By Scott Cooper
May 15 2002

With Dave Jones at the helm, and spending over 6 months in the top two, we all felt this was going to be our season, however as we all know, football`s a funny old game... The start of the season witnessed the best start for Wolves in several years, an eleven game un-beaton run which was finally put to death by Crewe was mainly down to the players the new coach had brought in.

Dave Jones totally re-vamped the squad, bringing in experienced players which towards the end of the season would cost him over £14 Million Pounds. The likes of Kennedy, Rae, Cameron and Newton were brought in to strengthen the Midfield and Sturridge, Miller and Blake were all drafted in to bolster the attack.

For once watching Wolves was enjoyable, fans came to Molineux like they used to and the atmosphere improved a great deal. This was the real Wolves, the football was great, the goals were going in, the defence was keeping clean sheets, we were top of the league, nothing could have been better.

We were fully focused on going up, as far as we were concerned it was in the bag. 11 points clear, we were coasting, what could possibly go wrong?

What many of us failed to do was to keep a watchful eye on the teams below us because, unknown to us, our bitter rivals, West Brom were catching us up. We slipped points, the goals stopped and before we knew it, we were going into the final game of the season in third place, behind West Brom.

Now what happened next really did hurt, yes as you all know, West Brom were promoted, we had missed out, so off to the play-offs it was for us.

4000 confident die hard Wolves fans travelled all the way to Norwich to watch their beloved team play in the first leg of the Play-Offs. I don’t want to go into detail about the game, id just like to point out that it was our worst performance all season and we lost 3-1.

Now I for one was very confused, how could we put in the worst performance of the season in the biggest game of the season? This puzzled me but I decided not to dwell on it, afterall we had another shot.

The Home leg to Norwich witnessed one of the greatest atmospheres inside Molineux, however the football on the pitch failed to meet the atmosphere in the stands, we won, but it wasn’t good enough. We were out, and Division one football it would be next season……..again!

What did go wrong?

In my opinion the season went wrong away to Nottingham Forest, we gave two silly goals away and we did exactly the same against Birmingham. The real shock to the system was the home game against Grimsby. Not only did we play poorly but we lost Kevin Muscat for a stupid elbow and we lost Kennedy through injury, the suspension and injury lasted to the end of the season.

Now to this day I am unable to pinpoint exactly what went wrong. Something must not have been right behind the scenes, but whatever it was must be changed for next season, when maybe, just maybe it will be our year.