Sylvan Ebanks-Blake is floundering. The scorer of 24 league goals this season – more than any other player in the top two divisions – is currently knocking them in for fun as Wolverhampton Wanderers sail towards the Premier League.

Describing how it feels is a more complicated matter entirely. “Oh, it’s indescribable,” he frowns. “It’s the hardest thing in football, but the more you do it, the more you want it.”

There is something he can pinpoint. “It’s late at night when I’m on my own, the adrenaline’s ebbed away and my body’s aching,” he muses. “Sometimes, I have to pinch myself that I’ve been out there performing in front of 23,000 people and taking part in moments of greatness. I think to myself, ‘Did I actually do that?’ And when the answer is ‘Yes’, that’s the best feeling of all. I never want that to end.”

We rendezvous at the genteel York, presumably Wolverhampton’s only boutique hotel, late on Friday afternoon. Ebanks-Blake arrives alone, brimming with good grace and within 60 seconds of the scheduled meeting time.

The 23-year-old who freely admits “I didn’t want to be a footballer as a boy, but I did want to be a millionaire”, tends to do things by feel. Take his surprise move in January 2008 from Plymouth Argyle to Wolves, only a few weeks after he had bought and furnished a house in Devon. Wolves had activated a clause in his Plymouth contract that left him free to move if a club offered at least £1.5m.

Late one evening, the club took him around Molineux. “I walked out onto the pitch. They hadn’t put the floodlights on but I could feel what a cathedral it was. I knew that this is where I wanted to play my football and that was that.”

Five points clear of the herd, tomorrow Wolves travel to second-placed Birmingham City. Win there and you suspect that, for all their traditional knack of securing defeat from the jaws of victory, they will be unassailable. “We’ll go up because we deserve it,” Ebanks-Blake asserts. “We’ve worked tirelessly from the moment the whole squad came into preseason in great condition. We’re young, hungry and want to play at the next level, but I’m expecting a battle: Birmingham aren’t the most free-flowing of sides, it’s a local derby and their pitch isn’t the best.”

One infallible measure of a team’s spine is how they respond to their annual blip. Wolves’ was long, deep and inexplicable. A Boxing Day draw with Sheffield United was the first of a run of 11 league games that featured just one victory. “Everybody has a blip,” he explains, “look at Manchester United. But spirits were still high and, since other teams were slipping up, we were still top of the league.” Two backs-to-the-wall 1-0 victories in four days, at Crystal Palace and Sheffield Wednesday, steadied their ship. “We defended like warriors in those games,” he purrs. “Palace proved we could go away from home and win 1-0 rather than trying to steamroller teams and cheaply conceding. Wednesday showed we could do it again.”

If Ebanks-Blake (an amalgamation of his unmarried parents’ surnames) does sit at the top table next season, his achievement will be the culmination of a higgledy-piggledy journey that began on the playing fields of his native Cambridge, where his mother cares for the elderly and his father is head of maintenance at The Junction, the city’s lauded cultural centre.

“We were incredibly family-orientated and that’s my grounding. I was brought up to respect my elders and to make something of my life,” he states. “There were better players than me at school but nobody had my passion and drive and nobody wanted to win as much as I did.”

Cambridge City, then Cambridge United, came knocking, as did Manchester United, who signed him as a scholar. After five Carling Cup minutes at Crewe Alexandra in 2004 and a goalscoring full debut against 10-man Barnet in the following year’s competition, he was squeezed out of Old Trafford. “A disappointment,” he sighs. “You never want to leave the best club in the world and you can never pretend you’re moving to a better place. But I just wanted to play first-team football and I saw Plymouth as an opportunity to rejuvenate myself.”

Plymouth’s then manager, Ian Holloway, who brought in Barry Hayles to mentor his new charge, remains a big influence on Ebanks-Blake’s life and career, the one who taught him to play for the team while retaining a striker’s instinctive selfishness. The Wolves manager, Mick McCarthy, is cut from similar cloth. “They’re both very honest and they both don’t hold back,” he explains. “That’s how I want to be treated. I hate to be buttered up and I don’t want or need the arm around the shoulder. I’ve never been that sort of character. I don’t want to be told, ‘Jam tomorrow’. If I’m not in the team I want to be told why. Then it’s my job as a professional to come back stronger.”

And so, although Ebanks-Blake started last season on Plymouth’s bench, he ended it as leading scorer despite that January move to the Black Country. In November, a trip to Plymouth’s Candy Store nightclub ended with Ebanks-Blake arrested and subsequently pleading guilty to actual bodily harm and using threatening or abusive language. That he had hit a startled bouncer with his girlfriend’s handbag at 4am prompted the inevitable Handbags At Dawn headlines.

Today, as he sips his orange juice, the incident is not something he wishes to discuss, not least because the future looks bright for the striker recently anointed Championship Player of the Year. And yet, with Premier League clubs who are less likely than Wolves to struggle next season now sniffing around him like deranged bloodhounds, that future is still tantalisingly unclear.

Ebanks-Blake smiles. “I can’t think that far ahead. I live in the here and now. I’ve always been that way and, believe me, this isn’t the moment to change.”