New Season, New Challenges

A number of former Wolves personnel will be starting the new season in different posts following a summer of upheavals.

And it isn’t just players who are on the move – there are several coaches and managers bedding down in fresh posts, too.

The highest-profile switch of the lot is that of Kevin Keen to Liverpool as first-team coach to Kenny Dalglish in succession to Sammy Lee.

The 44-year-old, who played around 50 games for Wolves after being signed from West Ham by Graham Turner in the summer of 1993, has had more than one spell as caretaker manager at Upton Park.

And there is an impressive pedigree behind his post-playing career, his late father Mike having managed Watford, Northampton and Wycombe.

Keen Jnr became the youngest player in Wycombe’s history when, at 15 years 209 days, he played for the Isthmian League club then managed by his dad. 

A division lower than Liverpool, Robert Kelly has had the call back into the game that ends the break following his departure from Sheffield Wednesday.

He has accompanied ex-England boss Steve McClaren to Nottingham Forest, where he will presumably find himself in opposition in 2011-12 to the former Wolves coach and caretaker manager Stuart Gray – now working with Steve Cotterill at Portsmouth.

Peter Shirtliff has gone in as assistant manager at Bury – an appointment which gives us the chance to inform reader Wolves Heroes Martin Heath that, no, his Gigg Lane boss Richie Barker is NOT the former Molineux assistant to John Barnwell.

Telford boy Kyle Bennett,  an England under-18 international groomed by Wolves, was part of the Bury squad who won promotion from last season’s League Two but has since moved to Doncaster.

And his brother Elliott became one of the summer’s higher-profile transfers out of the Championship when he left Brighton in favour of another newly-promoted club, Norwich.

Elsewhere, Sammy Clingan has been appointed by Coventry as captain for the coming campaign.