Twenty Twenty Vision

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You can turn inwards I suppose, when you sit back, or find yourself just staring into space thinking about the result at Anfield. The first impression is to attack. Because you yourself feel in danger for some unknown reason, your adrenaline starts up, you sweat a little, pull your fingers in and form fists. Shout at the TV. Moan at the dog. Drink another numbing pint of crap beer.

What objectives to we have now? What ideas can fight against this madness? Again our team coalesced into one amorphous single minded hive mind. Despite change, despite relatively new faces coming into the team. Pedro Neto is growing. He is becoming something frightening and exciting. I only want to look at him with one eye. It’s too much for two. Here of course the only real language I should use to describe him is in Italian. The prose would be full of hand actions and definite ends to the words, soft at times, comical, in that way Italians can be humorous. Like Netos football. His goal of course will stand for me. The result for me, will be a draw, always. In record books some abstract thing, some shit web page the result will show 1-1. But it will never have the power and the art of this Wolves team behind it. The official result will be abstract and lost.

I did predict that the ‘big table’ will be hard to sit at and they would not like it. It was apparent to me even arguing out Ashton Gate with a Bristol City fan after our 2-1 win there. Ryan Bennet day, fucking hell. Benno you beauty.

At Barnsley that same season they had half the ball boys in the stand to slow the game. It was a disgrace, I could have cried. But we played and we fought hard. We worked hard as always. Now of course the Vultures circle, their yellow eyes are twitching in the brightness of Nunos sun. They watch and they wait.

Now a Watford defeat. I was annoyed at Coady waxing about how the team didn’t work hard enough. Mate, seriously? After everything this team has done for us this season you can have an off day trust me. Mate, put your feet up on the touchline if you want. I watch Nuno in the Post match Presser after both the Liverpool and Watford games. His eyes are darting everywhere, he’s pumped up and ready. It’s that flight or fight reaction of someone who feels the world is stacked against him and his team. Of course, you would feel that pressure at this point in the season. It’s halfway though the season and we have played nearly enough games as we did last year and with the added bonus of opposition players having a free reign on trying to kick some members of our team into the stands. 

It’s only the halfway point and already there’s enough material to write another two books about this season (although there wont be any more book waxings). Halfway. January transfer window coming up too. I know who we are looking at as well and where the discussions are in terms of completion. Like a stupid bastard I’m retaining some loyalty to the Fosun entity and Wolves by keeping my mouth shut just in case anything I say fucks up the whole negotiation. This is where I wish I had an all singing all dancing interactive website where I could drop shit like this onto the net and benefit financially though clicks or whatever. But that ain’t happening either. 

This is certainly an ‘icky’ part of the campaign and I’ve iterated in the past that the issue will not be with ‘leggy’ players but certainly mentally we may be a bit frazzled certainly after the drama of the Man City and Liverpool games. Mental drama for sure. It takes a toll on you, you lot know that from your own lives. Imagine it.

Nuno instills an ethic in the team and he demands hard work, harder work, improvement and constant pushing forwards. It’s exactly the right way to go about forming a team and pushing for honours, accolades maybe too. But there does come a time when you get a bit shell shocked and dazed by it all. Confused even. I watched the Watford game and it was a frazzled insane display of madball from Watford (again). Now Pearson the Watford Coach, newly installed, smashing into his team with that Sub Warnockian insanity is starting to get results. He needs them, the whole team needs it too. Ben Foster puts on a half decent display purely from the ragging we give him on social media. I bet he loved it. How windy was the stadium? Not very methinks. 

I’m super chilled about the whole thing. Three points from three games, two of those games against top six teams and one against a wounded animal down at the bottom of the division. Yes, I will take that. Now it’s time for the transfer circus to kick into gear. I’ve knocked all my Social Media accounts on the head because I don’t want to read the madness that will appear on there over the next month. It does my head in to be honest. Sometimes I feel like I’m fighting a one man positivity battle all by myself, other times I think ‘what the fuck am I on about?’. Doing football blogs is a scary and lonely thing more often than not and I’ve had this same conversation with other blog writers and they agree. The blog will stay of course because I love writing about Wolves, it’s not hard. We are something different, something new, challenging and fresh. I’ve said before that Nuno and the team making writing very easy and that’s the truth. 

We will add players in January. Not big names but players that are required. Players that are versatile and motivated. People that will fit straight into the set up wanting to learn and develop, players that will push us further on to glory in Europe and the League. I will continue to write as long as I have an internet connection. But for once I haven’t got a clue about what will happen in the next few years with this team. Fighting for promotion in the Championship it was all hands on deck and I felt (with others) that maybe a little thing like us supporters might have had a hand or two in how we progressed and fought in that season. Now of course I’m not so sure we have anything to do with it at all any more and I keep getting that feeling and it’s not nice. But, sometimes being a fan is like work in a lot of ways. You sacrifice your time and energy, money, emotions and you fling them at something that in the bigger scheme of things means absolutely nothing to you on a personal level i.e. it aint going to pay your electricity bill Wolves winning a game, it just makes you a bit happier to face the following days.

I stood in a pub in town a few weeks ago with some people I ‘knew’ off Social Media and to be honest I just stood there like a prat as they slagged off Wolverhampton for a good twenty minutes. They come from all over you see. The team is something separate from the Town for them. Wolverhampton is just a place where they have to visit to watch the Wolves. They dip in watch the match then they are gone. For a moment I thought about sticking the nut on one particular moaner. I was unhappy. Isn’t the team part of the Town? Can you slag the town off but support the team? Not in my book. I love Wolverhampton and have always seen the two entities close and tangled in each other. But these freaks from ‘Out of town’ reminded me of those pair of twats going to Old Trafford to watch Manchester United and Wolves last season. They were from the Town, but supported United, I couldn’t get my head around that, and I’ve never been able to I’m afraid. Ah well, fuck it, do what you want. Support who you want I suppose. But there is a gulf of difference between ‘loving’ your team and ‘supporting’ it.

Without Social Media this blog will slowly die now and only be read by hardcore fans and that’s cool. Probably by next season it will only be read by the couple of blokes I wrote for originally before I was convinced to put it on the net. By then I suppose nobody will really recognise anything written in it and it will become at the most some academically interesting footnote to the whole Nuno Wolves thing. 

But I just want to say this. Nuno, dude, everything is OK man. You don’t have to push yourself so hard. You are not responsible for explaining decisions made by Officials, you are not really responsible for results either. You can’t cover all of the bases no matter how much you try. There are always other variables, there is always a little bit of life to kick you in the balls when you are not looking. The dream of course is still on track, still moving and grooving along oiled by the tentacles of our Chinese OverLords. But I’m not concerned about results and how we play, I’m concerned about you and how you are doing. I want you to be emotionally resilient to the madness that unfolds at our club. You aren’t a dog chained to a runaway cart. You can get tangled in this bullshit very easily. Untangle yourself Nuno, look at the larger picture. 

 

One thought on “Twenty Twenty Vision

  1. Spot on Mikey. How much effort has gone into the season so far? When we went 2-0 down at half time against Watford the Facebook supporter pages started the “Nuno aye got a clue” all over again. I scrolled on…..