Yes. Fuck VAR. It’s a virus isn’t it? Some extreme illness that has affected our football. I say ‘affected’ a throw away comment. It has ‘infected’ which is probably a better way of describing it. It has squirmed it’s tentacles into our sport and is slowly leeching and draining the sport of everything that makes it interesting. But there are other factors that make a day out at Molineux a depressing experience. Steve fucking Bruceball. Horsepunchers. I watch them pregame filing down the road singing and pissed as farts. Poor bastards. There’s an example of propaganda affecting shallow minds. The song was dirge like and sonambulent, I felt like nodding off and grabbing a blanket off the Staffy and homeless bloke in the subway and going to sleep.

Now I’ve chilled out a bit since Saturday because simply speaking this post would just be about the shape of Steve Bruces head. It’s like a carrier bag full of tent peg mallets…like a thumb pot made by a two year old kid. Hang on…it’s coming back. The rage. Then I see that Villa have been fully arseholed by Manchester City. My laugh sounded deep and gurgly. My weekend much brighter. Steve Bruce eh? Fucking hell. Old Cabbage head fucked Villa up well and good, I hope he does the same to the Horsepunchers so his decline will be as rapid as Villas. No love for Steve Bruce. We will never forget him and Wyness. 

Steve Bruce wearily pulls his team of malcontents onto the team bus from the dreary wastes of the North East. They have a plan you know. The plan was hatched over stale beer soaked tables, probably the remains of Bruces fry up, there would be the stub of a fag end rudely poked into the remains of an egg yoke as Bruce and his team plot. We know you Steve Bruce. You have rattled around West Midland clubs like a rash that wont go away. We know you and we know your football too. It is redolent of it’s environment of course. Drab, lifeless, false history, minor accomplishment. Yes we know this football. We have seen it much while we dragged ourselves from the insipid cloying griefs of the Championship promotion season. The same tactics dragged out for a shameless display of football as darkness. It is Lance Armstrong filling himself with performance enhancing drugs to win Tour De France titles, it’s Neckism at it’s finest. Using every dark art a team can dredge up to force a draw or nick a win. 

“You’re women are slags and you’re footballs shite’

At the final whistle the Newcastle ‘Jodys’ at the bottom of the New Stand erupt in paroxysms of arm waving, air punching joy and their scrambled point at the Golden Palace. A point my friends. The dishonours are shared really. I walked out more disgusted with that display of joy than anything I saw on the pitch. Wolves of course picked and scratched at Newcastle for a few periods. Trying to find some way through a defence that ached with necky and arsey tantrums. Everything we threw at them was rebuffed and it’s not a lesson in how to defend attacks that we saw. It was death throes of a side that has no belief. Like a drowning man that clutches at you and drags you under too as the breath leaves his smog choked lungs. We were fucked by it again like we always get fucked up by teams like this. Teams that only have survival in mind, that one goal. 

Newcastles goal was scored by some dude who looked like a Cats scratching post. His eyebrows were like two strips of insulation tape. He was that pale he looked see-through. How his little knobbly knees danced up and down when he scored. His adams apple bobbed up and down like a Plumbers arse. Fantastic. We were asleep again. I could have run down the steps and over the advertising hoardings to negate that attack. Fasta’ferkin-asleep mate. All the Club Shop Flakeys by me were apoplectic with rage. “Yeow can ferget the top six neeeeooowww” they exclaim in showers of spit and crap pie. “It ay ferkkkkin gud enuff” etc etc. Even Bob in front of me was that bored of it he started talking about getting Andy Grays autograph when Gray played for Villa…then started talking about George Best ffs. I was staring at Almirons eyebrows again. I couldn’t take my eyes of them. Fucking hell. They looked like aeroplane skidmarks. I can’t keep my eyes off him all game as he kept jumping up and down in some kind of insane extra from that movie ‘Freaks’. Amazing. We gave him the goal of course as we fettled and fucked about for a while before the idea that we were playing a competitive match suddenly dawned on us. What should be the focus for these early periods? Clean sheets from the defence and attack the bastards from the whistle, straight away, turn the knob straight up to 11 and do what we do best, split the bastards apart with forensic defence splitting passes from our Wizards of the midfield. 

Miguels Eyebrows 

As much as you try to whack off that gnarly big padlock with a lump hammer…well you are going to be there a while for sure clanging at the bloody thing and all you make is a few dents in it. Shape, that mantra we all wax lyrical about was prevalent of course. Get the ball wide and cross in. Newcastle were quite happy to let Wolves do that and just made sure their necks were always around to see the threat off. Not that many of the crosses were finding their mark. Neto is still a work in progress. Traore too I think. There wasn’t much of that dinky opposition confusing passing in the final third we have seen over the last few months. Brilliant time to introduce something different from the bench I thought. Anything really, something, some player that would terrorise these fucking imbeciles from Newcastle. But it looked thin that bench tucked into the armpit of the Billy Wright stand. What key stood out to insert into that nifty padlock to see the clasp spring free? None, as far as I could tell. I’ve watched teams like Liverpool and Manchester City…even Tottenham and Chelsea make a substitution and on trots some feral footballing nutter that runs like the ball is velcroid to his foot, who dinks and slides around, has a pop at goal, scares the living daylights out of our defence. Quality players who would have started in our team. But there was no one there. All great footballers of course. Benny Ashley Seal, Ashley Seal, Benny Ashley Seal. Vinagre, MaxxKill, Gibbo I forget who else. All fantastic players but the wrong tools for the job of course. Maybe I would have lashed on Benny for a chance, parked him up front and just kept whacking the ball at him for ten or fifteen minutes see if his physicality would undo Newcastle. But the poor sod has only had one start so far, do we want to send him into a depression by sending him out there in the drizzle to fart and bluster at no hope balls? I don’t know. It would have been a gamble I suppose and I am not Nuno. 

Donks equaliser is lovely. That precise even VAR hides it’s horrible face. Donk for me is a star for slotting into defence after Boly got pranged. Plus he chucks the odd goal in too. His presence makes me feel warm and I celebrate a little too loudly and longer than I should for some reason. 

I do think there is a languid and low key ambience to the way we start games. Maybe that chilled out groove at Compton tends to leak out into the first twenty minutes of our game when more often than not the opposition bang in a goal or two until we suddenly start to realise it’s not Compton it’s a game, a contest. Then of course we shift gears and gobble up a few goals ourselves. Maybe we will win the game or more often we will draw at least. If the Wolves were Musicians (which I’ve allegorised a few times) then this season would be the ‘difficult’ third album. The Championship was fresh and new and we were amazed by it. The second album was pretty much the first but with raw elements of the first album. This is the third album and we are finding out that many of the grooves we used in the previous two masterpieces are starting to look a bit jaded and stale. Maybe we are trying a few things out that aren’t quite exploding yet. But despite our season still being totally beyond our expectations we still hanker and yearn for that madness of dynamic and creative brilliance we have seen in the previous two seasons. We know these bastards on top of the pile are there for the taking. VAR has kicked us in the balls a few times, Bolys injury will be looked at closely in the season end. But really, we need bodies. Mad bodies. Crazy fucked up players who are a bit lunatic, a bit rah maybe. 

But hey! The chances were there. How many goal bound balls did their keeper clear? Two Three? Let’s say it was a day to forget. Of course we will have ‘C’ grade games and against a team that started time wasting on the 50th minute and a Referee as effective as a one sheet wipe after a Dixie Chicken shit well what else did we expect?. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ famous Wolves fan Bill Shakespeare once wrote. Well that was their goal for sure. But the other goal was again to inflect a lack of idea onto the game from the off really. They did that by rolling around on the turf after every innocuous challenge. They did it by constantly haranguing the Referee about every decision he made. Some of them were surreal and that’s being polite about it. 

Traore was sublime again. Acceleration and intent oozed out of him and he left his markers for dead every time. Has there ever been a player that has made our pulses race like he does? I don’t know. Bully maybe. What is scary is that there is more to come from him for sure, he is still a project in my eyes. Maybe the new addition (s) to the squad will be put in place to complement his play? Perhaps the shift in team intent will be to build a side around Traore. Another front player who will be fast and hard enough to follow Adama into the final third with enough strategic nous and physicality to split those necky deep lying defences that have discouraged us so much in the past? We miss Jota for sure down that left. As much as Neto tries he still lacks the physical presence for me, that will come in the next year or so. I expect Neto to grow into the role the more he plays and to be honest I’m picking at him a little because to be honest none of the team singly put much of a foot wrong but it was just the ‘whole’ concept that lacked any kind of luck. We should have won 3-1 you know this.

Ah well. Every slick pair of new pants will have a skid mark in it at some point. That’s what this game was, a skid mark. It will be forgotten in time and lessons hard learned. What do I see in the next few weeks? Nuno will be gunning for Southampton. The United game will be a throw away occasion I suspect. Do as well as you can but don’t be too upset at the result. If we get a win good. We lose? No biggy. Nuno will want to do Southampton after that drubbing they gave us after the Wembley defeat to Watford. It’s a chance for some madness to re-galvanise the team, get some blood flowing. Get some revenge for sure. Already I am seeing a name that was mentioned to me a month ago who is expected to join us. He’s a different key, something entirely different to what we have at the moment. Someone to mallet that fucking padlock off.