“First I was afraid, I was petrified, kept thinking I could never live without you by my side...”

Mick McCarthy grabs hold of the hairbrush, fixes a steely glare into the bedroom mirror and pops the CD into the player.

Even when they were playing ‘ordinarily’, as he himself put it, the Wolves boss was utterly convinced his side would be OK in the long run.

Then they started playing better, much better and results turned. But there were still the individual mistakes, still the missed chances and still the remarkable tendency for joy to follow sorrow, for rapture to go hand-in-hand with despair.

The win-lose, win-lose sequence of league results suggested Wolves possessed the ability to be as good or as bad as they wanted.

A full house at Molineux expected the unbeaten 32-year home run against Liverpool to continue. That optimism being firmly based on the Doncaster drubbing, the Chelsea chomping, the Man City comeback, a pair of strikers linking up like teenagers in love and the return of an inspirational captain.

“But I spent so many nights thinking how you did me wrong, I grew strong, I learned how to carry on...”

For half an hour at the start, and for 25 minutes at the end, there was precious little between the sides. In fact, Wolves shaded it.

They created little, other than a golden chance off a kind deflection from Stephen Hunt’s free-kick that Nenad Milijas fluffed at the far post after a poor first touch. And with almost his first touch, debutant Adam Hammill produced an air shot when a connection of any kind would surely have brought him the kind of dream sensation not seen on this planet since Joseph bought a technicolour coat.

Rumblings from some bemused locals on their way out of Molineux laid the blame for the lack of a creative spark firmly at the feet of Karl Henry’s inclusion ahead of David Jones. True, Henry looked a square peg in a round hole for an hour.

His critics forget what a dominant performer he had been before his knee injury and also give him little slack to get up to speed after two months on the sidelines.

“And so you’re back from outer space, I just walked in to find you here with that sad look upon your face...”

No, Wolves lost this one because Liverpool’s two best players on the day were outstandingly good and because Ronald Zubar’s attempt at playing offside which led to a gift of a first goal lifted Kenny Dalglish’s side and kicked McCarthy’s fair and square in the unmentionables.

When Wolves beat Manchester City at Molineux, City’s talisman Carlos Tevez was in Argentina.

When Wolves beat Chelsea at Molineux, Didier Drogba and Saloman Kalou were playing like spare parts, low on confidence in a season falling apart.