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?