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pavlosmacwolf
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I am gobsmacked and so proud that wolves brought in holocaust survivor Mala Tribich to talk to the under 14 boys and girls at wolves on sunday.
this shows me that the club i have supported since 1957, hav surpassd vn my wildst drams on and off the pitch.
I am so proud of this gesture by the club.
this shows me that the club i have supported since 1957, hav surpassd vn my wildst drams on and off the pitch.
I am so proud of this gesture by the club.
Norman Deeley
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Really? I didn't know that. Absolutely brilliant
WolfmanOz
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I couldn't agree more - the club now is a real treasure !
Norman Deeley
Dean Saunders's Press Officer
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Ah, this is lovely https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufx05I4WZXY
Bertiewolf
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Great stuff
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Adama is really good with the fans. There was something similar to this when he was at Boro and he was about to leave and join us
Derby Wolf
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Shame they didn't do it when Wayne Hennessey was in the u14's
Wonderful gesture though.
Tony Towner
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Pedant alert:
Hennessey was signed at 16
Hennessey was signed at 16
WolfmanOz
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Fantastic ! A real credit to him and the club.
sycophantia
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There is a Wolves related 'do' in Newport (Shrops) next week Wednesday 20th at 7.30. Its called Lets Talk Wolves and its featuring David Instone and special guest John McAlle (ask yer granddad). Not sure of the format or basis of it but I've usually enjoyed reading Instones Wolves stuff. Its at the Navy Club and entry is a fiver, proceeds to the Mayors charities which includes the local foodbank.
Tredman
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Interesting thread if you like stats.
https://twitter.com/wolvesanalytics/status/1195069042777841667?s=21
https://twitter.com/wolvesanalytics/status/1195069042777841667?s=21
b3h
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Paul
Jeff Moxshi
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Tim's latest Wolves article
"Conor Coady: ‘The referees you get on better with are the ones you can talk to – that’s even more important with VAR’
“To walk out with that armband on… it might sound stupid, but I’ve never got used to it.”
Conor Coady is a footballer who speaks from the heart, and he’s no different when describing to The Athletic the honour of wearing Wolverhampton Wanderers’ captain’s armband.
“Every time I walk in the changing room and see it on my peg,” he continues… “every time I put the armband on, it’s a massive occasion for me.”
In some countries it’s perceived as little more than a ceremonial role. In England though, being captain of your football team is a big deal. That armband carries status, but most importantly, responsibility.
In some cases, it can define a player’s career. Bobby Moore is considered to be one of the finest captains football has seen, but had previous England skipper Jimmy Armfield not picked up an injury just months prior to the 1966 World Cup, Moore may have “just” been a top class centre-half for his country and not an immortal icon.
The armband lifted Moore to greatness. For Granit Xhaka, in the eyes of the Arsenal fans at least, it became a millstone — a stick to beat him with, even — ultimately leading to an incident that could end his career with the club.
But other than making you the designated on-field leader of the team, what does being captain of a Premier League team actually entail?
In Coady’s case, his match day duties actually begin the day before a game. Alison Matthews, Wolves’ first-team football administrator, will drop a message into the players’ group chat asking how many tickets they want for said match. Coady’s job is to make sure his team-mates get the tickets they want — and ensure that any spares don’t go to waste.
Come match day, his first big responsibility comes precisely an hour before kick-off when he and the opposition’s skipper, as well as a member of staff from each club, head to the referee’s room for a pre-match chat.
Normally for Wolves, it’s assistant boss Rui Pedro Silva who joins Coady, but it can be any senior staff member, even the manager or head coach. Ahead of Wolves’ most recent game, Aston Villa boss Dean Smith himself joined captain Tyrone Mings to see referee Anthony Taylor.
“The referee talks through what he expects from you,” Coady says of these brief meetings. “He’ll talk in terms of how he expects you to look after your own players and make sure they’re not running to him all the time, things like that. He’ll tell you what he wants and you stand there and nod! Usually the chats are quite similar but it might change if it’s a derby, or if there’s any particular needle between the two clubs.”
There was a time when match day mascots were solely the captain’s responsibility. Nowadays there’s rarely just one mascot per side and the majority of a team can be entrusted to lead a youngster out onto the field.
It’s a responsibility Coady, whose own children have joined him for mascot duties at Molineux, takes seriously.
“When you arrive at the stadium they’re lined up near the dressing room so you have pictures with them and sign their books and shirts,” he adds. “For the warm-up they’re always lined up so you can get a picture with them out on the pitch, which is always a special moment for them.
“Then the big one for them is when they’re walking out the tunnel before kick-off. They’re lined up in the tunnel, it’s good to talk to them and make sure they’re having a good day because it’s a dream come true for them. Some of them will be nervous so I always try to have a chat and a joke. Then when we’re walking out I make sure they give the crowd a clap as well.”
Pre-match handshakes and warm-ups done, Coady’s next job is the coin toss.
Up until this season, the coin was flipped only for a choice of which end to play towards. Now, the captain who wins the toss gets to decide either that, or to have the kick-off.
“If we’re at home, I try to make sure we’re shooting towards the South Bank (Sir Jack Hayward Stand) in the second half,” he says. “That’s something the club has always done, for years before I was here. Away from home if I win the toss, depending on where it is, I’ll usually take the ball, so you can start in possession and off you go.
“Being a captain, you think of any advantage you can get. There’s some places where teams might be a bit superstitious about shooting in a certain direction. Away from home it doesn’t make a big difference to us in terms of which way you shoot, because you’re not used to playing there. If something will affect another team by changing, we’ll try and do it.”
Variables like wind direction or the position of the sun might be a big factor with the coin toss the lower down the leagues you go — or even a sloped pitch — but in huge, enclosed Premier League stadiums they are less of a factor.
“The grounds are massive,” Coady continues. “Maybe at Molineux, where the corners are open, it might be different sometimes, but generally they’re bowl shapes so you don’t have to think about it. If there is a problem, Rui will come to me and let me know before the game.”
On rare occasions Coady will also be involved in a coin toss before a penalty shoot-out.
Again, a toss-winning captain can decide whether to shoot towards their team’s fans, or to take the first kick.
“It depends where you’re at,” Coady says. “In front of your own supporters would always be your first choice. At the same time, I’d always like to shoot first as well. The ideal scenario would be the other team to put it at their end and you choose (to kick) first, because it’s good to try and put them under pressure by scoring the first penalty.”
During a game, Coady’s main duty specifically as a captain (other than organising his team and generally being the loudest person on the pitch, which has always been the case with or without the armband) is to communicate with the referee.
“Some are good to talk to,” he says. “I feel I’ve got a good relationship with Michael Oliver, for example, who’s a really good referee. He’ll chat to you all game. Others won’t.
If Oliver is an example of a good, talkative referee who’ll explain his decisions, Coady says in his opinion the less favourable referees are ones who are harder to communicate with.
“The ones who don’t talk, you feel as if when you ask them about a decision, it’s as if ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about’. Sometimes it can be the way you get looked at. The ones you get on better with are the ones you can talk to, which is the same in any walk of life, really. The answers you get might not be the ones you want, but you can get your head around it if you receive an explanation.
“That’s even more important now in terms of VAR. The big thing for me is to let supporters know about decisions but also the players. There were a couple of decisions in the Villa game last week — they appealed for a penalty when Jonny (Castro Otto) made a great last-ditch tackle and we went down the other end and thought Neil Taylor had hand-balled it from Adama Traore’s cross.
“They were checking both decisions and you go up to ask. Maybe there should be something that only one person can ask, maybe the captain. I can understand they don’t want people crowding them and asking questions, but the players need to know what’s going on.”
Perhaps the ultimate honour as a captain is lifting a trophy. Coady has had the pleasure of doing that on three occasions with Wolves — winning the Championship in 2o18 and also two pre-season trophies; the Uhrencup in Switzerland, again in 2018, and the Premier League Asia Trophy in China at the start of this season.
He lifted the Championship title along with good friend Danny Batth, who at the time was club captain but had been in and out of the side, with Coady taking the armband while Batth was sidelined.
That feeling of pride in joining Batth to raise the trophy — the first time he’d done it as a senior player (Coady also lifted the Under-17 European Championship trophy with England, one of three captaincy stints along with Wolves and Liverpool Under-23s) — has stuck with him, to the extent where he now won’t perform the honour on his own, choosing to share the experience with a team-mate, like in Asia where he asked vice-captain Ruben Neves to join him.
It’s typical of a man who is as self-effacing as they come. He doesn’t, for example, want to be called “Skipper” (“None of that. Just call me Coads and move on”).
“When we won the Championship, I’d played in that league for a few years and I know Danny, Doc (Matt Doherty), John (Ruddy), Benno (Ryan Bennett), they had too and you realise how much it means to your team-mates,” he says. “If we win anything else in the future, like we did with the Asia Trophy in the summer, I’d always ask someone to lift it with me. That feeling I got with Danny was amazing, so I’d ask someone else, whether Ruben or whoever, because it’s a team thing.”
Neves, who became the youngest player to captain a Champions League team when skippering Porto aged just 18 in 2015, also oversees the dressing room’s fines system.
Coady explains: “We asked the boys at the start of the year who’d like to do the fines and look after them and Ruben said he would. We’re quite good with them. The rules really do help, people think about them when they’re maybe going to be late or leave kit lying around. We’ve got a good dressing room with some experienced players who’ve played at a high level, so it’s not just me who runs the dressing room. Obviously I play my part. We all chip in with the fines and Ruben looks after it.
“Around Christmas time every year we do a Wheel of Fortune thing with the fines, which is pretty fun. We put different sections on the wheel and every time someone gets fined you’ve got to spin the wheel. It could have a big fine on there, it could be zero, you could have to sing at lunch, bring shower gel or cakes for the lads, anything.
“It’s great fun… unless it’s you!”
Programme notes are another captaincy obligation. Each captain will have a different way of conveying their thoughts, with some maybe choosing to write them personally, but Coady’s preference is to chat to programme editor Mark Ridgway, who’ll put his thoughts into a suitable format.
“For me, it’s an interview-based thing with Mark. He’ll text me during the week to organise a time, I’ll pop in and see him and I’ll talk through what’s happened during the week. It could be the team’s results, maybe international players who’ve played, the youngsters may have had a good win, or something the Wolves Foundation has done. He’ll then put it into shape for the programme.”
The captain can also provide that crucial link between the manager and the dressing room. They may need to mediate between players to sort out differences, or pass on instructions from the manager. In Wolves’ case, Coady’s role in that regard appears to be redundant, with Nuno Espirito Santo’s messages coming across loud and clear.
“At our club I’ll always go and speak to people if I need to,” he says. “I’ve not been in a position of having to jump in-between two people (in an argument).
“In terms of things from the manager down to the players, he doesn’t need to come to me, he’s very, very clear in terms of what he wants. I think you see that in how we play our football. His ideas are very clear. That’s the same off the pitch, if he needs to tell us about days off, things we’ve got coming up, if we’re going out for food, what we’re doing for Christmas… all those bits and bobs, he’s very clear.”
During his time at Wolves, who he joined from Huddersfield Town in 2015, Coady has perennially been the loudest player on the pitch, captain or not. He comes across as a natural leader — and it’s a role he’s grown into.
“There’s a lot going on as a captain, but I love doing it,” he says. “On the pitch I was always a talker and an organiser growing up, in terms of helping people on and off the pitch. People know they can always talk to me. I’ve always had that personality, with organisational traits. That was the same before I was captain at Wolves.
“I’ve always wanted to do it. It’s a privilege to be captain of a club like Wolves. I played under a fantastic captain in Danny Batth and before that at Huddersfield (Mark Hudson) as well. I try and take something from each captain and learn from the best ones.
“Danny’s a great friend of mine and that season in the Championship worked. I’d never say, ‘I’m doing this or that’, it was up to Danny to say to me if he wanted things looking after. It worked well because we’re good friends. I wanted to take as much as I could from him in terms of guidance.
“Being captain of this club in Europe this year has been a dream. Even more so in terms of what we’ve done and how we’ve adapted to the competition.
“I’ll never forget that Braga home game (Wolves’ first in the group stage, a 1-0 defeat) because it was really tough, we were playing against a different style, they sat in and played a different way and managed the referee really well, winning fouls and frustrating us, but we’ve adapted quickly (Wolves have won their last three games in Europe).
“To lead this club out in the Championship, then the Premier League and now Europe, it’s such a special feeling.”
"Conor Coady: ‘The referees you get on better with are the ones you can talk to – that’s even more important with VAR’
“To walk out with that armband on… it might sound stupid, but I’ve never got used to it.”
Conor Coady is a footballer who speaks from the heart, and he’s no different when describing to The Athletic the honour of wearing Wolverhampton Wanderers’ captain’s armband.
“Every time I walk in the changing room and see it on my peg,” he continues… “every time I put the armband on, it’s a massive occasion for me.”
In some countries it’s perceived as little more than a ceremonial role. In England though, being captain of your football team is a big deal. That armband carries status, but most importantly, responsibility.
In some cases, it can define a player’s career. Bobby Moore is considered to be one of the finest captains football has seen, but had previous England skipper Jimmy Armfield not picked up an injury just months prior to the 1966 World Cup, Moore may have “just” been a top class centre-half for his country and not an immortal icon.
The armband lifted Moore to greatness. For Granit Xhaka, in the eyes of the Arsenal fans at least, it became a millstone — a stick to beat him with, even — ultimately leading to an incident that could end his career with the club.
But other than making you the designated on-field leader of the team, what does being captain of a Premier League team actually entail?
In Coady’s case, his match day duties actually begin the day before a game. Alison Matthews, Wolves’ first-team football administrator, will drop a message into the players’ group chat asking how many tickets they want for said match. Coady’s job is to make sure his team-mates get the tickets they want — and ensure that any spares don’t go to waste.
Come match day, his first big responsibility comes precisely an hour before kick-off when he and the opposition’s skipper, as well as a member of staff from each club, head to the referee’s room for a pre-match chat.
Normally for Wolves, it’s assistant boss Rui Pedro Silva who joins Coady, but it can be any senior staff member, even the manager or head coach. Ahead of Wolves’ most recent game, Aston Villa boss Dean Smith himself joined captain Tyrone Mings to see referee Anthony Taylor.
“The referee talks through what he expects from you,” Coady says of these brief meetings. “He’ll talk in terms of how he expects you to look after your own players and make sure they’re not running to him all the time, things like that. He’ll tell you what he wants and you stand there and nod! Usually the chats are quite similar but it might change if it’s a derby, or if there’s any particular needle between the two clubs.”
There was a time when match day mascots were solely the captain’s responsibility. Nowadays there’s rarely just one mascot per side and the majority of a team can be entrusted to lead a youngster out onto the field.
It’s a responsibility Coady, whose own children have joined him for mascot duties at Molineux, takes seriously.
“When you arrive at the stadium they’re lined up near the dressing room so you have pictures with them and sign their books and shirts,” he adds. “For the warm-up they’re always lined up so you can get a picture with them out on the pitch, which is always a special moment for them.
“Then the big one for them is when they’re walking out the tunnel before kick-off. They’re lined up in the tunnel, it’s good to talk to them and make sure they’re having a good day because it’s a dream come true for them. Some of them will be nervous so I always try to have a chat and a joke. Then when we’re walking out I make sure they give the crowd a clap as well.”
Pre-match handshakes and warm-ups done, Coady’s next job is the coin toss.
Up until this season, the coin was flipped only for a choice of which end to play towards. Now, the captain who wins the toss gets to decide either that, or to have the kick-off.
“If we’re at home, I try to make sure we’re shooting towards the South Bank (Sir Jack Hayward Stand) in the second half,” he says. “That’s something the club has always done, for years before I was here. Away from home if I win the toss, depending on where it is, I’ll usually take the ball, so you can start in possession and off you go.
“Being a captain, you think of any advantage you can get. There’s some places where teams might be a bit superstitious about shooting in a certain direction. Away from home it doesn’t make a big difference to us in terms of which way you shoot, because you’re not used to playing there. If something will affect another team by changing, we’ll try and do it.”
Variables like wind direction or the position of the sun might be a big factor with the coin toss the lower down the leagues you go — or even a sloped pitch — but in huge, enclosed Premier League stadiums they are less of a factor.
“The grounds are massive,” Coady continues. “Maybe at Molineux, where the corners are open, it might be different sometimes, but generally they’re bowl shapes so you don’t have to think about it. If there is a problem, Rui will come to me and let me know before the game.”
On rare occasions Coady will also be involved in a coin toss before a penalty shoot-out.
Again, a toss-winning captain can decide whether to shoot towards their team’s fans, or to take the first kick.
“It depends where you’re at,” Coady says. “In front of your own supporters would always be your first choice. At the same time, I’d always like to shoot first as well. The ideal scenario would be the other team to put it at their end and you choose (to kick) first, because it’s good to try and put them under pressure by scoring the first penalty.”
During a game, Coady’s main duty specifically as a captain (other than organising his team and generally being the loudest person on the pitch, which has always been the case with or without the armband) is to communicate with the referee.
“Some are good to talk to,” he says. “I feel I’ve got a good relationship with Michael Oliver, for example, who’s a really good referee. He’ll chat to you all game. Others won’t.
If Oliver is an example of a good, talkative referee who’ll explain his decisions, Coady says in his opinion the less favourable referees are ones who are harder to communicate with.
“The ones who don’t talk, you feel as if when you ask them about a decision, it’s as if ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about’. Sometimes it can be the way you get looked at. The ones you get on better with are the ones you can talk to, which is the same in any walk of life, really. The answers you get might not be the ones you want, but you can get your head around it if you receive an explanation.
“That’s even more important now in terms of VAR. The big thing for me is to let supporters know about decisions but also the players. There were a couple of decisions in the Villa game last week — they appealed for a penalty when Jonny (Castro Otto) made a great last-ditch tackle and we went down the other end and thought Neil Taylor had hand-balled it from Adama Traore’s cross.
“They were checking both decisions and you go up to ask. Maybe there should be something that only one person can ask, maybe the captain. I can understand they don’t want people crowding them and asking questions, but the players need to know what’s going on.”
Perhaps the ultimate honour as a captain is lifting a trophy. Coady has had the pleasure of doing that on three occasions with Wolves — winning the Championship in 2o18 and also two pre-season trophies; the Uhrencup in Switzerland, again in 2018, and the Premier League Asia Trophy in China at the start of this season.
He lifted the Championship title along with good friend Danny Batth, who at the time was club captain but had been in and out of the side, with Coady taking the armband while Batth was sidelined.
That feeling of pride in joining Batth to raise the trophy — the first time he’d done it as a senior player (Coady also lifted the Under-17 European Championship trophy with England, one of three captaincy stints along with Wolves and Liverpool Under-23s) — has stuck with him, to the extent where he now won’t perform the honour on his own, choosing to share the experience with a team-mate, like in Asia where he asked vice-captain Ruben Neves to join him.
It’s typical of a man who is as self-effacing as they come. He doesn’t, for example, want to be called “Skipper” (“None of that. Just call me Coads and move on”).
“When we won the Championship, I’d played in that league for a few years and I know Danny, Doc (Matt Doherty), John (Ruddy), Benno (Ryan Bennett), they had too and you realise how much it means to your team-mates,” he says. “If we win anything else in the future, like we did with the Asia Trophy in the summer, I’d always ask someone to lift it with me. That feeling I got with Danny was amazing, so I’d ask someone else, whether Ruben or whoever, because it’s a team thing.”
Neves, who became the youngest player to captain a Champions League team when skippering Porto aged just 18 in 2015, also oversees the dressing room’s fines system.
Coady explains: “We asked the boys at the start of the year who’d like to do the fines and look after them and Ruben said he would. We’re quite good with them. The rules really do help, people think about them when they’re maybe going to be late or leave kit lying around. We’ve got a good dressing room with some experienced players who’ve played at a high level, so it’s not just me who runs the dressing room. Obviously I play my part. We all chip in with the fines and Ruben looks after it.
“Around Christmas time every year we do a Wheel of Fortune thing with the fines, which is pretty fun. We put different sections on the wheel and every time someone gets fined you’ve got to spin the wheel. It could have a big fine on there, it could be zero, you could have to sing at lunch, bring shower gel or cakes for the lads, anything.
“It’s great fun… unless it’s you!”
Programme notes are another captaincy obligation. Each captain will have a different way of conveying their thoughts, with some maybe choosing to write them personally, but Coady’s preference is to chat to programme editor Mark Ridgway, who’ll put his thoughts into a suitable format.
“For me, it’s an interview-based thing with Mark. He’ll text me during the week to organise a time, I’ll pop in and see him and I’ll talk through what’s happened during the week. It could be the team’s results, maybe international players who’ve played, the youngsters may have had a good win, or something the Wolves Foundation has done. He’ll then put it into shape for the programme.”
The captain can also provide that crucial link between the manager and the dressing room. They may need to mediate between players to sort out differences, or pass on instructions from the manager. In Wolves’ case, Coady’s role in that regard appears to be redundant, with Nuno Espirito Santo’s messages coming across loud and clear.
“At our club I’ll always go and speak to people if I need to,” he says. “I’ve not been in a position of having to jump in-between two people (in an argument).
“In terms of things from the manager down to the players, he doesn’t need to come to me, he’s very, very clear in terms of what he wants. I think you see that in how we play our football. His ideas are very clear. That’s the same off the pitch, if he needs to tell us about days off, things we’ve got coming up, if we’re going out for food, what we’re doing for Christmas… all those bits and bobs, he’s very clear.”
During his time at Wolves, who he joined from Huddersfield Town in 2015, Coady has perennially been the loudest player on the pitch, captain or not. He comes across as a natural leader — and it’s a role he’s grown into.
“There’s a lot going on as a captain, but I love doing it,” he says. “On the pitch I was always a talker and an organiser growing up, in terms of helping people on and off the pitch. People know they can always talk to me. I’ve always had that personality, with organisational traits. That was the same before I was captain at Wolves.
“I’ve always wanted to do it. It’s a privilege to be captain of a club like Wolves. I played under a fantastic captain in Danny Batth and before that at Huddersfield (Mark Hudson) as well. I try and take something from each captain and learn from the best ones.
“Danny’s a great friend of mine and that season in the Championship worked. I’d never say, ‘I’m doing this or that’, it was up to Danny to say to me if he wanted things looking after. It worked well because we’re good friends. I wanted to take as much as I could from him in terms of guidance.
“Being captain of this club in Europe this year has been a dream. Even more so in terms of what we’ve done and how we’ve adapted to the competition.
“I’ll never forget that Braga home game (Wolves’ first in the group stage, a 1-0 defeat) because it was really tough, we were playing against a different style, they sat in and played a different way and managed the referee really well, winning fouls and frustrating us, but we’ve adapted quickly (Wolves have won their last three games in Europe).
“To lead this club out in the Championship, then the Premier League and now Europe, it’s such a special feeling.”
