I am starting to love Saiss more and more as he plays for us. He jinked a Norwich neck in the game yesterday and with a twitch of his body and a semi errant stud he sent said neck twisting around like he’d been shot. The innocence on the face of Saiss made me bend over with the giggles and my heart pumped a bit faster…plus Doherty isn’t wearing gloves and it’s February…climate change is real. Now I’m a believer. 

On a side note I read about Patrick Cutrone having a go at Nuno and Cutrones time at Wolves. I laugh. Patrick…your song was better than you to be honest. You had chances but you are a Maverick. You are not what we needed. I daresay you were given every chance to assimilate to the Philosophy and instead you chose personal glory over team effort. Now it is a shame that you have chosen to wax your sad lyrics to all and sundry about your time here. So Nuno was right after all. You cannot hide from Nunos intense observation of the way a player comports himself within this club. It’s a team game Patrick. One day you may reach the same glorious heights as Nuno and this club but you will never be loved Patrick. Travel well and play your Cutrone ball. The door at Compton obviously banged your arse on the way out.

Norwich and Daniel Farkinell are in some sort of dark place at the moment. They are wounded and are twisting around on the subway floor trying to avoid the odd boot in the throat. Wounded animals fight dirty and hard. But this was not the case yesterday. Startling mate, open football. The kind that ‘some’ teams play when they come down to Molineux. So open in fact that Wolves gaily skipped and danced through their defence to poke a trio of goals into the ‘Nardge’ net. Their Goalie made me laugh all game too. He’s got a trim like some Pedophile on tag. You see, I look at trims a lot. But he was obviously in a place in his career when he has a couple of Rugrats, an expensive woman, big fucking mortgage. Every penny of his wages probably goes in the bank, every shirt swapped goes in a black bin bag with a piece of blank A4 paper sellotaped to it ready for when he dumps them on ebay at the end of his career. 

Poor Farke must have wondered what was going on as Wolves trotted out in a 3-5-2 thing. It would have been quite easy for Farke and his staff to train most of the week for this match expecting a trio of front men to thunder down the Molineux turf to terrorise old Shitrim in goal. Alas no. Nuno had other ideas and ya know what, I’ll leave the analysis of why Nuno shifted the dynamics to people better suited to understanding such intricacy. Did the shift in variables work? Yeah man, it did. Although Wolves seemed a bit laid back those soft and languid movements again showed me that hard work is the key. It always looks easy when you are good at something and I idly thought that Wolves didn’t really shift up the gears for most of the game. But this idle thought was a stupid one really. Yes, it is hard work to make it look easy, and the work was hard regardless of the score line and the relative ease in which Young Diogo threw shapes at the Norwich goal. I mean it got that weird that even Willy Boly started to dribble the ball around at one point but by that time many of the Norwich players were hands on hips and downcast. This is what happens when you have to play football against Wolves these days. Get Wolves in the sparkly mood and they are going to stun you fast. Stun you hard too. 

Adama dropped from the front three and Donk was shoehorned in. Maybe this was to ally the threat of that Pikku bloke. I’m not sure. But Donk was throwing himself around with alacrity at times breaking up attacks as they swept by him…and to be honest in the first ten minutes Nardge had some shapes to throw for sure. Meaningless shapes of course but shapes nonetheless. It was all whiteboard bollocks tho. You could tell they had been set up well and had the players to move around our defence. On another day maybe they would have got an early goal and then defended it. That’s what most doughnuts do when they come down here. But you could tell that they were scared shitless of Wolves. Every time that ball arced towards Jota on the left there was a Titanic like scramble for the lifeboats as Norwich tried to shift back into the shape they had practiced all week. I say tried…I mean what can you do when you have Wolves attacking the way they do. Maybe watch the game back not as a Wolves fan but as a Norwich fan. Watch the way Wolves build up a head of steam before barrelling into the final third. It’s scary isn’t it? And that’s without Traore on too. 

There was discussion around me about Cantwell being a viable addition to the Wolves squad but no thanks. He has great hair but even his effervescent rollicking around the midfield started to get lacklustre and dull as the game started to progress. You can’t have a bloke like that in the team, not this team anyway. Nuno wont stand for deserters when all seems lost. He wants ballers and brawlers, fighters…not in a violent sense but in a football one. He wants blokes who don’t give up, don’t start to weep when shit gets real. That’s the great thing about Wolverhampton Wanderers…we understand that you have to keep the momentum going, sometimes you have to dig deep. 

I spent a lot of time thinking about the Norwich fans at halftime. They are an odd bunch for sure. I think that if VAR continues to infect the game as much as it has then the average football fan will be pretty much like the Norwich support. Sitting there with a bucolic and vacant stare and the only emotional out pouring will be if someone drops any litter. I was hard pressed to have any emotional thought about them or their team to be honest and that made me sad. I have had many conversations with Mr Norwich Clubshop at the top of my road. He loves to wax about Ipswich and their rivalry. He wont even say ‘Ipswich’ he just calls them ‘Those bastards’ but have you watched a Norwich V Ipswich derby? It has all the excitement and madness as of a bowl of Angel Delight.

I liked Norwich early on this season and a few points mid way. They play lovely football at times, it’s pretty and academic. What lets them down I think is that there is a lack of passion, a lack of excitement about…well…anything at all connected with Norwich City. Perhaps if their fans had got behind their team from the off well, anything could have happened I suppose. But nothing did. It’s going to be like that in a few seasons when VAR has fully infected the game of football. Everyone will be like Norwich. No celebrating, no songs, no madness, no flags only Club permitted designs. There will be Cheerleaders flinging their tits around and flashing their arses trying to get some emotional shit going. But we will sit still, eat our ten quid hotdog, chewing endlessly, like Cows in a field. Chomp, Chomp, Chomp. 

VAR FC ay they? Ah so sad. But I look at Jota banging in two goals and feel better that at least we have a team that doesn’t really let all that VAR bullshit affect them and I hope it carries on that way too. But I love the way Diogo is handling the physicality of the Premier League. We wonder whether or not Nunos team has that ‘horribleness’ that seems to give Manchester Uniteds and the Liverpools that edge they have. But you know I don’t think we need it. There is nothing worse than clanking a player to the ground constantly only to see them get straight back up and make another of those intense runs into the box. I know we say we have never seen a Wolves team play like this but let me reiterate for a minute. We have never seen a Wolves team like this one. We don’t need ‘nasty’ and we don’t need ‘arsey’ either. What we do need is Conor Coady being an absolute rock in defence again. We need Willy Boly shuffling attacks away like he’s done this all his life and he sees no reason to change. Saiss I talked about earlier. Clean sheets mate. Foundations. Nuno loves that defensive thing, he lives for it and when he speaks about Diogo and Raul, Traore and attacks I think what he wants to talk about is the way our defence performs. How Rui performs. Man, we never talk about Rui and I think that’s all down to the fact that Rui doesn’t have much to do in goal most of the time. I think that’s why he had a bit of a mare the other week against Espanyol. He was probably thinking about what to have for supper. 

We inch closer and closer to a Champions League place. We seem to be coming into a vein of form. Pedro Neto is looking like he grew here. Vinagre back. Jonny Otto gaining experience and confidence every match he plays in. Willy Boly beautiful. Out of our small intense squad we can pick a game changer here and there…not a lot of them but by God enough of them. Moutinho playing like a young kid full of passion weaving his own madness all over the pitch again. Honestly take five minutes and just watch him, nothing else. It’s a revelation. Watch Neves inching further and further forward now that he knows Willy Boly is back in the side. He smacked a beauty at Krul Pedotrim that Krul was acrobatic enough to get half a finger on it. Bloody hell Ruben.  So dangerous again yesterday, he is threatening and it’s a new thing for opposition Coaches to worry about.

Good day mates. Things are getting scary aren’t they?

 

This article is dedicated to my friend Adam Weaver

I’ve only stepped out of the car for a few minutes and I can feel the cold getting in me. It’s that cold that creeps up your back and you feel it’s tendrils oozing around your neck a bit. It gets in the old wounds and makes them ache a little. It’s a dark night in Wolverhampton. But it’s a Euro night. It’s a night where we play a Spanish side at Molineux. I let this thought prickle it’s way through me simple head like the cold does.

All around us as we walk to the ground…these Spanish football fans. Espanyol. They are a weird bunch for sure. None of them are very tall for some reason and I can see over most of their heads as we mill and press trying to avoid the Death Race 2000 style bollocks trying to get over the ring road by the art block. I mean the David Carradine version of course not the Jason Statham one (which was rubbish)…hiring a video of it, it was always in the ‘pound a night’ section, remember? These Spanish fans are singing now. The song sounds very loud and impressive although I regret to say I didn’t understand a word of it, but I try to sing along for  a giggle and take the piss. The Spanish have a little squint to see who this tuneless ape is. It’s me. I laugh and say something to somebody and a lad next to me laughs. He thought I was one of them Espanyols. No mate, just me. I give them a chorus of ‘My old man’  with the ‘chains and hammers’ part echoing around the art block. I should stop doing this, one day I’ll get punched, again. But enough about the crap before the match.

What is this Euro football all about? This is the last but most arduous leg of the whole experience for sure. Because now people are saving money and throwing crap on Ebay to raise money to travel to away games we haven’t even qualified for yet. That is the amount of belief here in Molineux and in the faces of the people moving to and fro to cram themselves through the gates to get in. This is what it is all about. Excitement, hope and dreams. Last night I went to talk about Barnsley and Crawley and stopped myself. The time for that memory lane trip has gone. There has been an evolution now. Fosun and Nuno have built the dream home and now we have to try and live in it.

So the team have got Adama and Joao in from the start today. At Leicester they were given 45 minutes or so off. Adama has evolved for sure. Not so much physically but mentally for sure. In the warm up he is resplendent in his new mentality and it shows. He communicates, laughs and works as the team go through their warm up drills. Between the whole team there are words, laughter, a touch here and there, a slap on the shoulder or a smile. This is the Nunomachine, the thing that Nuno has created for our pleasure but I still keep thinking how big can this thing get? Have we got the mental capacity to understand what this team means to us? What it may possibly do in the future?

At kick off the Machine sets it’s stall out early and we start to press and attack from the off. Jota is moving and weaving his own complex tapestry of delights on the left. Adama on the right is an unexploded bomb just ticking away slowly one minute and the next he explodes into movement and I swear you can feel the hot air of that explosion dry your eyeballs and blow your hair back a little as he moves forwards. Joao Moutinho is a Wizard he weaves his own shapes in midfield and it all looks so effortless and refined, so easy, you can practically forget he is even there sometimes as he moves into spaces and collects a ball, goes for a loose ball, moves players around him like a Chess Master waiting for the momnent every piece is in place and then firmly places his ball into exactly the area his team mate needs it. I say ‘needs it’ because what Jota or Adama ‘want’ is sometimes not the ball they ‘need’. Henceforth it takes a second or a half second for Moutihos team mate to actually understand the complexity of the pass they just recieved. Often that realisation comes as they look up after collection or move into a vast space Moutinho has forseen to open up giving the team a movement into the final third, a chance of attack, a shot, and we repeat, probing, searching, looking for the moment. 

There is something in the air here tonight of course. You can feel it, some metaphysical process going on that weaves between the stands and the pitch. It is gratifying on many levels of course. The football we are generating is electric and it of course materialises in a background hum of pure intent. Espanyol themselves have their own footballing agenda but it lacks belief and perfectly symbolises their slide towards the nether regions of La Liga, but don’t let this doldrumic narrative of their play fool you into thinking that they are a push over tonight. They are not. But they don’t believe their own dreams anymore and you can tell. But Neves and Moutinho are in full belief mode and the distances between themselves and the goal in a few early long distance pokes towards the Espanyol goal are belief ridden of course. Ruben and Joao know something we don’t. Yet.

Adama explodes, he springs around the Espanyol players like Tigger of Winnie the Pooh fame. A corner and a chance. Espanyol defence already finding out early doors what this particular night holds for them. You can’t play football against this team. Play football and you will dry up, bleed out on the lush 5G grass of Molineux and finally cook in the heat from Adama and Co to be picked up by the wind and blown over Dunstall hill. So the Great Wizard Moutinho plonks into the mix a swinging and swirling peach of a corner, Raul Jimenez has a subtle and gentle touch on it as the ball flies over, Jota is there, ready and waiting to volley it into the net. I don’t know whether there is a deflection or not off an Espanyol player but who cares? We have scored first (which is a shock) and I can’t quite get a grip on that groove at all. But I’m jumping around a bit. 1-0 mate. Have that. 

But tonight with beauty we also have comedy. Some shot or pass is there for Rui Patricio to deal with and with that lets take a second to imagine a rolling piano tune, a Buster Keaton choreographic nightmare and Rui has a nightmare dealing with it. As dysfunctional as I am, I can sympathise with Rui. I don’t know what is going on mate and I am up in the Southbank with a pretty good view of the proceedings. I think most of the Southbank are dysfunctional too and we have a bit of a laugh about the incident as we wipe a bit of sweat away. 

Now there is a turning point in the whole show. Down the side one of the Espanyol players has a Bee in his bonnet about how Jota keeps flying past him. We know this feeling of course and it always ends the same way. The Espanyol player gives Jota a bit of a jink with his forehead in a testosterone fuelled bit of ‘You wait till Home time’ bollocks’. You know what? I didn’t want the Espanyol bloke sent off. I wanted all of them to be on the pitch for what I knew was about to happen. You see once you resort to plonking a headbutt on someone then it’s game over. You’ve run out of arguments and your dogmatic football has reached it’s conclusion. You only do that when you have run out of ideas. It was a symptom (if you like) of the end for Espanyol. They have come, they have seen, they have failed. At halftime I go over the joy of the football played and moments of magic I have just seen. It was beautiful at times with that undercurrent of madness we all know and love about football. Willy Boly makes me feel warm, his return has made me feel safe and protected. Romain Saiss is nearly at Conor Coady levels of love for me. I love him roaming around the box sniffing out attacks. I love the way he instills a hardness and an aggressive sub narrative to our defence. Don’t annoy him in any way because you will rapidly find yourself tumbling through the air like a bin bag in the wind. The Espanyol players know this story and are aware of Romain Saiss. Jonny Otto is troublesome for the Spanish side. His story is defend and attack and the bloke just ‘appears’ all of a sudden. One second ushering a Spaniard into the electric advertising hoardings then half a second later the man is bumping in a cross or three. Amazing work rate. I like Jonny too, I like all of our team. 

So this second half. It’s all set up now isn’t it? We have softened them up lovely, rubbed a bit of Olive Oil in them, sprinkled some salt and pepper on them, maybe a sprinkle of Paprika and in the oven. Time to cook this team. Gas mark 18 for 93 minutes. Forget about the incredible hard on Espanyol came out with. There were threats and danger flying around. Wu Lei their Chinese Superstar threatened a few disjointed shapes that sailed a bit close for comfort. But who was worried? Who was biting their nails? Was it close? Ruben what do you think?

I’ll tell you what Ruben Neves thought. It wasn’t a Derby County moment. There was no spooky silence as the ball looped towards him, no stillness. This is where we see how Wolverhampton Wanderers have affected us over these past few years. Especially us in the Southbank, because as a ball was cleared out of the box by an Espanyol defender we automatically see who is going to collect it. Ruben is just sitting there waiting. This is Zen Ruben. So I started celebrating straight away. He hadn’t even touched the ball and I was going apeshit. Because that’s the way it is my friends. That is the Ruben Zeitgeist and I’m not going to apologise for the fatness and ripeness of my lyrics about this. I knew he was going to score because ‘Time’ slid forwards a few seconds. It did this for a lot of people in the Southbank. Because…most people encourage Ruben to shoot in those positions and are vocal in encouraging Ruben to do it. But there were many people in that stand that just shouted ‘YES’ and already had their arms aloft for the goal mosh pit that was about to happen. Time slid forwards and we saw into the future. Ruben takes the sting out of the ball with his chest and volleys it into the top corner of the net.

Who didn’t think about the local park? Who didn’t think about that time some kid delivered a rare almost perfect ball for you to chest and volley? Do you remember how the ball deformed under your foot as you hit it, the ping of the ball at connection with foot, the way the ball arced and dipped into the net? OK most of the goals didn’t have a net but you know…we wheel away and the poor Goalie has to jog fifty yards through the Council park dog eggs to get it back. For a minute you were Ruben Neves even if Ruben hadn’t been born yet. Ruben you beauty. That is a million views YouTube goal moment with the comments filled with angst and bitterness that you do not love their team. 2-0 mate. Things are cooking lovely and you can smell the Espanyol fat starting to crinkle. There is an aroma enticing us to let our shields down and be emotional about it. By eyes were streaming but that was the elbow I took in the nose during the goal mosh.

This was the end of the game. There was no coming back now for Espanyol. It wasn’t the score line of course, it was the whole experience. Here’s a sentence for you. 

“Jota scores twice and gets his hat trick” 4-0

This is when you have just had the best sex of your life with a beautiful woman and as you lie there like a wet flannel hovering between wake and sleep, that Hypnagogic netherworld where you just seem to float…Jotas goals were the beautiful woman coming into the room with a pot of tea and a plate full of biscuits for you to munch on and get your energy back. Alright I’m laughing and there is now way you can extrapolate his goals with a plate full of HobNobs and a pot of tea. But…bloody hell. Let me explain…

In this Europa League tie we are in some sort of Hypnagogic netherworld. Nuno said that ‘dreams are free’ and he is right. But the journey to that dreamland isn’t. That journey involved tough work at the University of Compton by our players and Staff. It was paid for by investment and analysis from Fosun, it was paid for by Wolves fans being clubbed outside Bragas stadium while watching their belongings being tossed into the mud by Fascist arseholes in riot gear. That’s what makes me think we are going to win it. We have already paid for it. Now if you close your eyes and think about Gdansk, about how mad that night will be cast your mind back to when the BBC came to interview me in my front garden back in 2017 and I said ‘who says we can’t win a European Trophy in a couple of years?’ How everyone laughed…but I wasn’t laughing mate, I was dreaming. 

 

New podcast! I’m always asked when it was to return and here it is…in fact nobody ever asks about the blog just the podcast hahahahahaha. Big thanks  to Ian and Pat for popping in and waxing humungous fat lyrics. They are much needed as if it was just me all I would be doing is talking about Conor Coady and how he is most excellent. Truth spoken. Anyway enjoy!

 

 

 

The Liverpool match. Gutting mate. Apparently the Liverpool team spent the day at Compton. I wonder if they had Lunch there? I hope someone pissed in their stewpot. I don’t care what wankfest Klopp is having with Nuno and company at the moment, I just wanted sad Bindippers filing out…but. Thursday was extremely weird for me. I had three conversations with friends and it was all the same conversation. Every single one. It was about struggle, and I don’t mean the football kind for a change. It was about men struggling with issues be it mental or physical, or both. Now I can do the listening part no problem and I have many times in the past. I don’t mind it at all. I’ve sat and held the hand of a Multi Millionaire friend of mine as he recounted all his angst when he was at the end of his tether. I’ve given a Crackhead a hug and a listen down the canal when things got a little on top of him. But I’m not only a listener I’m a talker too. You see my depressive interludes (and I have a lot) are helped by me finding some doughnut to talk to and letting it all out. I don’t have any real issues with being emotional with other men because it pulls me out of those troughs of despair we have at times…or all the time. Talking helps me take a stock of my situation and if the listener is any good they will often have some points to make or a similar tale that kind of lets you know you aren’t alone.

Dudes have problems opening up. Dudes think dudeness is something where if you are in the pack and you show some element of weakness then you are liable to be attacked as a weak member and your ‘manliness’ is under question. So blokes just shut up and hold it all in. They just seem a bit miserable maybe or over happy…you see we are pretty good at hiding things like emotions. We men are very good at it. We hide our issues under layers and layers of personalities and before we know it we forget who we are. We forget what makes us ‘Us’.

I’ve missed writing about two games now, the Pool one and Manure. You know I didn’t know what to say about both of them only that we were bloody close to sticking it up both of them. That would have been good. But it’s the same old shit really. Chances and dances in midfield, chances in front of goal. All blew away like a bit of fluff. How funny was it to watch Traore razz around all those Pool players in midfield? Fair enough they all filed out of the Lower New Stand with a few cheeky grins these Scousers…but they didn’t look completely happy did they? There’s something weird about the way they are going to win this Premier League thing, something not quite right about the winning zeitgeist to me. 

Before the Liverpool game at Molineux me and Knocker had a walk around the ground to gather our thoughts about the game. See some people too, some of whom I wanted to check on because of the above madness and mental health grooves. I was in a weird mood to be honest especially as we walked around the Billy Wright. Loads of Flakies waiting for the players at the entrance. There was a certain security mood there for sure but everybody was quiet and I got talking to a dude near the security barriers. Just shooting the shit ya know. Bullshitting as you do. Then all hell breaks loose. It was quite silent there really until the Security fatties started moving the barrier back to let Liverpools Coach into the dropping off area. It was quiet…I mean it was intimated later that the silence at the Liverpool Coachs arrival was punctuated by some doughnut shouting…

“Ah Klopp you fucking Scouse wanker! Kloppy fuck off! Fuck off you Scouse bastards…you wanna share them teeth out ya Kraut bastard! Oi Henderson you fucking streak of wank!”

The voice echoed around the façade of the Billy Wright then I realised it was me and started to laugh. They were a lucky bunch of bastards that night mate. No shit. 

So I have bigged up Thelwell enough over the last couple of years despite most people hating him. You know me, I try to stick up for people especially when connected with the club. So his departure made me feel a bit….unmoved to be honest. I didn’t feel anything at all. Where has he gone? New York Red Bulls or some other Non entity in the MLS. He will have a great time there probably but I don’t really care to be truthful. I’m wondering what’s going on at Fosun Towers to warrant the move. Of course Jeff would have known months ago that Thelwell was off. I wonder whether or not he was prodded to go. Perhaps his role will go to some other up and coming negotiator or whatever his job entailed. I’m tempted to understand he was the dude at the bukkake party who couldn’t coax any life into his limp member as the transfer of players was dissected by perhaps sharper minds than his. Maybe being a bystander to such liquid splashing of egos wasn’t enough for Fosun…I dunno. Other bodies with better ideas of how these doughnuts do their career shit will know better than me. I’m just a bit unmoved by the whole thing. Same as when Garglypimple went. Decisions don’t have to be made in the light of his departure. Decisions were made months ago that’s obvious. I bet you any money the bloke that does take on the role left vacant by Thelwell is already throwing Wolves related shapes in their current role…which they still have. Jeff is just playing shadows with his ‘taking on the Thelwell role’ for sure. I wonder who the new dude will be? Someone exciting and a bit mad I hope….it also makes me wonder whether or not Uncle Jorge is doing it while Wolves wait. Who knows.

The transfer window has come and gone and it’s the first time for years I haven’t read any angst about it on Social Media or the Depress and Stir comments section. It’s not that I don’t care it’s just that having some sort of Reductionist viewpoint on the whys and wherefores of the players we got and the players we didn’t hasn’t bothered me as much. Fosun and company don’t really need my help in getting players in or out. The January window is a bloody harsh place to do business especially when your club have their toes nearly under the big table. But it’s their job not mine. All I can do is talk about who they got in. I like the signing of Luke Matheson to be honest. I got a bit sweaty when his name came up and then he went back to Rochdale on loan. I can see that. Nuno likes to have a good preseason with players before he starts to understand who they are. He likes to get close and personal with them to see what they are all about in the madness of pre season training. He’s done it with all his players so far. I expect Matheson to have a role in next years squad. A big role too maybe. The captures of Podence, Leonardo Campana, Enzo Loiodice and Luke Matheson are far sighted of course and excellent for this time period. There weren’t going to be any 80 million pound buys and ‘marquee’ signings for the Flakies to get sweaty about for sure. Simply because there wasn’t going to be any ‘push on’ for a Champions League place this season no matter how close we are to them. Don’t forget that we are still a year in front of our timetable for global domination. Nuno has bought additions and support for the next three years or so and we will see some of those additions blossom and become Nunoites or flutter away and join other teams…and we will make profit on all of them don’t worry. It’s the Fosun way. I think we can have a quick look on how splashing the cash can go brutally wrong by looking at Villa. I mean nobody wants that here do they? It’s all about the Europa League at the moment, we can win it you know, everything is set up for us. So we can eye that prize while we are in the competition, if we get knocked out (which I doubt) then we can have a crazy push to get a Champions League place. I think there is deffo more to come from Wolves yet. I don’t think we have achieved half of what that squad are capable of yet. I’m waiting for the explosion to be honest and it will come at some point. 

This breathing space we have is a ripe time to consolidate the squad we have and add to it with an almost academic approach rather than one that reflects a jerky fattening of the squad ‘because it’s too thin’. I mean the team is small don’t get me wrong and we have rode our luck with injury for a couple of years. But that’s where great teams become greater isn’t it. By riding as close and as fast to the edge as you can to grab half a second on your rivals. Plus the other great thing about our January window is that nobody has left the squad. Nobody got tempted away by oodles of ready cash. We still have our team…apart from Benno. 

I was a bit sad about Benno and I wont wax sad lyrics about his hopping over to the Crispies in Leicester. Fair play to him, I hope he made a couple of quid over it. I mean he was never the same after Nuno nicked his alloys was he? That goal at Bristol though eh? That tackle against Willian or whatever his face was against Chelsea…yes a bit sad. But we wave and say tata mate, see you in a bit. 

You see…in this madness of being a football fan you can sometimes get carried away by spending someone else’s money and it does occupy those times when people don’t want to look up and actually communicate with the people around them, they would rather argue with internet non entities about the pros and cons of the window. 

There hasn’t been much writing from me over the past few weeks because I have been struggling a little too much. I get bouts of depression that come on all of a sudden. Sometimes the depression is linked to something someone has said or something that has happened and BOOM its black dog time. But with me there is a difference between my struggles and other mens. (That is) I talk about it all the time. When I have a bout of depression I call up a mate and moan at them for an hour or two. They do the same to me of course. A few of us have this mutual moan network. It is vitally important that we talk about this shit together. Strangely enough before I started to open up about myself then they started to as well. I never even knew they struggled to be honest. I thought they were successful men who had great lives. In fact I thought it was brilliant that I was pissing on their happy strawberries with my woes until I found out they too were sitting in their cars in strange deserted car parks wondering how they were going to deal with the multitude of their own griefs. I like to lecture about how I deal with my madness because some of the tactics I use are bloody handy mate. Some of them not so good. But that’s where talking about this shit comes in handy. Talking lets you share your own ideas of how to deal with mental issues. Talking means sharing. Sharing means you have less of a burden to carry. There isn’t any stigma with being a depressed fruitloop because every man you know is going through the same crazy shit. Some are just better at hiding in than you that’s all. I’m not ‘brave’ in talking about my problems because I love talking about them and I see how it helps, I see how it has not made me ‘better’ but has made the whole depressive cycle a lot easier to get through when they do come. Talking about it is brilliant, cathartic in fact. Talking is the way we drag ourselves out of this mess. I know that picking up the phone is the hardest thing to do for some men, I really do. But I also know that listening can be tough as well, especially if you are on one of your peak periods when things seem OK. That’s where the whole pack mentality comes in. We have to be open with each other and there has to be a little give and take with the conversations we have with each other. So for fucks sake talk about it, learn about it, and let’s share our tactics with each other so we can get through it when we need to. 

Grab onto this site which has helped me in the past…

https://www.wolverhamptonhealthyminds.nhs.uk/

Have a read what Wolves are doing to help us…

https://www.wolves.co.uk/news/foundation/20190311-new-mental-wellbeing-project-for-men-kicks-off-in-city/