Villa lose to Wolves, Dave Woodhall is duly furious.
There’s two things you can usually rely on long-term Villa supporters to have an opinion about. One is Worst Player Ever, the other is Worst Performance for Thirty Years. It doesn’t matter how long they’ve been a supporter, it’s always thirty years. The travesty that unfolded at Molineux on Friday night might not have been anyone’s Worst but it feels like it. It’s certainly one of the most humiliating.
All season Wolves haven’t exactly struggled so much as floundered. They’ve won one league match and were well on course for the lowest Premier League points total ever. Villa have had a bit of a bad run lately but there were signs in the last match that they were starting to fight again. And however poor current form might be, however many injuries have been picked up, they were still third in the league, seventeen places and forty-one points above Wolves. If ever the team were going to get back on track, this was the night.
The team Unai Emery picked was, on the whole, if not unanimously popular then at least understandable. Pau Torres and Ezri Konsa in the centre of defence, no arguments there. Lucas Digne at left-back could have given some defensive solidity before making way for the more attack-minded Ian Maatsen as the game opened out late on. Emiliano Buendia has been off-form lately but he’s always capable of doing something and a more reliable choice than Leon Bailey. Starting Ollie Watkins could also be explained with the idea that he could run at the Wolves defence before making way for Tammy Abraham. That, maybe, was the idea.
If it was, it didn’t work. In fact, there wasn’t much sign of an idea all night. They were out-fought, which was perhaps to be expected, but worse than that they were out-thought. By Wolves. For the first hour of the match there was the hope that the inevitable substitutions would make a difference, and they did. On came Bailey and Ross Barkley; seconds later Wolves were ahead.
Tammy Abraham arrived on the scene ten minutes later, with the Wolves defence not so much tired as bored through lack of having anything to do. Abraham didn’t do a great deal either, although that was as much down to him not having the ball as anything else. Marginally more impressive was Alysson, who did more in the last five minutes than any of the other Villa attackers did all night, which isn’t saying a lot. Deep into stoppage time they finally did muster up a chance but Amadou Onana’s close-range shot was kicked off the line and there was an inevitability in the way Wolves broke immediately for their second. To make the evening complete we had another old Villa tradition as a player argued with supporters, in this case Ezri Konsa.
All of which begs the question of where we go from here. The clubs who looked a long way distant a few weeks ago are making up ground and will be overtaking us on this form. Unai has surely lost patience with a few of this team, we can’t rely on everything coming right when the missing players return and some radical changes have got to be made.
