Hello all,
I’ve popped by as a Wolves fan to wish you all the best for the tie against Manchester United. I, and I think our entire fanbase, all hope you can knock them out.
Obviously I am disappointed that Wolves did not progress to the semi-finals, but no Wolves fans are really arguing that Sevilla was not clearly the better side over the 90 minutes.
From our point of view it’s a shame the officials decided not to bother doing any of the supposedly mandatory VAR checks so your defender was allowed to stand inside the penalty area as the penalty was struck and then clear it. Who knows how the match would have gone if we would have taken the lead, but it is in the past now.
Unfortunately we were too physically drained from the long season and had too many players out of form at the wrong time to really show our best side and make it a more entertaining game. We have shown earlier in the season, when the players were fresher, with our performances vs Man City, Liverpool or Tottenham that we can better or at least greatly trouble the CL level sides.
Our squad depth though is just non-existent, so we end up relying on pretty much 13, maybe 14 players, to play every single minute of the campaign, and by match #59 they simply had no energy left at all.
On top of this, some of this small group of players have simply lost their form (Moutinho & Jota have been especially bad in the last 2 months). The loss of two more players who were actually in decent form with a long-term injury and suspension (Jonny and Daniel Podence) worsened our hand even further.
In recent weeks, Traore has reverted back into his normal game with all its normal weaknesses, whereas in mid-season he was really developing with every game and walked all over Manchester City and Tottenham’s defence. I think Nuno only really likes to use him as a substitute, but Jota’s terrible form and Podence’s suspension gave him no choice but to play him from the start.
In the end you saw that Nuno had no subs open except a painfully out of touch Jota and the “promising” Pedro Neto who occasionally does some good things but can also wildly misfire (in Espanyol he literally missed an open goal - it must be on YouTube). The rest of the bench was just under-21 youngsters who maybe play in a first round League Cup tie but very few have even played a league game for us.
By the way, the oil on Traore’s arms is the medical department’s idea is try and eliminate what has been happening too often: namely, that opponents all know he has a shoulder problem which requires an operation and so they know one decent yank on his arm and he will be out of the game (both Man Utd and Sheffield United successfully used this tactic against him). It would be good to let him have the operation but we have so few options and the schedule is so tight, the medics are just crossing their fingers and hoping at least the oil will stop the deliberate targeting of his weak spot.
So, the writing for our display had already been on the wall for many weeks as the team relied more and more on just being “resilient” in games, rather than having the energy to try and overrun the opponent. The loss was ultimately predictable, especially when we got such a difficult draw (maybe vs Basel or Copenhagen we would have progressed to the semi-final).
Anyway, good luck on Sunday. You’ll need to against the penalty record of Man United (“only” 21 given to them so far this season!). They have a highly profitable gameplan of rushing as many players into the opponent’s area at once and falling over if you even go near them. It has already saved their league season, now they want a trophy for it too.
PS Are you all pleased with Lopetegui? He was an interesting factor in this game as he supposedly was about to become Wolves manager in summer 2017 but our takeover took too long and the Spanish FA offered him the national team job in the meantime.
) again.
