Wolves 5 Forest 1

By: Tim | August 31st, 2008

After last Saturday’s defeat of Watford, and a creditable performance against Sunderland midweek, I’ve been left not only with a sore head (and one less bottle of duty-free rum), but wondering what went wrong at Molineux yesterday too. Did we simply come up against an in-form Wolves side who had key players returning from injury? Or, in fielding an attack-minded formation, did this game expose Calderwood’s tactical naivety? It was a bit of both really.

First of all, fair play to Wolves. Our defence had no idea how to handle their play, particularly down the wings, as Kightly and Jarvis repeatedly exposed the frailties of our fullbacks. With two goals disallowed, too, this match could easily have been even worse for us. Obviously it’s early days yet, and it’s easy to say after they’ve just hammered your team, but with the results they’ve had so far this season I see Wolves as promotion candidates if they can keep all their players fit. Play-offs at the very least.

Back to Forest though, Mick McCarthy had this to say about us after the match: ‘Forest play good, attractive football, but in doing so they leave themselves vulnerable to the counter-attack’. This is textbook stuff for me. Unless you are extremely confident in your team’s abilities, you can’t expect to play attacking football away from home and win. By playing 4-3-3 (or was it 4-3-1-2?) Calderwood set his stall out straight away, and it left us as open as the door-policy at my local cheese club. Surely it would have made more sense to clog the midfield and stop Wolves from creating anything, perhaps by using a 4-5-1 or 4-2-3-1 formation?

Our stats on the road really don’t look good so far: played 2, lost 2, conceded 8. I really hope CC learns from this defeat, his tactics might have been just enough to scrape through League One, but clearly we’re going to come unstuck in the Championship.

Calderwood at least acknowledges our defensive shortcomings: ‘We lost discipline and the desire to win the ball and we need to defend better as a back four’. Having said this you’d think his priority would be to sign a defender before the transfer deadline, sadly not though, the only rumour doing the rounds is that we are going to bid for Ben Watson, the Crystal Palace and former England under-21 midfielder.

In other news, Earnshaw picked up a slight hamstring problem at Molineux, although he should be fit in time for the next Championship match it looks like he’ll miss the international double-header. Oh, and Skybet have recently made Calderwood third favourite in the Championship sack race, at 10-1 I reckon they’re still pretty good odds.