Captain Karl Henry today challenged Wolves to use the FA Cup tie against Stoke as a launchpad for Premier League survival.

Mick McCarthy’s side go into Sunday’s fourth-round clash having two lost on the bounce against Liverpool and Manchester City and conceded seven goals.

But Henry, who faces his old club having returned to the side against the Reds following two months out with a knee injury, has urged his team-mates to reproduce their recent performances to embark on a new run that can ensure survival in the top-flight.

“We’ve just got to put the last two games to bed and look forward to the Stoke match,” said the midfielder, who sat out as Wolves eased past Doncaster Rovers in the last round.

“We had games prior to Liverpool where we played well against Chelsea, Manchester City and Doncaster and we’ll take that into the Stoke tie and hopefully we can kick on in the FA Cup and use that to get us going again.

“It’s been the sort of season where we haven’t put many runs together whereas last season we had a good run in the second half of the season.

“I think if we have a good performance or good result against Stoke, we can kick on from there.

“We’ve always had good second halves of the season since I’ve been here and we need to do that again now by going on a run.”

Henry is convinced there is enough quality in the current squad with new signing Adam Hammill to keep Wolves up.

The skipper was impressed by the arrival from Barnsley’s first outing last weekend.

“Definitely – I thought Adam Hammill put some great crosses in when he came on,” he said.

“He showed his quality and I’m looking forward to seeing more of him.

“The confidence is still there – these things happen.”

But Henry wants Wolves to avoid a repeat of their below-par display against Liverpool and accused the side of a lack of composure.

“We had a very poor first-half performance and conceding the goal didn’t help,” he said.

“It was wishy-washy and horrible from us and we have to do better than that.

“We didn’t string two passes together in the first half and the goals were disappointing.

“We were poor on the ball – we tried to stop them playing at times, but, whereas we were able to stop them high up the pitch at their place, this time they got their man in behind us too often which just killed us because we were high up the pitch trying to press them.

“It meant that when they found the spare man in the middle of the park, we were nowhere near him and we ended up chasing the game a lot.

“I thought we were 100mph trying to close down and we tried to keep that pace up when we had the ball.

“Sometimes you’ve just got to put your foot on the ball and relax and calm things down a bit, which we didn’t do.

“We did it in the second half but it was too late.”

Henry added: “When we play at our best we get the ball down and get it to our wingers and we attack teams.

“But we didn’t do that and we didn’t give ourselves a chance.

“There were a lot of long balls going to the strikers and we didn’t give ourselves chance to win second balls and the game just went away from us.”