Kennedy provides trump card

writes: Wolves are adamant that they will not be badgered into a takeover deal by the kind of outside pressures Graeme Souness is employing.

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But they know the Scot will, as he says in his statement today, be ticking the right boxes for many supporters frustrated at the club's new steady-as-she-goes policy in advancing Wolves back to the Premiership.

Souness is not everyone's cup of tea. His management record is patchy, his approach to football uncompromising bordering on the confrontational. But he has charisma and contacts and a fiercely-driven passion for the game.

Now the 53-year-old Scot has introduced what he clearly believes is his trump card - Brian Kennedy. His lifelong friend is one of the UK's most spectacularly successful businessmen who certainly gives the Souness consortium a boardroom 'gravitas' which will doubtless further convince supporters of this bid that Wolves should at least get them round the negotiating table.

Kennedy has proved at Sale Sharks that he can take a sporting molehill and turn it into a mountain. Fans fed up of staring up at football's distant summits will be only too excited to learn of his willingness to now turn his sights on Molineux.

The Souness camp have been rebutted so far by Wolves' insistence that the £20m offer made in writing is "ignificantly below" the level being discussed with other potential investors.

It is the appointment of Rothschild, however, as brokers which is now key to the changeover of power. Their experts will surely approach Souness without any of the baggage of the last uncomfortable fortnight and seek a breakthrough.

There is no patience in football; only a ferocious spotlight and an insatiable demand by its public for their team to win, win win. Those are the rules Souness has played to all his life.