Wolves might be about to appoint a former Real Madrid and Spain coach. How times have changed in the Premier League.
In the end, it was a little difficult to see why they didn’t pull the trigger a little earlier. September was a quiet month for Wolves, with just two Premier League matches which ended with a win against Southampton and an obviously expected home defeat against Manchester City. But their return to the Premier League schedule, a 2-0 defeat at West Ham, hinted that nothing had particularly changed in a fortnight.
The West Ham defeat left them third from bottom in the Premier League with just one win from their first eight games. Only fellow Midlands late-risers Nottingham Forest and Leicester City remain below them in the table, and losing this match only heightened the sense that this season is rapidly becoming an attritional one in which any position above 18th in the final league table will have to be considered a success. And the West Ham game was a clear relegation six-pointer. The sacking of Bruno Lage after another stale performance was certainly no great surprise.
At a club which has had few issues with the rigours of the Premier League since returning four years ago, that feeling of slight stagnation always felt likely to curdle further. Wolves have failed to score more than a goal a game for the last two seasons and this season has seen them net just three goals in eight matches.
It’s true to say that football is almost entirely a result-based industry these days, but it remains equally true that when a team is struggling to entertain while picking up results, goodwill will usually be in short supply when the flow of points slows.
And while last season was a little underwhelming, Lage can hardly claim that he wasn’t backed in the transfer market during the summer, with Matheus Nunes arriving from Sporting Clube for £42m, Nathan Collins from Burnley for £20m and Sasa Kalajdzic for £15m.
But when the ball isn’t running your way, it isn’t running your way. Kalajdzic damaged his anterior cruciate ligament against Southampton and is expected to be out for the rest of the season. His stop-gap replacement Diego Costa made his debut from the bench at West Ham, but he’s going to need to hit the ground running if Wolves aren’t to continue to labour near the foot of the table.
But it’s the departure of a player which says something truly telling about how things have been flatlining at Wolves over the last few months….
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