Terry Connor deserves Wolves show of support

Terry Connor has stepped into the Wolves hot-seat amid an outpouring of frustration from fans, now he needs their backing writes MARTIN?SWAIN.

Surrounded by all the negativity these letters reflect, it appears to be hard for Wolves fans to be positive right now.

But that is the only way out of the predicament in which the club finds itself now.

No-one would have guessed when Mick McCarthy's sacking followed the 5-1 hammering at the hands of Albion which shunted the club back into the relegation positions, Wolves would turn to a face so familiar for a new way forward.

But to Terry Connor comes the task of calming the stormy seas around Molineux and Wolves fans, in the time-honoured fashion of the devoted, can only throw their support behind a genuinely decent and equally-impassioned gold and black servant to help him pull their team round.

Connor's first home game will be against Blackburn Rovers by which time he may or may not have established some momentum to his interim regime.

You have to admire the man's pluck. He was asked, obviously, if he wanted to whistle up someone to help him from the ranks of football's unemployed but O'Connor deferred. One result, he suggested, one positive, morale-changing result would do more good than an army of new coaches out there on the training pitches.

But there is much resting on his shoulders, not least the peace and contentment of the men seen as the real culprits of this fractious episode, owner Steve Morgan and his chief executive Jez Moxey.

Morgan stands accused of leaping before he looked in the sacking of McCarthy and then dithering over replacements, veering wildly from one style of candidate to another. Moxey is under fire because . . . well, because Moxey remains Molineux's pantomime villain when the crowd scenes get ugly.

They are charges Morgan countered with increasing fervour yesterday as Connor's appointment was introduced to the football world.

"What on earth have we done that we should be embarrassed about?" he argued, taking umbrage at the criticism of his handling of these past 11 days and insisting Wolves had only been held up to public ridicule by the breaking of confidences elsewhere in the chain.

Each of you will have your own opinion on this but with a new man in the post it is now just so many spilled tears.

What matters for Wolves are the games to come and the challenge to Connor to somehow extract something out of this group of players that had been eluding McCarthy over this season of disappointment.

Connor is being introduced as a good deal more than a McCarthy clone. He is his own man, it is said, with his own ideas about how the team should shape up which could see some significant changes over the short-term opportunity he now has to strike out for some sort of long-term managerial career.

His elevation to the front-line has surprised many in and around Wolves. 'TC' is an absolute natural out on the training ground as anyone who has ever witnessed his sessions would testify. But he has never before been seen as a man who would relish 'the big chair'.

As much as he will want his bond with the players to thrive, he will know that this cannot always be possible when there are some he must drop, substitutions with which others will not agree and no-one else to take the brunt of the flak.

Managing a team is an opportunity for huge satisfaction which carries on its flip side a potential for vicious criticism; Connor will have to be strong enough to cope with that should things go further awry.

But he knows the club, he knows what a bear pit Molineux can be, he knows how the support can be as intimidating as it is inspiring.

He is plugged into the mainframe of Wolverhampton Wanderers FC.

He has been a coach at Wolves since John Ward recommended him 13 years ago, working with firm approval from Colin Lee, Dave Jones, Glenn Hoddle and McCarthy. It is rare that a coach is able to satisfy so many different masters with his work especially in an area of the job so important to what each of those managers demanded from their teams.

That throughout this time, Connor was never before seen as a No.1 himself is either a tribute to his loyalty or a perception of his strengths.

Now, though, he has to prove that after an angst-laden search for a successor across the wide spectrum of available candidates, the answer was always closest to home.

He has the games to do it. After Newcastle comes Fulham away, Blackburn and Manchester United at home and then Norwich away. He's starting on 21 points in a glut of five clubs most obviously threatened by the drop; most guesses suggest another 15 will be needed to give Wolves a chance of staying up.

Four wins and three draws? Well, it's not beyond the realms of possibility but a squad shell-shocked by events during and since its last match needs to re-emerge with fresh energy and a renewed self-belief, both of which were ebbing away under McCarthy.

There was a revealing moment in yesterday's brief introduction when he was asked whether his dressing room title would change: "Are you now gaffer or still TC?"

"TC," he answered. "You have to earn the right to be called 'gaffer.'" How the players are addressing him a month from now will say much about this gamble's progress.