Mick McCarthy has hinted Wolves will snub big- money buys this month and continue hunting bargain gems.

Wolves snapped up their first signing of the January transfer window this week with the £500,000 arrival of Adam Hammill from Barnsley.

The signing of Hammill – who has been guaranteed a debut against his former club Liverpool today – was very much in keeping with the club’s tried-and-trusted policy of bringing in young and hungry talent.

And while fellow relegation scrappers Villa have already splashed out the best part of £30m in their bid to stay up, McCarthy insisted Wolves won’t be following suit as he pulled up the drawbridge to big-money signings.

“We’re not going to spend £24m on someone,” said the boss. “We would have to spend a hell of a lot of money or be very fortunate to get better than we’ve got – that’s the upshot of it.

“We spent in the summer, and the other side of that is we’re in the bottom three and signing players in our position is easier said than done.”

The core of Wolves’ squad is still very much the players brought in cheaply during the first two years of McCarthy’s reign and the manager believes that’s still the way forward.

“I still think it’s possible,” he said. “Our’s have been the lifeblood of the club, there’s no doubt about that.

“Yes, we’ve spent bigger money and seen the quality of players such as Ronald Zubar, Nenad Milijas, Stephen Hunt, Kevin Doyle and Steven Fletcher, but the ones who got us promoted and kept us up are the ones who didn’t cost us a great deal and were young and hungry.

“The majority of them are still in the team and around the squad – Wayne came out of the academy, Kevin Foley, Stephen Ward, George Elokobi, Karl Henry, David Jones, Matt Jarvis and Sylvan Ebanks-Blake.

“I remember signing a lot of these players and the feeling was ‘who?’ because they came from Luton, Stoke reserves, or, in Michael Kightly’s case, Grays and within two weeks, he was superb.

“But we have to keep doing that because these lads have been the lifeblood of the club.”

“They’ve got us promoted, they kept us up and they’ll do it again.

“Others have done it: Charlie Adam at Blackpool is fairly ripping it up, Roger Johnson and Scott Dann – who we were in for at the time – have done likewise.

“Birmingham paid good money for them so maybe they’re not the best two examples, but they were still taken out of the Championship and they’ve become really good centre-backs in the Premier League.”

Wolves host Liverpool at a sold-out Molineux this lunchtime in optimistic mood after four wins in eight, and eight goals in two games having given Manchester City a real scare before losing 4-3 last weekend.

And McCarthy believes the fans’ optimism is well placed.

“I think the optimism is justified as well because of recent results and recent performances,” said the boss.

“There’s been a really good feeling about the place.

“There is a sense of optimism – and so there should be.

“You can look at league position, or you can look at performances and results.

“Balance it off, and the way we’ve been playing and the results we’ve had says our league position won’t stay that way.

“We had a really tough start to the season, and I’m not saying we’re going to go rocketing up the league, but we’ll be out of the bottom three at the end of the season.”

Wolves are still without Dave Edwards after the midfielder, who recovered from his hamstring injury, went down with a bug.

And McCarthy said fellow hamstring victim Sylvan Ebanks-Blake is expected to return in the FA Cup fourth round tie at home to Stoke next Sunday.

By Tim Nash