It is one of the oldest derbies in English football — contested for almost 140 years.
It was the contest at the centre of a thrilling English title race 70 years ago, with Wolverhampton Wanderers edging out FA Cup winners West Bromwich Albion.
For the past three decades, it has been a fixture steeped in vitriol and mutual loathing.
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And on Sunday, the Black Country derby is back in front of fans for the first time in 12 years, but what does one of English football’s less celebrated but most fiercely contested derbies mean to those involved?
The Athletic convened a panel of fans and former players to explain and discuss their most vivid memories of this fixture.
Where?
The Mount Hotel in Tettenhall, close to Wolves’ training ground — not exactly neutral territory, but handy for all but one of the participants, who joined on Zoom.
Who?
Phil Parkes — Born and raised in West Bromwich as an Albion fan, but became a legendary goalkeeper for Wolves, making 382 appearances.
Steve Daley — Made more than 200 appearances and won the League Cup with Wolves before becoming English football’s most expensive player when he joined Manchester City in 1979 for £1.4million.
Adrian Chiles — Journalist, broadcaster, former football presenter and well-known West Brom fan who joined us remotely.
Jason Guy — Wolves fan of almost 40 years, podcaster, writer and author.
Alistair Jones — West Brom season-ticket holder since the 1980s and chairman of Action 4 Albion, the protest group set up to protect the club’s interests.
Steve Madeley — The Athletic’s Wolves reporter who previously covered West Brom and, for the chat, acted as neutral referee.
Madeley: Let’s start at the beginning, which will be different for each of you. What is your first memory of the Black Country derby? Or, failing that, your best memory?
Guy: My first ever away game was December 29, 1990. We played at The Hawthorns and Rob Hindmarch, God rest his soul (Hindmarch died in 2002 from motor neurone disease), scored an equaliser in the 96th minute for Wolves. As a young lad, it was a brilliant moment.
On Christmas morning that year, there were two purply-pink tickets and it was West Brom vs Wolves. I went on the coach and it was being pelted with rocks and everything, but we got into the ground and it was just an amazing atmosphere.
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To this day, I’ve never ever witnessed anything like it because I’d only ever gone to home matches, where it was all happy, smiling, hot dogs and reading your programme.
I hardly saw any of the game because I was being pushed from pillar to post on the old terrace, but I loved it and realised how big the derby was. It was like: “Wow, this is massive.”
Jones: My memories are similar really — but better! (West Brom have got the better of Wolves more often than not in recent times).
I’ve had a season ticket since 1981 and I was named after the man of the match on the Saturday I was born, Alistair Robertson, who later went on to be a Wolves player as well.
The late 1980s was the time when it started to get big and then in the Jack Hayward years (millionaire businessman Hayward owned Wolves in the 1990s and early 2000s), it became a story of the haves and have-nots. Albion were owned by a bloke who sold sheds. The disparity between what the players were worth was massive, but as an Albion fan, we were always proud that we gave them a game.
The memory that lasts with me is the Darren Bradley goal in a 3-2 win. That was the year the Albion boing started and you could genuinely feel the boing when Bradley scored.
Guy: For me, when Steve Bull and Andy Thompson moved across to Wolves, that increased interest in the derby. Robbie Dennison moved not long after that and we’d nicked three players off you who couldn’t really get into your team and they became the backbone of our success during that period.
(Bull, sold by then-Albion boss Ron Saunders to their neighbours, became the club’s record goalscorer with 306 goals, while defender Thompson, who moved at the same time, became another stalwart of their climb from near extinction in the fourth tier to the Championship under manager Graham Turner.)
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Jones: We sold Steve Bull and it should never have happened and he went on to have massive success down the road.
But as the years went on, our hold over Wolves seemed to increase. In the Alan Buckley era, we were getting smashed every week, but we went to Molineux and got a draw. It is just one of those game where funny things happen.
Chiles: I think it was always a massive game, but as Albion fans, we can never decide who we hate more, Wolves or Aston Villa.
It’s waxed and waned and, for me, the stronger I’ve felt about Wolves, the less I felt about Villa, and when I’ve felt strongly about Villa I cared less about Wolves. It often depended on what divisions we were in at the time.
I’m from Hagley, where it was divided between Wolves, Villa and Albion with the odd Bluenose (Birmingham City fan) thrown in.
Parkes: I was born a stone’s throw from The Hawthorns. The first result I look for after Wolves is still West Brom because if you’re born somewhere, you have an affinity to that place.
My first local derby — we got promotion in 1967 and West Brom was our second game of the next season — was sold out; 50,000 people at Molineux. I saved a penalty, scored an own goal and got sent off!
We were winning 3-2 with a couple of minutes to go, Clive Clark, who lived in the same street as me in West Bromwich, was running down the wing for West Brom.
He crossed and it was going straight into my hands and Tony Brown (West Brom’s all-time record goalscorer) dived full length like Superman and punched it in. Fifty thousand saw it, but the referee didn’t.
We were arguing on the halfway line and this head came through the crowd and said: “It’s a goal, you b*****d.” I said: “Have that, you b*****d,” and gave him a smack.
It was Jeff Astle (the West Brom legend). I got sent off for foul and abusive language, which did me a favour, really!
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For my second game against Albion, on a Tuesday night only a couple of weeks later, I was still living in West Bromwich, so instead of going to Molineux to travel back to West Brom, I said I’d meet them there and I went to get the bus from Carters Green.
But there were so many people I couldn’t get on the bus. Two young girls, Wolves fans, in a sports car spotted me at the bus stop and picked me up and took me to the ground. I got there at about 10 past seven for a 7.30 kick-off.
Daley: I scored at Molineux against West Brom and scored at The Hawthorns.
The one at Molineux was better. We were playing towards the South Bank, we were drawing 1-1 and it broke outside the 18-yard box. I thought, “I might as well have a go here.” It flew straight in the top corner and I ran away as though I meant it!
Jones: Do you think the players today, especially the foreign players, understand what it means?
Daley: They say they do, but I don’t think they can because players today, whether they’re foreign or not, don’t mix with the fans like we did. But what even we didn’t see as players was bricks flying at the side of the coach and stuff like that.
I think any player who doesn’t get it before the game will get it when they run out and hear the atmosphere. And they will certainly get it if they lose the game, straight after the final whistle.
Madeley: This game unfortunately can get nasty among the fans. Can you pinpoint when it became nastier?
Chiles: One that sticks in the mind for me was a game at Wolves that we lost 3-1 in 2011. I’ve watched a lot of football and I’ve always thought in terms of the violence that unless you go looking for it, you don’t see it.
But that was one of only two occasions when I thought: “This is horrible.” We arrived on coaches and it was like a scene from the miners’ strike.
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The police were about three deep in a big line around us, protecting us as we walked to the ground, and I thought, “this has got ridiculous, it’s just feeding off itself”. It has become almost sectarian somehow and you hear fans talking about each other — Albion fans talking about Wolves fans as if they’re some kind of sub-species and vice versa.
One of the attractions of football is that there’s an underlying nastiness to it, but it’s gone too far over the past few years. One of the first away games I went to was at Molineux and we won 2-1 at the end of the 1981-82 season and it always sticks in my mind.
And I went two years later in 1984 when we drew 0-0.
We were mid-table in the old Division One and the gates for those games were 19,000 and 16,000 respectively, so it just shows how the game has changed now. There would be twice as many as that if we were playing at Molineux now.
Jones: I think one of the biggest moments was the ‘pie and a pint’ game.
(FA Cup rules mean away clubs are allocated 15 per cent of seats and Wolves complied with the rule in January 2007 by moving their own fans from the popular South Bank to accommodate West Brom supporters. Wolves fans were given a voucher for a pie and a pint in compensation, but West Brom fans left blue and white striped Tesco shopping bags on the gold seats to taunt their rivals.)
If you’re looking for a moment when the atmosphere turned, I think that was pretty pivotal.
Guy: For me, we’re sitting next to each other now, as a Wolves fan and a West Brom fan, we can have a beer and a bit of banter.
But when people get together on matchdays it becomes a pack mentality and a few lads have too many beers and that’s where it sometimes goes too far. Would I be comfortable taking my lad to one of these games? Probably not.
Jones: I’ve got an eight-year-old and I’m not taking him.
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Let’s not forget in the 1980s when Wolves were in real trouble financially, Albion fans helped. They were doing bucket collections around the stadium. We all take the piss but it’s important to retain these rivalries in football.
Madeley: Albion have been in financial trouble of late, albeit not yet at the point Wolves were in during those days, but you can’t imagine Wolves fans doing a bucket collection now.
And you couldn’t imagine Albion fans doing a bucket collection today if the boot was on the other foot. Did the feeling change in the ‘Bully years’?
Guy: I think so. It added massive needle to it because he was born locally, even though he was a Liverpool fan growing up.
Albion were helping their impoverished neighbours at the time and we never expected to pay £60,000 for Steve Bull and Andy Thompson and for them to get us where they did.
Then there was Robbie Dennison and, later, Ally Robertson, who won nothing in over 600 appearances and 19 years at West Brom, came to Wolves and in two years won the Fourth Division, Third Division and Sherpa Van Trophy.
Jones: That was because he’d never experienced football that low!
Madeley: Looking ahead to Sunday, is this a bigger game for Wolves? Because of how well they’ve done in the first half of the season, they almost certainly won’t get relegated, Europe is still unlikely, so the FA Cup is a big chance for them to make some memories this season.
For Albion, is the season all about getting in the play-offs?
Guy: I agree. People speaking about Europe are getting carried away, so to have a cup run would be great.
Jones: I’ve said before, this is a game we didn’t need and I genuinely don’t want a cup run. We haven’t got the squad to be able to cope with it and with where we are as a club, we need to focus on trying to get into the play-offs.
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Guy: That’s a bottle if ever I heard one!
Parkes: Wolves have to put their best side out. There’s no real chance of getting into Europe, we’re not going to get relegated, so we have to go for it in the cup.
Daley: It’s Wolves vs West Brom. Both managers have to put their full side out.
Guy: For Wolves, this game is a must-not-lose because we are the better side and we will be the favourites. People are looking for us to go there and win.
Madeley: Tell us what having this record against Wolves means to you? (Wolves have not won at The Hawthorns in 11 attempts since a 4-2 win, complete with a Iwan Roberts hat-trick, in 1996.)
Jones: I hardly talk about it at all, this 28 years, 9,996 days, it hardly gets mentioned! It is mad and we had the shoe on the other foot to a lesser extent with Stoke fans singing, “We always beat West Brom”.
The game has been intermittent, but it’s not like we haven’t played each other in those 28 years.
Guy: I think it’s the manner it’s happened in as well. If you lose in a derby 1-0 you’re gutted and you feel sick in the pit of your stomach, but to lose 5-1 at home is complete humiliation.
And for me, worse than that 5-1 was the game in the play-offs in 2007. To meet Albion in the play-offs over two legs and lose was gutting. That was a real chance for bragging rights and we bottled it.
Madeley: So what do we think will happen on Sunday?
Chiles: I think most Albion fans have got a bad feeling — well, actually, I have.
Madeley: You’ve always got a bad feeling!
Chiles: Both sets of fans remember the 5-1 game…” (The last time the sides met with fans watching — the two Premier League games in 2021 were played behind closed doors due to the Covid-19 pandemic — West Brom won 5-1 at Molineux.)
Guy: Oh, it took 30-odd minutes to mention that one!
Chiles: Hear me out. Then there was the game under Sam Allardyce behind closed doors when we’d beaten almost no one but we went to Wolves and won.
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I think a lot of Albion fans are thinking, “Hang on, is it our turn to get our arses handed to us on a plate.” If we lose 2-0, fine, but it can’t be four, five, or something like that, please God.
Daley: On paper, Wolves should win the game. They’ve got better players and they’ve got Neto back, who to me is a great player. They have hit a vein of form at the moment and if they can continue that, they should have enough to win.
But West Brom are also in good form and their players will be confident as well.
Jones: There is no question that Wolves have the better squad. We’re not naive and we understand that.
But over the last calendar year, Albion have won more points at home than any other team in the Championship. We’ve only lost three times at home under Carlos Corberan. We’re not used to losing at home.
I think our manager is special and he will look at the strengths of Wolves and set us up to counteract them. I think Wolves will just edge it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it went to a replay.
Parkes: I agree, for the simple reason we haven’t got a goalscorer at the moment and anything can happen in local derbies.
Guy: It will be won in a couple of key areas. The way Wolves counter-attack with pace should be too much for West Brom.
But I think West Brom will be in our faces and they will be really quick to close us down, which worries me because we like to play out from the back and I’m concerned about us making mistakes because of being pressed.
I do think we’ve got the quality to do it. I think it’s going to be a really close game — and we’re going to win it 5-1!
(Top photos: Getty Images)