, partnering Kevin Doyle up front. Forget relegation, I think we’d be challenging for a Champions League place!
Anyway, now I’ve given Bully’s promotion a shameless plug, on to the asinine decision yesterday to give Wolves a suspended fine for putting out a supposedly weakened team against Man Utd back in December.
When Mick rotated his squad, fan’s opinion seemed to be split as to whether he had done the right thing or not. Some argued that Stan Cullis would be spinning in his grave in disgust at the defeatist manner in which Mick approached the game at Old Trafford.
Others, like me, accepted that the game has changed and that Mick took a pragmatic approach, realising that he could put the same team out who won at Spurs a few days earlier and come away from the North West with nothing but a probable defeat and perhaps some key injuries.
Let’s not forget that we played a near full team against a Man Utd B team in the Carling Cup a couple months earlier and still lost.
Of course, lots of cash was wasted by dedicated Wolves fans travelling up to Old Trafford to see the so called reserves, but Mick does what is right by the team and as we know, not the fans.
But why now? Why punish Wolves for something Premiership teams have been doing for years. I won’t bore you with loads of examples, but to prove my point how about when Saturday’s opponents Chelsea played two league games in five days back in 2006?
Only Ricardo Carvalho, William Gallas and Frank Lampard played in both games against Blackburn and Newcastle. So why is it that those eight changes are any less of a crime than the ten that Mick made at Old Trafford?
It stinks of complete hypocrisy by the sanctimonious Premier League. They quoted rules E20 and B13 that the club had supposedly broken, but where is the rule which stipulates how many team changes you can and can’t make? And who are they to tell Mick what his first team is anyway?
What about trying to ensure that the people who run the clubs in this league are actually fit and proper in the first place? Forget setting a petty precedent with a ruling about rotation, how about ensuring that you don’t let debt-laden criminals take over clubs and run them into the ground?
I think Wolves have accepted the suspended fine ruling far too easily. I would tell the Premier league to stuff the ruling where the sun doesn’t shine. Come up with a rule which stipulates the amount of changes you can make to the first team from game to game. If that’s broken, then fine, give a club a rollicking, but until then, get your own house in order and leave us alone.
Can you imagine the Premier League trying to do this to Arsène Wenger when he sticks the kids in for a cup match? He would completely lose the few Gallic marbles that he has left. The Premier League won’t slap the wrists of the all powerful Arsenal, Man Utd, Chelsea or Liverpool, no; they prefer to set an example by picking on one of the smaller clubs, they are just a bunch of oppressive bullies.
Charles Ross, the brilliantly gifted editor of A Load of Bull recently wrote, “The rewriting of football history since 1992 and the advent of Planet Premier is bad enough, but it just gets worse. Every time I hear the phrase “a new Premiership record” something inside me dies.”
Like Charles, I love and loathe the Premiership in equal measures. I loathe the fact that our top league has become all about the have and the have nots, with players on ridiculous salaries and fans having to foot the bill with inflated ticket prices.
And yet, paradoxically, I love watching some of world’s greatest players in the best league in the world. And we all know the alternative and I’m not quite ready for Doncaster on a cold Tuesday night in front of a bored Molineux just yet.
At the end of the day, the Premier league are playing right into the hands of belligerent, narcissistic buffoons like Piers Morgan who will no doubt applaud this moronic decision by the Premier League.
One ruling from the Premier League I would quite like to see though would be a play-off to play in the Champions League for the teams who finish 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th in the Premiership.
Why not mix it up a bit? If we get established in the top flight, then we could well be contesting one of those places and as a result, I think Arsène Wenger may frown so severely that the lines in his forehead could suck his whole face into some kind of parallel vortex!
On to Saturday’s game and the visit of team Terry and his men in blue and I happened to be in the same room as his team mate, Michael Ballack on Wednesday night.
But before the tabloids start getting excited, we weren’t exchanging dodgy photos by phone; instead we were both at the Albert Hall roaring on the brilliant Depeche Mode at the teenage cancer trust charity gig.
Never mind the Ballacks though; what chance do you think we have of getting a positive result this weekend?
After the huge morale boost of beating Spurs, Mick is likely to start with the same eleven against a Chelsea team that have already dropped points away against the likes of West Ham, Hull, Everton and Birmingham.
As I said in my bostin video blog earlier in the week, we simply gave Chelsea far too much respect at Stamford Bridge, with our players almost looking overawed to be on the same field.
We can’t afford to start like that on Saturday. Yes, we will have to ride our luck a little bit like we did against Spurs. But with the nefarious Ashley Cole injured, we should unleash Matt Jarvis to test his replacement Yury Zhirkov at every opportunity.
After all, at just £18 million, Yury is only the most expensive Russian player of all time! But I think Jarvis is in a fantastic vein of form and that price tag means diddly-squat on the field of battle.
And lets get Adlene Guedioura into the face of the Chelsea midfield to see if can get close to that extraordinary performance against Spurs.
Like Bully, My head says we’ll get beaten by a couple of goals, but my heart says there is always hope.
And on Saturday, Heidi my beautiful girlfriend of eight years, would love you all to join in a chorus of, “Chelsea, wherever you may be, don’t leave your wife with John Terry”.
Enjoy the game and your weekend. Come on the Wolves!
@Wolvesblogger 