I was having a drink with my good pal James on Tuesday night and the topic turned to Wolves goalkeeper Matt Murray, who I stated was currently having a blinder on loan at Hereford. James said that Matt was too brittle and would never be injury free.
I retorted that I thought Matt had now turned a corner and it wouldn’t be long before the Ikeme vs Hennessey argument would be obsolete.
My notion was that Matt would soon be back in a Wolves shirt, because he is easily the best number one I have ever seen play for Wolves.
Fast forward to Wednesday morning and the irony of my conversation the night before became apparent.
It turned the euphoric mood I was in after our seventh consecutive win away at Bramall Lane into a feeling of real melancholy for Matt’s latest career threatening injury.
Anyone who has come into contact with Matt will probably tell you that he comes across as perhaps the antitheses of how you might expect a modern footballer to behave. He is a real gent and an absolute top bloke.
Matt’s battle with injuries has meant he has appeared fewer than 100 times
for Wolves in over 10 years at the club.
The season before last he was not only the Wolves player of the season, but he also made it into the PFA Championship team of the year and was voted the PFA fan’s player of the year for the division.
I’m sure all Wolves fans will wish Matt well in his recovery and we should all remember that Matt was a fundamental reason we made it to the Premiership in 2003.
I would love to see him next season fulfill his destiny as a mainstay of Wolves in the Premiership.
On a better note, surely an absolute shoe in for player of the month of November in the Championship is our own mighty Chris Iwelumo. His second brace of the week secured probably our most significant away win of the season so far at Bramall Lane.
You’ll find all three Wolves goals nestling nicely in the top draw, especially Iwelumo’s rifled volley and Sylvan Ebanks-Blake’s thunderous drive at the near post.
Probably the most significant thing though about Tuesday night, apart from the magnificent result of course, is that the squad now has real strength, depth and flexibility compared to the last couple of seasons.
As we probably expected, it was a tough old battle against United and as a result a few players boarded the coach home a little worse for wear.
But even with a change of goalie during the game and Kevin Foley moving into central midfield, something he has done in the past whilst on the books at Luton, we still looked a massive threat going forward.
You could argue that Sheffield United were a tad unlucky when they had a perfectly good goal disallowed, when Hennessey scooped the ball back from around row C of the Halliwells stand, only for the linesman to completely miss it. Send that man a Christmas hamper.
But who cares? We have had our own bad luck in the past and even if they had scored, I’m sure the Wolves side on Tuesday night had another gear to move into.
Mick has patched up injuries this season by picking out some real gems in the loan market.
Had we have slipped up the other night, I’m sure people would have said that we really missed Michael Mancienne, but the defence were solid and deserve a lot of praise for the way they kept James Beattie, Billy Sharp and then Darius Henderson very quiet.
In other good news, it was great to see Lewis Gobern, Jody Craddock and Matt Jarvis come through unscathed after 45 minutes in the Senior Cup defeat the other night. The wings are still the position that I feel we lack any real depth when Kites or Jarvis are injured.
With Jarvis missing since the home defeat against Reading, we have struggled on the left wing and now that Carlos Edwards has left, we are having to get players to play out of position, until Matt hopefully returns in the next couple of weeks.
When Gobern gets back to fitness we could finally have some proper cover for Kites on the right and good luck to Mark Davies on his loan spell at Leicester. Like most Wolves fans, I’m hoping that Mark will still be a first team regular in the not too distant future.
So on to Birmingham on Saturday. Probably a more mouthwatering prospect than any of the hundred or so times we seemed to play the Baggies last season.
When we last played Birmingham at Molineux in April 2007, we absolutely dominated the game but ended up on the losing end of a 3-2 result.
Although we lost a game we really should have won, it was still a thoroughly entertaining game and I think we can expect the same in front of the cameras on Saturday.
Because I love my stats, most of them proving completely pointless, I added up the cost of the transfer fees for the players in the likely starting line-up for both teams on Saturday.
Wolves come in at around the £6million mark and the Blues will probably be around £16m.
In fact, in McFadden, who will probably end up costing Birmingham a transfer fee of around £6m, they have a player that costs as much as, well you can probably guess the rest.
Of course the player we are hoping won’t get a sniff near the Wolves goal will be Kevin Phillips, the man who could have still made a difference to Albion’s prosaic start to the season.
The only Englishman to have won the European Golden Boot, Phillips continues to score goals even though he almost qualifies for a senior discount on the tram.
If he has recovered from his man flu, I’m sure Mancienne and Stearman will be able to keep the dwarf and McFadden quiet. There will be some other fascinating battles right across the pitch on Saturday.
Stephen Ward’s ability in the left-back berth will be tested to the full against the pace of Swedish International Sebastian Larsson. In the middle of the park, the ‘2 Q’s’ of Nigel Quashie and Franck Queudrue should prove a great match up against Karl Henry and the hopefully fit David Jones.
Blues fans have been berating all season about how poorly their team has been playing, despite picking up victory after victory and attendances have been quite low at St Andrews.
I think Wolves will expose Birmingham for the average team that they are on Saturday and come away with a resounding 2-0 or 3-0.
I’m sure that a packed Molineux will roar the lads on, to put even more daylight between us and the second city’s second team.
Come on me babbies!
@Wolvesblogger 