Stowell Sadness At Latest Drop

No prizes for guessing Mike Stowell’s name but who were the other three former Wolves players on view the last time Leicester were relegated to League One?

The highly experienced keeper coach was with Plymouth for their 1-1 draw at Bradford on Tuesday night and was upset to learn at the end that his long-time former employers had gone down for the second consecutive season.

Their 2-2 home draw with Hull doomed them to the drop with two matches still to play and means they face the ignominy of playing in the third tier ten years on from thrilling the nation in winning the Premier League title by an astonishing ten points.

It is also nine seasons since they reached the quarter-final of the Champions League and only five since they won the FA Cup. It is some nosedive. 

When they went down from the top flight in 2023, they bounced straight back up as champions, with Conor Coady in their ranks. This time, they have hurtled straight through. 

Ian Holloway was in charge when they fell from the Championship in 2008 and I recall being present in a reporting capacity and seeing a disconsolate Stowell heading along the touchline after a 0-0 last-day draw at Stoke had failed to save them.

They came back up at the first attempt, with Nigel Pearson having taken over as manager, and then won the Championship under the same leadership in 2014 before the glory of their 5,000-1 Premier League title conquest under Claudio Ranieri.

There’s hope for them, then, amid the current gloom at the King Power Stadium but who were the other familiar names on show in the goalless stalemate at the Britannia Stadium 18 years ago that lifted Stoke into the top division for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century?

One was Richard Stearman, who was playing his 130th and final Leicester game before moving to Molineux that summer. A year later, he headed the goal that beat Doncaster and kept the party going for Mick McCarthy’s already promoted Wolves.

One of Leicester’s unused substitutes that Sunday afternoon in the Potteries was Jamie Clapham, the experienced former Ipswich left-back who had become one of McCarthy’s early signings in 2006.

Even more obscurely, Stoke had a former Wolves player in their line-up, too, but one who didn’t play in the first team here. Their keeper was the on-loan Carlo Nash, who had a brief loan spell at Molineux in 2000-01.

Nash departed from the Potteries after that game and Stoke’s main keeper in their Premier League years was Asmir Begovic, who, by considerable coincidence, is now at Leicester and blundered for one of Hull’s goals two nights ago.  

*Still on an East Midlands theme, we are very keen to reconnect with Leicestershire-based Wolves fan Michael Roberts on the subject of some of Johnny Kirkham’s career keepsakes.

Michael kindly emailed us promptly after our February 25 story about trying to raise money for charity through the sale of two framed early-1960s squad press photographs belonging to the late Wolves wing-half. If any of our readers know Michael and have contact details for him (other than an email address), please share them with us – with his permission, of course.