Fan Column: Winless Wolves parallels to 1983 pain

November coming to an end, our best players sold, rock bottom of the league without a solitary win to our name, a former Wolves’ defender at the helm appointed by unpopular owners and a daunting away trip to our nearest neighbours next up. 

Spool way back to 1983 and the parallels are uncanny. Mind you, first things first, anybody suggesting that the Fosun era in any way replicates the Bhatti nightmare clearly did not follow Wolves back then or is suffering from acute amnesia. 

Trust me; take your current despair then multiply it by 1,000 and you have an idea of what we endured back in the mid-eighties. No win in the opening 14 games back then; Andy Gray just sold on the cheap, our former centre-half and now harassed boss Graham Hawkins hoping for divine intervention and a challenging local derby to follow. 

Villa Park this Sunday, The Hawthorns that Saturday, in both instances Wolves in total disarray with expectation levels bordering around zero. I’m not expecting a miracle in Birmingham this weekend but one occurred back then in Sandwell and I wasn’t expecting that either. 

Danny Crainie won’t be getting his photograph in the Wolves Hall of Fame that’s for sure, but for a few brief ecstatic moments he lifted a ghastly pallor engulfing the club then just as it does right now. Almost inexplicably, given our appalling state, he rifled home two remarkable long-range strikes that Sir Bobby Charlton would have been proud of. 

Us Wolves’ fans at the Smethwick end were as stunned as the Albion supporters on the Brummie Road and when Wayne Clarke added a third, that elusive first win was sealed with levels of delight matched only by equal measures of astonishment. 

But of course, it made no difference; Wolves finished the season haplessly adrift before spiralling to depths of unimaginable humiliation. As for Crainey, he added only a solitary goal to his Hawthorns brace and returned to Scotland to continue and complete a career that scaled few heights. 

But he’s remembered in this neck of the woods; the archetypal 15 minutes of fame in a nutshell. What we’d give for an outlandish repeat from a Wolves’ player at Villa Park. 

Some suggestions of signs of improvement against Palace. I don’t subscribe to that myself. Clutching at straws? Well, why not!