Wolves players have admitted the heavy defeats against Arsenal and Chelsea had taken their toll and affected them for the setback against Birmingham.

Mick McCarthy’s side host fellow strugglers Bolton on Saturday having lost three in a row, including four-goal reverses against the London duo.

Those results have left the club four points from safety after eight games without a win. But club-record £6.5million signing Kevin Doyle believes the results against Arsenal and Chelsea have hit the players more than they thought.

The striker said: “I think the two results against Chelsea and Arsenal hurt us a bit and we need to recover from them.”

Goalkeeper Marcus Hahnemann agreed with Doyle, admitting belief has taken a dip and reckons they were still scarred by the heavy losses against Arsenal and Chelsea for the Blues game.

The American said: “We were always likely to lose against Arsenal and Chelsea, so maybe we dwelled on that too much and let it affect Sunday’s performance.”

Doyle believes Wolves can’t afford to dwell on the defeats again, with another team they need to beat at Molineux this Saturday.

He said: “Sunday’s game against Birmingham was the most disappointing. We still had chances to get something from the game. But I think we need to forget about it and go and win the next one.

“We’ve shown some good performances up until the last few weeks so we just need to get our confidence back. We had Chelsea and Arsenal but before that we had three good results.”

Doyle admits Wolves weren’t good enough to get anything from the Blues game, after a poor first-half performance saw them booed off at half-time.

He said: “We had some chances, but in the firs- half we weren’t good enough to win the game. We’ll get our heads around it. It’s 14 games into the season so it’s not the be-all and end-all, but it was a massive match for us and we have another one on Saturday.

“It’s been difficult for the team – all of us. We need to get ourselves out of a bad patch that’s all.”

Hahnemann added: “Everyone is down because we’ve dropped points and Sunday was one of those days.

“Everyone is really frustrated, but that’s good in a way because we need to figure out how we can put things right and gain that belief back.

“Hopefully we can build that back up this week because we’ve got a huge game on Saturday.”