The Wolves class of 2008/2009 reunite for a great night at the museum

Like they had been transported back to the time, 15 years ago, when the magic played out on the patch of grass behind the Hayward Suite in which they shared memories and experiences of such a special season for Wolverhampton Wanderers.

Close your eyes and you could picture Sylvan Ebanks-Blake slotting home the promotion-clincher against QPR in front of the North Bank. And imagine again the thunderous wall of noise which accompanied such a monumental Molineux moment.

Or think back to the glorious pitch invasion which greeted the full time whistle. The hordes of joyous fans who gathered underneath the Directors Box. The Mick McCarthy mic drop. The injured Michael Kightly being mobbed in the dressing room. Mark Little ‘serving’ the champagne, all over the boss’s head.

Every promotion-winning team possess their own unique modus operandi and storyline. An excellent event put on by Wolves Museum at Molineux last week, marking the successes of 2008/09, did much to both reveal and re-iterate just what was so special about the achievements of McCarthy, his dedicated staff and fearless group of players.

The words that so regularly infiltrated the series of on-stage interviews orchestrated by former Wolves keeper Matt Murray probably came as no surprise either to guests or indeed any of the thousands among the Molineux faithful who witnessed that memorable campaign.

Young and hungry. A diet of hard work. Togetherness and camaraderie.

That season provides - even now - a consummate case study in the building of a squad focused largely on recruiting talent from lower leagues with good personalities and a determination to succeed, mixing in a sprinkling of tried and trusted experience, and all founded on an indefatigable relentless to give it absolutely everything which filtered down from the very top.

Not to mention plenty of quality, and attacking verve, which made for some exciting and free-flowing spells of football as Wolves hit top spot in October and blazed a trail – amid one difficult run – all the way to the Championship title. Two pacey and direct wingers. Perm two centre forwards from four. Those were the days, my friend.

“It was such a great time, for me the best time, and I am sure that applies to a lot of the other lads too,” said Kightly, in keeping with the mood of fond nostalgia which pervaded the event.

“We were successful - but we were also spending time with our friends - and everyone always had each other’s backs.

“It’s such a privilege to come back and see all the boys again, and have a beer and a catch up about the old times – it’s a really great occasion.”

Kightly now lives not far from Wolverhampton, and what is pertinent about so many of McCarthy’s men, in echoes of the great Wolves team of the 1970s, is that many have settled in the local area having moved from various outposts across the UK and Ireland.

Couple that with the fact that Murray, ever the consummate host, was no doubt anticipating the odd spot of ribbing from his former team-mates, and it made for an entertaining opening salvo.

“Come on then Foles, how long is it since you saw some of the lads who are here tonight,” arrived Murray’s opening gambit.

“Yesterday,” came the response from Kevin Foley. Delivered deadpan, with perfect timing.

But what did add to the context and profile of the evening was that not only were McCarthy, his trusted assistant Terry Connor and several former members of the Wolves backroom and office staff joined by the majority of players who have stayed in and around the club in different guises, there were one or two who have barely been back to Molineux in the last decade-and-a-half.

Kyel Reid only made three starts during a brief loan spell during that season. He did, however, score the crucial goal to clinch a point at Barnsley which secured Wolves the Championship title. Michael Mancienne made ten appearances on loan in the centre of defence – during which Wolves lost only once – before being recalled by Chelsea in the January and missing out on all the celebrations, although he later returned in the Premier League.

Both were in attendance, and both clearly loved it, a reminder of fleeting but fun times making their contributions to the success of the season.

And, when it comes to the Wolves class of 2008/09, some things never change.

You could hear the booming positivity of George Elokobi long before he entered the room. And Karl Henry arrived at the very last minute. Henry time.

What has also never changed are the friendships, the camaraderie, the togetherness which underpinned so much of this team’s achievements. That has never left them.

“A lot of us still live by each other and see each other now and again, but getting together as more of a group like this, it’s a little bit different,” said Carl Ikeme.

“But we just pick stuff up again so quickly, I’m sat here now and it’s just like we’re back in the changing room again.

“Ready to go out on the pitch, and pay in front of the amazing fans, it was so good to be able to share those experiences.”

Ok then, so what was the secret behind the success of the first Wolves team to secure automatic promotion to the Premier League? And stay there. And become only the third of four Wolves teams to have lifted the second division title.

The Wolves of 15 years ago was very different to the Wolves of the present day.

This was Wolves without the incredible level of investment and transfer fees and salaries shelled out in recent years. This was a far more modest budget both across playing staff and the club in general, making it far more of a battle when promotion was finally achieved than it has been more recently when the club has been more attuned to aiming for the top half of the top tier. Under McCarthy, the whole was always so much more than the sum of its parts.

“When you look at the talent we had in that squad, so many players were spotted by the gaffer and the recruitment team that cost peanuts,” Henry explained.

“The game is so big now, with recruitment and data, and the old school scouting has probably been lost a little bit,” added Stephen Ward, now Sporting Director at Solihull Moors.

“To do what the gaffer did with ‘TC’ and ‘Taff’ (previous assistant Ian Evans), they had a process and looked at the character of player that they brought in.

“We all came with something to prove from clubs lower down the pyramid, and grew into men together – it worked perfectly.

“Nowadays the big clubs have hundreds of staff - there is a separate team coach for staff as well as players at a club like Man City - but at Wolves back then we were such a tight knit group.

“Everyone knew everyone, whatever job you did and whether you worked at the stadium or the training ground, and everyone felt like they were in it together.

“I think that is one of the reasons we achieved what we did and had a successful few years, because it bound us all together.”

Fifteen years can hinder the powers of recall somewhat, but, as the guests spoke on stage, the review of the season was played out on the video screen behind them, bringing back all the golden memories of an exhilarating nine months.

Sam Vokes’ equaliser on debut at a rain-sodden Plymouth; the two bursts of seven-game winning runs; the first half demolition of Nottingham Forest sparked by the blistering wing wizardry of Kightly and Matt Jarvis; a brutal away win at Sheffield United; late wins on the road at Doncaster and Nottingham Forest; the goals of Ebanks-Blake; an Easter weekend maximum return against Southampton and Derby; promotion secured against QPR, the title at Barnsley and then the trophy after the final-day return against Doncaster. Incredible times.

But it wasn’t all plain sailing.

There were disappointing defeats, including at fellow challengers Reading when, as McCarthy recalled on stage, Neill Collins scored an own goal.

“I got sent off as well, gaffer,” the former defender offered from the floor.

McCarthy laughed. “Well, I can’t have a go at you for scoring an own goal and getting sent off because that happened to me once or twice during my career.”

That Reading defeat arrived during a post-Christmas spell when Wolves won just one out of 11 in the league, and, even though both the Royals and Birmingham had failed to capitalise, the gap had been cut to just three points ahead of two key away games in March, at Crystal Palace in midweek and Sheffield Wednesday on the Saturday.

It was now that McCarthy, recognising that everything – himself included - had just become a little too intense, decided to call on the services of a therapist to speak to the players.

That therapist was Bill Stevens, among the backroom staff present at the celebration, whose intervention, after some initial suspicion, proved vital. As Henry explained.

“Bill is now a good friend of mine but, at the time he came in to speak to us, I had no idea who he was.

“In one of the very first sessions, Bill got us all in a room, and got out this orange, which he called the ‘positive orange’.

“You can imagine what it was like for us as a group of players who were struggling at the time – we were all looking at each other and wondering what the hell was going on!

“What he asked us to do, was that a player would have the orange, and then throw it to another player, whilst saying something positive about that person.

“It started off a little bit awkwardly, but after a couple of minutes everyone got right into it, and what it did was allow some of the players who didn’t normally open up too much the chance to speak and everyone started saying some really nice things about each other.

“You’d have people who were in the team throwing it to people that weren’t and saying how important those players were and how valuable their support was, and overall, I think it had a massive impact.

“I remember leaving the room that day and thinking that, during what was a difficult spell in terms of results, the positive orange had definitely brought us all closer together.”

It clearly made an impact on the pitch.

In those two away games, including in awful weather on a midweek night at Selhurst Park, Wolves won both 1-0, the predatory finisher Ebanks-Blake grabbing both of the goals.

Wolves were back on track, back enroute for ultimately the Championship title, and an achievement which has stood the test of time, a decade-and-a-half later.

The players were pretty much consistent and unanimous in their recollections of the need for hard work and togetherness as a prerequisite for success.

Which prompted some pretty intense training sessions.

“We trained so hard, and sometimes people like Karl (Henry) and Neilly (Collins) would be an absolute nightmare,” Ikeme recalls.

“I love Neilly to bits but he didn’t half moan and Karl as well, was so demanding and competitive.

“As soon as we got into the changing rooms it was all forgotten, and I look back now and value that time so much – we definitely had something special.”

“Yes, I was demanding,” Henry responded with a laugh, whilst acknowledging he was sometimes pulled into line by McCarthy because of it.

“I was a local lad, from Ashmore Park, and to play for Wolves was surreal.

“I never wanted to take anything for granted, and every day I would bust a gut, whether it was training or in a game.”

The demands and pushing of each other made it very much a squad effort behind the overall promotion.

Ebanks-Blake led the way with the goalscoring, and Chris Iwelumo in the first half of the season, but Andy Keogh and the then 18-year-old Vokes played a key part.

The midfield and defensive positions were sometimes changed, but one example of that squad ethic was Collins’ late winner at Doncaster before Christmas, only coming into the starting line-up minutes before the kick off after Mancienne suffered a severe migraine, going on to head home Kightly’s cross in front of a packed and jubilant away end.

“I was nervous that day, because the team had been on a good run of form and, when you come into it, and it doesn’t go well, you’re the first person people are going to look at,” Collins reflects.

“But Kights was probably the best I played with in my career at delivering a set piece, and he put it in there for me to score with five minutes to go.

“It was another big moment and coming into the changing room afterwards, top of the league at Christmas, was incredible.

“Those are the things you remember, not just the moment on the pitch, but afterwards, and that feeling of togetherness.”

Collins is one of so many from that squad who have gone on to coach or manage, or stay in football in one capacity or another.

And speaker after speaker put a lot of that down to the influence of McCarthy and Connor.

“So many of the boys are now involved in coaching and management and I think Mick has a big part to play in that,” said Henry.

“He left a huge imprint on me and will have had an impact in the way I go on in my coaching career.”

Henry also reflected favourably on how Connor would do so much extra work after training with those players not in the first team, but at the same time using the first teamers as part of the drills, keeping them grounded whilst also maintaining that vital squad ethos.

And Mancienne recalled the moment he came for talks around his loan move from Chelsea and decided to meet McCarthy alone without his representative.

“’Where’s your agent’, Mick asked me,” Mancienne recalled.

“I told him he wasn’t with me and that I had decided to come up on my own.

“’You’ll ******* do for me,’ he replied!”

“Mick was like a father figure to us,” added Kightly.

“Even if he pulled you into the office, and you didn’t agree with some of the things that he said, all of us respected him.”

There were so many other similarly fun stories mixed in with the informative.

Collins on changing his name in Murray’s phone to that of McCarthy, and then texting the goalkeeper on a coach trip asking him to go to the front to speak to the manager. Who wasn’t best pleased to have his phone call interrupted.

Elokobi recalling how Murray bought him a special gift to help him through his recovery from serious injury, initially music to the host’s ears, before announcing he has kept it, ‘in his loft’!

“That’s where I keep all my memorabilia,” argued the man from Cameroon, who also received a rousing ovation to mark his FA Cup heroics as Maidstone boss last season.

On a night which included a heartfelt message passed on by former CEO Jez Moxey, who couldn’t attend due to being out of the country, the last word was fittingly left for McCarthy.

Having spent his entire playing and managerial career with such an open, direct and forthright attitude, there was perhaps a rare moment of letting his guard down and revealing of emotion when describing his near six years in the Molineux hotseat.

“It was wonderful, and I just want to thank all the fans and the players for the support and everything they did for me,” he said.

“I was disappointed with how it all finished but much of it was among the best times in my career and there will always be a place in my heart for Wolves and Wolverhampton.”

In some ways, as Foley claimed, 15 years ago feels like yesterday. “It has flown by,” reflected the title-winning Player of the Season.

In others, as suggested by Kightly, it is more like “a lifetime ago.”

But on the night that a new exhibition was revealed in the Museum, in tribute to the Championship winners of 2008/09, and those feelings flooded back of the football and the fun which underpinned their success, the prevailing emotion was one of clarity.

Clarity that their place in the annals of Wolves history is very much assured.

* Wolves Museum, which has enjoyed a recent refurbishment as well as the addition of the 2008/09 exhibition, is open every day this summer, from 10.30am-4.30pm. Stadium tours are also available. Visit events.wolves.co.uk for details.