Tottenham 0 Wolverhampton 1:KEVIN DOYLE admits he may never recover from his World Cup misery – but at least Wolves' survival bid is taking his mind off it.

Doyle may have wondered where his season was heading last month when he returned to club action after the defeat in Paris. Birmingham won at Molineux and the chances of English Premier League survival looked bleak – but Mick McCarthy’s men have responded with victories over Bolton and Tottenham.

“Who knows if I’ll be around for another chance,” the 26-year-old striker said about missing out on the World Cup. “It’ll never be out of my system unless I do get to a World Cup. I didn’t watch the draw and next summer I probably won’t watch the World Cup either. I just hope to do well with Wolves and be in the Premier League and forget about all that next summer.”

Wolves have a tough programme ahead – they face Manchester United, Liverpool and Manchester City before the end of the month – so climbing out of the bottom three with victory at Spurs was the perfect start to December.

“It’s a massive, massive boost,” said goal-scorer Doyle. “People said that we had Tottenham and Manchester United coming up and so you can forget about them, but we just showed what can be done in this league. Anyone can beat anyone and we’ll feel the same going to Old Trafford.”

“The manager deservedly ripped into us after the Birmingham game. We talked about it, the players themselves talked about it, the manager let us talk about it ourselves, we looked at the video and saw that we were very poor and we’ve put that right the last couple of games.”