Festive Season Changers From The Past

Okay, we’re dipping deep into the pages of Wolves history here but it’s not easy finding causes for optimism right now.

In our last post before Christmas, we traditionally focus on festive matches from the past and have managed to come up with a few sets of results that offer some crumbs of comfort.

The challenge we set ourselves was to find some instances of when this time of year had been good for Wolves in turning poor runs into good ones.

And we did find several such cases, although they very much belong to distant decades of yesteryear.

In the 1894-95 top flight, Wolves entered Christmas week on the back of a run of eight games without a win and then beat Burnley 1-0 at home on Boxing Day to embark on a sequence of three successive victories. They finished two points and four places above the bottom two.

In 1901-02, they won only one game in eight, including a Christmas Day defeat at Derby, but recovered to win four of their next five League games and ended the season two points and three places out of the bottom two.

In 1925-26 (that’s 100 years ago), the club went eight Second Division games without a win and then won at Oldham on Christmas Day – one of three victories they recorded in only four League games. They finished fourth.

In 1932-33, Major Frank Buckley’s Wolves endured a sequence of only one win in 12 games, including seven defeats in a row, but won 3-1 at Villa on Boxing Day, won two of their next four League games also and ended up one place above the First Division relegation places.

In 1949-50, Stan Cullis’s men went win-less for 12 games, then beat Villa and Derby in their final two games of the year (both by three-goal margins and with Jesse Pye on target in each). It proved to be a marked turnaround in form because Wolves finished as top-flight runners-up to Portsmouth.

Who knows what relevance that is to the hugely troubling 2025-26 season but it is a sign of how past struggles have been turned around immediately after Christmas.

We plan to maintain our usual output of stories by resuming on here over the weekend.