Stephen Ward

I watched the latest of the Old Gold Club unofficial"confessions of the bomb squad" interviews last night. Wardy was with big Mikey and Lumes talking a lot about his switch to left back (a lot) and the double relegation years.

Interesting part, and a slightly different take from the others that have been interviewed recently was that he sensed that the change in attitude to the longer serving players came half way through the championship relegation season, by which I guess he meant after the Luton debacle. He felt "the club" were looking to move the old guard on at that stage and that they would go with youth for the rest of the season. Ward didn't really blame any of the managers for the situation and in fact said that the changes that Solbakken wanted to make required time, more than 3 or 4 months. Karl Henry for example was quite scathing of Jackett, but then he's out of the game now so can probably say what he wants.

The conclusion you make is that it was Morgan & Moxey that were trying to drive the changes but didn't bank on their policy being so disastrous that it would lead to relegation. But then they persisted and the bomb squad became the de-facto scapegoats. I remember feeling at the time that if M&M were really serious about offloading these players, isolating them and thus labeling them as toxic was hardly going to make them attractive to other clubs. Whilst they remained at Wolves they were a symbol of failure that Moxey and Morgan could point at and shift more and more of the blame towards. On the surface they were available for transfer and loan, in reality they were excluded from training, excluded from any matches that would allow them to showcase their fitness and weren't even allowed proper training facilities. Of course those players and others deserved their share of blame for successive relegations, but for the CEO and owner to offload their share on to those players was cowardly and cynical.

It was also shrewd however and bought them time. Had we not got back in to the Championship at the first attempt, there's a good chance that Morgan would have been lumbered with a huge under performing asset, fans on his back for many years and a febrile atmosphere around the club that would have made it impossible for them to even attend games in person. Their actions damaged players careers but got them off the hook long enough to get the club back on track and in to a saleable condition. They might argue their actions facilitated the success we now enjoy, others might say that it could have been achieved anyway without employing such diversionary tactics.