Mancienne, Mourinho and Big Mick!

Even though he was never actually a permanent Wolves player, he braved the Friday night rush-hour traffic to head up from London to join his former team-mates, boss Mick McCarthy and assistant Terry Connor, to celebrate the achievement of that squad a decade-and-a-half earlier.

And that was a mirror image of the journey he first took back in October 2008, when heading up to Compton to discuss the first of three loan spells from Chelsea which would ultimately lead to 60 appearances in a Wolves shirt.

On that occasion, the stylish defender, then a 20-year-old, was asked by his agent if he wanted company at the meeting with McCarthy which would ultimately decide the loan’s fate.

But Mancienne was happy to go it alone. The terms had been arranged, it was just the footballing chat with the Wolves manager. Defenders past and present, though of vastly contrasting styles.

“I got to the training ground and, as soon as I walked in, Mick asked me if my agent was with me,” Mancienne recalls.

“I was like, ‘No he’s not, does he need to be here’?

“’Not at all’, Mick replied, ‘And I ******* love that son’!

“From that moment I knew what kind of manager I was going to play for, and I couldn’t wait to get started.”

Mancienne would go on to make a total of 10 appearances before being recalled by Chelsea at the start of the January transfer window.

During that time he had helped Wolves stay on top of the table, a place they never relinquished, and he would not only land a Championship-winners’ medal in his absence but would return for two further loan spells for Wolves in the Premier League.

“I was devastated to miss out on all the celebrations at Wolves at the end of the season,” he laughs.

Having said that, returning to Chelsea in such good form – he had also landed his one and only senior England call-up whilst with Wolves – did then offer him the opportunity to grace the first team of the club where he was first recruited at just eight years old.

And so, when the time came that he made his only six appearances in the Chelsea first team, in that second half of the 2008/09 season, it was always going to be special.

Not least when you think of some of the team-mates he was sharing a dressing room with.

“To play with people like John Terry, Frank Lampard and Didier Drogba and work with some top managers was amazing,” Mancienne explains.

“It just gave me so much confidence because stepping onto the pitch knowing you had that quality in the team meant there was nothing to fear.

“Coming through the academy at Chelsea, being surrounded by leaders and international players who were at the top of their games – it was an incredible learning experience.

“Just getting to train with them and be around that group every day showed the level and the professionalism that was needed to reach those sorts of standards.”

One of those six first team appearances came as a substitute in the closing stages of a Champions League win against Juventus, up against Alessandro Del Piero and David Trezeguet, and Mancienne was an unused substitute for many more titanic fixtures, including both legs of the Champions League semi-finals against Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona and the FA Cup final win against Everton at Wembley.

“That Champions League night in particular was a dream come true,” Mancienne recalls.