Twice Bitten, but Still not Shy

I’ve got the feeling I’ve been here before.

Two seasons ago: Wolves score a soft early goal from a set-piece and proceed to tackle and time-waste for the best part of the next 90 minutes, holding on for a 1-0 win.

Last season: Wolves score with their first meaningful attack of the match and continue with the aforesaid tactic until a couple of late breaks give us the win.

This season: Wolves score a soft goal from a set-piece in their first attack of the match, ushering in another frustrating afternoon of treading treacle before we had to settle for a draw.

 

 It’s like being trapped in a time warp, and I’m not just talking about the hugely irritating similarity between our last three home games against Wolves. McCarthy’s boys have a curious talent all right. Despite disrupting, niggling and taking a minute-and-a-half for each goal kick – adding a hefty heap of stoppage time to the end of each half – they still have an uncanny ability to make a half of football go by very, very quickly. Especially when you’re losing. Before you know it, you’ve looked up at the clock and realised that another hour of your life has slipped into the abyss with hardly any football being played and barely a chance created. With that dawns the realisation that we’ve fallen into the same trap again.

Okay, so you wouldn’t expect Wolves to turn up, grab their ankles and say ‘come on Tottenham, give us a darn good spanking.’ But you’d think we’d have taken the hint by now. In a game where the opposition will spend the last 15 minutes hoiking the ball into the corners and the visiting fans will greet parity at the final whistle with the kind of roar that usually follows a cup final win – and a chorus of ‘who are yas’ that sum up everything about where the two teams are at the moment – you can’t give the other side any encouragement whatsoever. Start with a high tempo. Attack in numbers. Keep the game moving. Rush in to make options from free-kicks and throw-ins. Don’t let them take their time with anything. Above all, do not, repeat NOT give them a soft early goal to allow them to embed their game-plan and the pattern of the game. What did we go and do for the third year in a row? Yep – soft early goal please. You’d take only having to defend one corner in a Premier League match. Maybe that corner wasn’t a corner, but we responded by not defending it either.

Which leads me to our own special talent. Despite a near-monopoly of possession and territory, we still manage to concede from nearly every attack in games like these. Whereas we created relatively little from all our pressure, Wolves got the ball into our box about four times and created utter carnage on each occasion. It’s as if we’re in such a forward-thinking mindset that we can’t maintain concentration when the other side has the ball. Walker’s getting better and better, but was sometimes a little slapdash in possession. There were so many wayward shots, so many over-hit passes. Then again, when the ball seems to be out of play for such a long time, it’s difficult to get any kind of rhythm going. You try to force things, you get frustrated.

Good chances were relatively few, but we had enough to win. Ade successfully tucked away a goal-bound effort from a debatably offside position. Lennon managed to find the keeper rather than the empty half of the goal. Defoe – brought on too late, when we really needed someone sharp around the box – forced a good save from their keeper. I was surprised he didn’t start in a game like this, where you need strikers to occupy the opposition’s cluster of defenders, but it’s never easy to leave out one of our midfielders. For all Ade brings to the side, he takes too long to get his shots away, too long to assess his options. We hardly saw anything of Bale. While he can be dangerous when he’s allowed to roam, we sometimes end up missing him making his penetrating runs down the left, where he’s most effective. In games where there’s not much space in the middle, it’s hard for him to produce those runs. You need to stretch it, move them around. As for our catalogue of set-pieces, it’s amazing how we manage to pick out the first defender from corners or the same section of the upper tier from free-kicks.

There’s no way we weren’t going to mess up in one of our four home games in a row. The way things have gone in the last couple of years, you could probably have guessed we’d mess up against Wolves. Still, Wolves aren’t the only side to have played that way against us and got something. Stoke and Hull did it the season before last, Wigan did it last season. Our next home game? You’ve got it. Wigan.