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Stephen Ward shines in the face of adversity

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If one player alone captures the Mick McCarthy era at Molineux then surely it must be Stephen Ward.

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If one player alone captures the Mick McCarthy era at Molineux then surely it must be Stephen Ward.

From an unheralded arrival in the early months of the manager's reign, the 26-year-old Dubliner has overcome every challenge thrown in his path to make a significant imprint on the continuing adventures of McCarthy's Wolves.

All the virtues so closely associated with the Wolves boss feature in Ward's story – hard work, commitment, a refusal to buckle in adversity and a determination to make every minute count of what he still considers a privileged opportunity.

And that is not to under-estimate his growing qualities as a left-back, good enough even to force his tetchy international manager Giovanni Trapattoni to abandon his reservations about the Wolves man's capabilities and introduce him to the nation's European Championship qualifying campaign.

Wolves fans, too, are now firm admirers of a player whose unquenchable spirit has defeated the critics who once cynically dismissed him as a McCarthy favourite.

Even this summer, there were cries for a new left-back but the manager has stuck with Ward and been rewarded by performances which have induced songs of praise from the South Bank.

Yes, it feels as if Ward has finally arrived as a Wolves player – just as he feels Wolves have finally arrived in the Premier League.

"Please God, this season we've looked as if we are a Premier League side," he says.

"I don't want to get carried away but when you come up, it's all relatively new and you have the 'wow' factor of being in the Premier League. But your mentality changes over a couple of years. You go to these places at first and all you want to do is make sure you don't let yourself down and get battered. Then that changes and now we feel more at home going there.

"We've still got a lot to learn, though, as last season taught us."

Ward is now one of the genuine stalwarts of a regime which has led Wolves from the aimless drift of their Championship campaign in 2006 to third-season Premier Leaguers, but he feels blessed in the timing of his arrival at Wolves as a 21-year-old.

McCarthy had given him an earlier chance at Sunderland but Ward acknowledged he wasn't ready. The message to go back, work hard while the former Ireland manager kept an eye on him was heeded.

"I signed for Wolves at a great time," he recalls. "Kites (Michael Kightly) had just come in, Andy (Keogh) and myself. We all viewed the opportunity the same.

"We knew it was an unbelievable chance to make a name for ourselves at a really famous club, a big club, and we were all anxious to make the most of it.

"Mick had taken over the previous summer and he was basically starting from scratch. He was looking for the right type of player and quite a few of us had come from lower teams and we all felt we had points to prove.

"The experienced players were brilliant but the four of us kind of bonded together. We had separate apartments but we used to hang out at Kites' most of the time.

Had you come in most mornings you would have found one of us sleeping on the sofa, one in the spare room, we were close. I don't think that mentality has changed.

"We've improved as footballers but our attitude, to just get out there and help the team, help the club, I still see that in us.

"Mick's the gaffer and he will do whatever is in the team's best interests. Being a bad egg is not going to help anybody. You just hurt the team and if the team is bleeding everybody bleeds.

"If he asks me to play up front, I play up front. Look how far we've come. The manager is the best at picking the team, as his record proves, and I will play anywhere."

And the prospect of reaching next summer with a place at a major international tournament behind him will bring Ward's working relationship with McCarthy full circle.

As a 16-year-old with dreams of making it over to England, Ward watched the drama of Ireland's World Cup challenge in 2002 shaken to its core by the infamous McCarthy-Roy Keane dust-up.

"That was a massive story in Ireland at the time," he recalls. "Roy Keane was a special footballer, maybe the best ever for our country, so my main memory of it is one of just sadness.

"Everybody had different opinions of course and I was just a kid wanting us do do well.

"But I think I took the gaffer's side on it – the country has got to be bigger than one man and Roy has realised that since he has gone into management. But the team still did the country proud.

"You got an impression of what the gaffer would be like and when I started working with him he was exactly as I imagined he would be. Dead straight, honest."

"It was absolutely unbelievable working with someone who I had watched on TV as a youngster."

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