Few of my thoughts having slept on it (I watched the game live and haven’t seen any replays or highlights).
I thought we were well on top in the first half and were clearly the better side; but the signs were there from early on that we were doing the standard Wolves thing of being dragged down to the opponents level, rather than playing our own game and going on to win comfortably. We’ve seen this for years, regardless of the manager or the players on the pitch - it’s weird.
In that first half, we broke through a number of times but once again, our final pass (Cunha & Semedo both spring to mind) let us down, or we were afraid to shoot. I didn’t think playing Hwang so deep and wide worked or played to his strengths. We need him in & around the box where he can get on the end of stuff without having to think too much about it. I lost count of the number of heavy touches he took, giving up possession. In the end, it looked to me like his head had dropped. Shame because in the opening 10 minutes he was having a good battle with Robinson.
Sasa just looks clumsy. He occasionally has some nice touches, but I struggled to see exactly what he brought yesterday. He didn’t link particularly well with the others, doesn’t have pace to break & wasn’t causing them issues in the box on set pieces - which I thought he may have done. In fact for a lot of the time he just seemed focused on winding up the crowd. Was a strange performance. Cunha was what we’ve come to expect - all huff, very little end product.
Dawson & Kilman were fine, but I thought Toti struggled a bit. He didn’t offer us anything going forward & RAN seemed a bit untidy in front of him. Now I come to think of it, the whole set up looked a bit slapdash and like no one really knew what they were doing. Why was Doyle sat on Dawsons toes, for example? I understand we’ve lost our best player to injury, but you have to find a way to get past that. It’s odd, as I actually commented before the match that the team had a nice balance to it, but it didn’t pan out that way.
We had a bit of a throw back to the early days under GON with the random substitutions that had little to no impact. It was a nice goal from Bellegarde but he didn’t do much outside of that (and I’ve read since that it took a deflection?).
Less said about Fabio the better. I hope for his and our sake he’s shipped out in January. For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s a penalty, but when you look at your bench for a positive impact - he came on, made a foul within 30 seconds, did the old pat on the head, shake the hand of the opponent to make sure he’s ok (Ipswich anyone?), then gives away a penalty when he had quite a minute to clear it beforehand. Shocking. He doesn’t want to be here - sell him, loan him, whatever. There’s an argument that he’s our worst signing in modern day history when you look at the amount and his impact.
Back to the result - I mentioned this in the matchday thread, but beating Manchester City counts for absolutely nothing when you lose to a shower like Sheff Utd a few weeks later. It undos all of the hard work & the feel good vibe that had been created. We’ve got Spurs & Arsenal coming up and we will still be without Pedro. Our default against those kinds of club is to hit them on the break, but set up and play like yesterday and we’ll be comfortably beaten. Sure, there’s a gap between us and relegation at the moment, but it only takes a little run and before you know it, you’re looking over your shoulder again when really, we should have been looking up the table.
I hope GON can stumble across something that works until Neto returns, because I’ve started to really like the guy.
