Familiar First-Day Foes In Town
Jimmy Murray – scourge of Manchester City.
Rayan Ait-Nouri no doubt has better things to do with his time than to submerge himself in the record books. If he had had a strong interest in the archives, though, he might have started to suspect that he wouldn’t be kept waiting too long for his first Molineux return.
Since the Second World War, no team have been in opening-day opposition to Wolves more often than Saturday’s visitors.
So Manchester City’s newly-signed marauding left-back shouldn’t be too surprised he is coming back to these parts so quickly.
There were no such cosmoplitan names across the period we will home in on for this piece. ‘Jimmy Murray’ was about as exotic as it got, the prolific inside-forward coming to the fore more than once in the head-to-head fixtures.
Since the British game properly resumed following the hostilities, the League computer has thrown the clubs together five times on the day the curtain goes up – no fewer than three of those meetings having come on August 18.
And Wolves have had by far the better of the clashes, especially at Molineux, where they have run riot in a fashion we can only dream about counting down to this weekend.
Opening-weekend clashes:
August 23, 1947: Manchester 4 Wolves 3 Goals by Tom Galley (penalty), Johnny Hancocks and Dennis Westcott were not enough to secure any reward against the newly-promoted hosts but Wolves recovered magnificently by hammering Grimsby 8-1 four days later.
August 18, 1951: Manchester City 0 Wolves 0 City had gone down and come back up again by the time of this repeat fixture; one that produced the rarity of a goalless stalemate between teams who would finish next to each other in the bottom half of the First Division.
August 18, 1956: Wolves 5 Manchester City 1 Murray’s four goals and one from the debutant Harry Hooper emphasised the gulf between the sides on this occasion – one further underlined when Stan Cullis’s men completed a high-scoring League double in the December.
Ted Farmer pictured tormenting Saturday’s visitors.
August 18, 1962: Wolves 8 Manchester City 1 Another individual four-goal blast, this time by Ted Farmer, saw Wolves home to a crushing 8-1 victory to which Murray (later to move to Maine Road), Alan Hinton and Terry Wharton also appeared on the score-sheet.
August 8, 1999: Manchester City 0 Wolves 1 Robbie Keane’s powerful first-half finish brought Wolves both points in the brilliant Irishman’s penultimate game for them. He scored again the following weekend against Portsmouth and then departed for another team clad in sky blue, Coventry.
That isn’t the end of the early-meeting story featuring Wolves and City. In 1955-56, 1984-85, 2018-19 and 2020-21, City were the opponents for Wolves’ second home game of the season. And, in 1953-54, 1965-66 and 1968-69, there was a gold and black exodus to Maine Road for the second game of the campaign.