Steve Bruce leads the pack as Wolves chase a new boss

Less than three months after being told he wasn’t good enough to keep one side in the Premier League, Steve Bruce is set to be trusted with the task of doing exactly that at another.

Following Neil Warnock’s appointment as Leeds boss today, Bruce is now the 1/4 favourite to become Mick McCarthy’s successor at Molineux.

The former Birmingham, Wigan and Sunderland manager was interviewed by Wolves chief exec Jez Moxey and owner Steve Morgan on Friday, 11 years after losing out to Dave Jones for the same post.

Previous favourite Alan Curbishley (now 7/2) was also interviewed by the club this week, but a revealing tweet by Curbishley’s son Michael suggested that the man who hasn’t managed a club since leaving West Ham in 2008 is not likely to end his time out of the game just yet.

Despite eventually deleting the compromising tweet, Curbishley junior mentioned that while his old man wanted the job, he had suggested that he didn’t think he’d get it after meeting with Wolves bosses.

And with Warnock this morning being confirmed in at Leeds, it leaves Bruce out in front with Wolves keen to appoint a new man before next weekend’s match at Newcastle.

Despite being sacked by Sunderland earlier this season for a seeming inability to get his talented and expensively-assembled squad to gel – a feat his successor Martin O’Neil has managed with aplomb – Bruce can cite his revival of Wigan Athletic as a positive factor towards his appointment.

Wigan were second bottom in the Premier League, with just two wins from their first 13 games, when Bruce joined the Latics from Birmingham in November 2007.

Bruce not only kept his new side in the top flight that season, but led them to an 11th place finish the following year – just the sort of comfortable mid-table finish the Wolves owners now crave following consecutive nervy years battling against the drop.