What if Jim Melrose would have stayed at Wolves?

Death, taxes and never falling in love with a loan player. The three certainties of life, according to Benjamin Franklin.

One of those may not be factually correct when it comes to Franklin’s quote. But it can often ring true in the world of football.

Those players that are borrowed, and fit in, and excel, to such an extent that being called back or returned to their parent club causes untold angst and devastation to those that they leave behind.

For any Wolves fans watching the club 40 years ago, then Jim Melrose would certainly fit into that very criteria.

Wolves, back in the 1984/85 season, were in a state of unpredictable flux.

Not so long after almost going out of business after topflight relegation, promotion under Graham Hawkins had been followed by a seemingly inevitable immediate relegation after a lack of investment to strengthen.

Still though Wolves had plenty of quality in the squad, notably young talents such as Tim Flowers, John Humphrey, John Pender and Paul Butler, with experience including Alan Dodd, Alan Ainscow, Mel Eves, Tommy Langley and Tony Evans.

And then came Melrose, brought in on loan from Celtic thanks to a connection with Wolves boss Tommy Docherty and a desire for first team football.

It has to be said, it didn’t start particularly brilliantly.

Melrose made his Wolves debut at Middlesbrough, but, somehow, his boots didn’t make the journey. So instead of his normal size seven boots, he had to borrow a pair of size tens. And then he got injured after coming on as a substitute, a collision with the goalkeeper worsening a pre-existing hamstring niggle which would affect the first month of his temporary stay at Molineux.

In the second month, however, he exploded into life.

In the final four games of his nine-match spell, Melrose scored four, and Wolves won all three in the league – the Championship equivalent as was – and drew 2-2 at topflight Southampton in the first leg of the League Cup Third Round, the Scotsman grabbing both goals.

“It was Tommy Doc who got me to go down to Wolves, and he was a manager that gave me my head in terms of how I wanted to play and getting the best out of me,” Melrose explains.

“There were three managers like that in my career – Tommy at Wolves, Jock Wallace at Leicester, and Lennie Lawrence at Charlton.

“Every one of them knew how to get a tune out of me and that meant getting a return in terms of a goals-to-games ratio.

“I relished the opportunity of getting down to Wolves to play some football, and there was a really good group of lads there at that time, including Danny Crainie who I had played alongside at Celtic.

“There were obviously a lot of things going on behind the scenes at the time, with the Bhatti Brothers owning the club, but on the pitch, I think we had a really good group.

“We were having to take our own teabags and biscuits in, having to wash our own kit, and the lads were worried about whether they were going to get paid – buttons compared to what players get nowadays - but sometimes that brings you together more, you know?

“It kind of added to the mystique of the club, but there were a lot of young lads there who just needed a lift.”

Melrose and others were able to provide that lift, and, in the final home game of his loan against Cardiff – where he went off after sustaining a ‘bang on the head’ – the 3-0 victory, the third in succession, Wolves were occupying mid-table, comfortably some distance away from the relegation zone.

But that game was to prove the last for Melrose at Wolves, the club were unable to provide Docherty with the £40,000 needed for his permanent signature, and the dip in fortunes which followed was spectacular.

The feeling among fans that afternoon that Melrose’s future was pivotal to the club’s future fortunes was palpable. The collective groans of disappointment when he had to leave the action, equally prescient.

Following the striker’s departure, having just won three league games in a row in October and November, Wolves would only win another three over the remainder of the season, and just one of the next 22. At one stage, they actually went seven consecutive games without troubling the scorers. Inevitably, that led to a second successive relegation, soon followed by a third, as the club nearly went out of business once again before the revival of the late 1980s.

Melrose plays down the suggestion that things might have been different had he been able to stay, but he certainly wanted to.

“I was 25 at the time, and had come to a great club which was just going through a bad moment,” he recalls.

“I’d already been down to watch a Wolves game at Molineux a few years earlier as part of a trip with my boys’ team, and remember seeing some of the greats like Munro, Bailey, Hibbitt and Dougan.

“There was a lovely set-up around the squad with Tommy supported by Jim Barron and Frank Upton, and we got that little run going and I was enjoying it and playing well.