Across the pond

At last it has happened. The heroes of my boyhood in the Old Gold shirts have won a place in the Premiership next year with their 1-0 victory over Queens Park Rangers at Molyneux yesterday. It is sixty years to the month from the proudest day of my youth, when Wolverhampton Wanderers won the FA Cup on 30 April 1949 before a crowd of 98,920 at Wembley Stadium. I could not afford the price of a Wembley ticket but I was there the following Saturday, in my usual place on the first terrace bar behind the goal at the Molyneux end, to witness the triumphant parade of glittering trophy around the pitch. The captain was the bald-pated Stan Cullis, who went on to manage Wolves for the most successful decade of their history. My particular hero, the blonde cropped left half, Billy Wright, played a major part in those glorious ten years, and went on to captain the England team.

The splendid picture above of Sylvan Ebanks-Blake celebrating after scoring the goal that promoted Wolves to the Premier League is by Peter Ford/Action Images. The old black and white picture below of Billy Wright carrying the Cup in 1949 is from PA Photos.

But for nearly all the Saturday evenings of the last fifty years I have been plunged into depression as soon as I heard the football results. Even worse than the depressions which hit the whole town in my youth, whenever the Wolves lost. In those days, they lost sometimes, but there was still the hope that they might come back and win the Cup or the League. But since 1984 Wolverhampton Wanderers, one of the founder members of the Football League, have spent only one year in the top division.

Yesterday’s victory changes all that. Momentous though it was for all natives of Wolverhampton, it warranted only one sentence on the main BBC Television News. Next season it will be different, because Wolves will be in the Premiership, not even invented when I was following football.

But today it is the only league that matters to the national media.