Doherty recovering after successful wrist surgery

Wolves defender Matt Doherty is recovering after undergoing successful surgery on his wrist last week. The Republic of Ireland international damaged his scaphoid - a small bone in the wrist - against Bournemouth on 23 August and had been playing with a protective splint in recent weeks before the operation.

The 33-year-old missed Sunday's draw with Brighton and has withdrawn from international duty with Republic of Ireland as he continues his recovery.

Wolves' director of high performance Phil Hayward explained that surgery was necessary due to the nature of the injury.

"Matt had an injury to his scaphoid after falling awkwardly during a tackle," Hayward said. "It's a bone known not to repair particularly well without intervention, so it was a case of finding the right opportunity to do the surgery within a six-week period.

"We're towards the back end of that six-week period now from the initial injury, so we decided to go ahead with the surgery at this point.

"He should be absolutely fine. The success rate of these surgeries is very, very high, and he should be back training pretty quickly. We can get him going fairly soon with non-contact training and doing things on the grass which don't involve a risk of him falling to maintain his fitness levels while the bone heals.

"Then as soon as he's ready to go back into competition again and take full contact, he should be good to go and back at the level of fitness that he was at when he when he came out of the team."