Matt Doherty: We have strength to stop the rot

Tuesday night's miserable 3-0 defeat to Middlesbrough in the Capital One Cup continued their indifferent start to the season.

Wolves have failed to pick up where they left off last season and are languishing in 18th place in the early Championship standings.

A much-changed team took to the field at the Riverside but the nature of the heavy defeat will be of great concern to the Wolves hierarchy.

However, Doherty – who made his fifth start of the campaign – backed Wolves to improve.

The 23-year-old said: "We've not gone through this for a while, we're used to winning games, we went through it once last season when we lost five in a row but we came out of that one and hopefully we can do the same. We're obviously good enough to do it.

"Every loss is disappointing and this is no different. I know we didn't have our strongest team out but we still thought we could win it.

"It looks pretty bad to lose 3-0, it looks like a heavy loss, but it felt like we were in the game for quite a lot of it.

"The goals we conceded, they're mistakes throughout the team, missed clearances, and it cost us."

Doherty this week put pen to paper on a new three-year contract. With Wolves having the option of a fourth year, it potentially ties him to the club until 2019.

"Obviously I was in the last year of my contract, they've been negotiating for quite a while so I knew they wanted to keep me, since before the summer," he said.

"I feel I have had a lot of experiences of both sides of the game and I can maybe pass that on to people like Dominic Iorfa and Kortney Hause who haven't yet played as many games."

n Wolves' third-choice shot-stopper Aaron McCarey has joined Portsmouth on an emergency 28-day loan to solve the Pompey's keeper crisis.