Flowers’s Record On The Line

Matt Doherty is in sight of an obscure piece of Molineux history if he can rediscover his knack for coming up with vital goals.

The Irishman has been one of the freer-scoring Wolves defenders across the decades with his 33 goals for the club to date – a total that is all the more impressive for the fact he has never been seen as a penalty specialist.

And if he nets again at or beyond the end of this season, he will have managed something that was beyond Steve Bull, John Richards, Kenny Hibbitt, Peter Broadbent and all the other greats to have scored in gold and black.

Ron Flowers still holds the record as the man to have had the longest time span between his first and final Wolves goals, having hit the target on his debut at home to Blackpool on September 20, 1952 and signed off with his 37th and last in the 8-2 slaughter of Portsmouth 13 years, two months and seven days later on November 27, 1965.

Now Doherty is in line to take over as a Wolves goalscorer of even greater longevity, although his two spells here have come either side of stints at Tottenham and Atletico Madrid.

The Republic of Ireland international first netted for Wolves with a floating header in a 3-1 Championship defeat at Nottingham Forest on March 9, 2013.

That means that if he scores for the club again in a League or cup game any time after the middle of next May, he will have achieved a longer gap than Flowers did between his first and last Wolves goals.

Doherty last netted a senior Wanderers goal in the defeat at Chelsea in January and therefore hasn’t yet put 12 years between his first and latest entries on the club’s score-sheet. But the fact he is still playing gives him a chance of doing that and considerably more.

Flowers’s club goal-scoring feats with Wolves stretched across 13.185 years and, among other post-war greats, Jimmy Mullen achieved a span of 12.887, Peter Broadbent 12.841, Derek Parkin 12.715 and Kenny Hibbitt 12.572.

To show we haven’t forgotten the top two marksmen in Wolves’ history, Bully put approaching 12 years between his first and 306th goals here and Richards 12 years minus one day.

Doherty, who turns 34 in January, also continues to climb the Legends area of this website. Having recovered from wrist surgery, he made his 380th appearance for the club at Sunderland on Saturday.

He is currently 18th in the list but has both Phil Parkes and Alf Bishop only two games ahead of him.

We promised further insight into Wolves’ goal-scoring past when we posted our piece on October 20 about Paul Ince being their oldest ever marksman.

So we are closing this article by posing the question as to who has had the shortest gap between his first and last Wolves goals.

We yet again thank Scott Pritchard and the remarkable www.wolvescompletehistory.co.uk website for informing us that this claim to fame belongs to Shaun Bradbury, whose only two goals for the club – in a 3-1 home win over Millwall on May 1, 1993 – came a mere eight minutes apart.