Hi Ho!Wolverhampton Wanderers F.C., was founded in the 1860's and since has won major honours including the top division champions, European champions and all four division championships available. With the newly built 30,000 seater stadium costing 3 million pounds, Wolves F.C. is making way for the next step, the Premier League for 2001/02.
| So, after 306 goals and 561 games for Wolves, this is it. The end.
No more aeroplane-like celebrations, no more of those pumping elbows, no more Bully. Following months of worry over all those knee problems, the final curtain has fallen with surprising haste.
Just like Billy Wright - probably the only player to have made a bigger impact on Wolves' history since World War Two - Stephen George Bull has chosen pre-season to announce his retirement.
Unlike Billy, who decided his time was up when he saw young pretenders overtaking him on training runs over Cannock Chase, Bully had little choice.
Mother nature made his mind up for him.
As he chatted yesterday about life out of the second skin that was his beloved gold and black No 9 shirt, the 34-year-old former factory worker and England international displayed the cussed joint that has put a full stop to the rags-to-riches story; swollen and with nothing like the definition of the right knee which has also had its fair share of batterings.
There's a great tendency for footballers to look only as far as their next save, their next goal, their next game. But, for the vast majority life as an ex-player spans much longer than life as a player.
With that in mind, Colin Lee, whose own career as a prolific scorer was ended by chronic hamstring problems, is glad Bull is walking away from the profession he loves, rather than waiting to be pushed away in a wheel- chair.
And what wonderful memories he leaves for a generation of Wolves fans.
In particular, in those distant, revivalist Third and Fourth Division title-winning days in which he became the first man ever to score a half century of club goals in successive seasons.
Hereford, Darlington, Chester, Hartlepool - it didn't matter. In the wide-open spaces of a crumbling Molineux or in the pokey surroundings of Somerton Park and Layer Road, there was no difference. Defences wilted and Wolves fans celebrated.
A new hero had risen to the throne vacated a few years earlier by King' John Richards and it was an intoxicating experience to witness the march he inspired through the divisions.
If there's one spell that stands out as being more golden than any other, I would say it was the one just before Christmas in 1988, when he scored four at home to Preston, four more when Port Vale came to town and three against visiting Mansfield. Not bad for three weeks' work!
As the best single day, Wolves fans would probably plump for the New Year afternoon at Newcastle at the very start of this decade - when four more beauties flew in - or perhaps for either of the days on which Bull scored late winners against Albion.
England recognition duly came, first with the under-21s and B-team, then with the senior side.
And, when the big day came there was a predictable outcome. On his debut under Bobby Robson, Bull stunned Hampden Park with a goal that was swept in with uncomplicated, yet amazing, single-mindedness.
The World Cup, the career-highlight for so many, drove Bull to distraction. He was less keen on foreign climes then, and the frustration of life largely on the bench was compounded by his struggle to gain approval from the recognised superstars of the English game. But his record of four goals in 13 caps, more than half of them from just parts of games, was a good one.
Life in this division has certainly been less plentiful than at the Football League basement, but he overtook Richards as Wolves' all-time rcord scorer with his winning goal at Derby in the spring of 1992 and went past the 200 mark a few months later.
In the redevloped Molineux and with bigger-name company after the ending of his memorable partnership with Andy Mutch, he accumulated steadily and there were sporadic appeals for his recall to the England side.
He last played in Graham Taylor's first autumn in the job.
When Taylor was recruited by Wolves as the intended antidote to his bitter Lancaster Gate experience, Bull plundered the equaliser at Tranmere that ensured the club's first-ever place in the First Division play-offs. You could weep for him that he has never made it to the Premiership - a route Taylor offered him with £1.5m move to Coventry that the player himself rejected four summers ago.
Clearly, unlike his best Molineux pal Andy Thompson, he was never going to play his football anywhere else, and Mark McGhee pulled off a PR master stroke when he said upon his arrival in 1995 that Bull was good for another hundred goals.
As it turned out, the striker made it just past half way to that additional century, his 300th goal for the club coming with characteristic drama via a late winner against Bradford in yet another comeback from injury.
There was nothing at the start of 1998-9 to suggest the trail had gone cold. In tandem with Robbie Keane - still in short trousers when Bull made that now famous £64,000 move down the A41 from Albion - the No 9 opened with a flurry of scoring until injury cut him down after the goalless draw at Crewe in early October.
In mid-winter, it appeared the railway town would prove the end of the line. Bull admitted some weeks later he was facing the make-or-break, but promised to give it "one hell of a go" at coming back once more.
True to form, he made it, although his failure to score another first-team goal was poor reward for his efforts.
Today, for the first time, Steve Bull - last on the scoresheet in the home win over Bury last September - woke up as an ex-player. Maybe even with a slight hangover.
He has given us magnificent memories and has carved his indelible mark in football history.
More importantly, he has hopefully blown the full-time whistle on himself early enough to be able to brush round those seven-year-old and three-year-old sons of his, and show them just how he did it.
Steve Bull factfile
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