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Wolverhampton Wanderers are every inch a modern and progressive football club.

They are led by a visionary Portuguese coach, they employ a fluid 3-5-2 system which morphs seamlessly into a 3-4-3 and and they are considered one of the Premier League’s most upwardly mobile outfits.

On the pitch.

Off it they’re back in the flared trouser, three star jumper and Ox Blood Doctor Martens era.

Terrace chants which went out of fashion with those 1970s trends were back at Goodison Park on Sunday .

All the old, repugnant refrains were given an airing. “Sign On!” “You’ll never get a job!” “With a pen, in your hand.” Long, loud and utterly shameless.

It was as depressing as it was inaccurate.

The most recent release from the Office for National Statistics, published in August 2019, listed the unemployment rate for the North West of England as 4.3 per cent compared to 4.6 per cent in the West Midlands.

If that geographical comparison is too broad for some Wolves fans, Merseyside and South Yorkshire recorded the strongest levels of job growth in the decade since the financial crisis – a rise of 6.4 percentage points.

The same report also lists the employment rate of 16 to 64 years olds in the North West as 74.7 per cent and the West Midlands? 74.4 per cent. For those inhabitants of the away section unable to decipher those simple numbers, more people are employed in the North West than the West Midlands.

That IS something to shout about.

Not poverty, the heart-rending despair of unemployment and families torn asunder by the economic tragedies wrought upon Liverpool in the 1980s.

Those sign on chants were first aired in that era as a pointed response to Everton and Liverpool ’s domination of football at that time.

Most clubs couldn't get at Merseyside on the pitch, so they tried to do it off it.

Maybe Wolves fans were denied the opportunity to sing those chants back then, because they had started their own dizzying descent to the bottom tier of English football in that decade.

They started their climb back to respectability thanks to goals from the legendary Steve Bull and a Scouser called Andy Mutch.

Therein lies the irony. Wolves’ current captain is also a Scouser - the humble, the decent and the very likeable Conor Coady.

Quite what he might have made of those chants is unrecorded.

Which is perhaps for the best.

Conor is 26-years-old. He wasn’t alive when those chants were first popular.

He’d be as bemused as the rest of us that some of his club’s fans still trot them out in the name of “banter.”