Wolves look like a team in need of a hug after Crystal Palace loss, and the Super League returns – The Warm-Up

WEDNESDAY’S BIG STORIES

Some Of Those That Wander Are Actually Lost

Last night’s defeat leaves Wolves hovering just above the relegation places: a win for Southampton this evening and they’ll be down there below the dotted line. They look like a team without a striker or a manager, which isn’t too much of a surprise, since that’s exactly what they are.

This is a team playing from memory, marking time, waiting for somebody to come and tell them ‘don’t do that, do this’. Plenty of decent footballers out there, but hardly anything that resembles decent football. Under happier circumstances, Sasa Kalajdzic would be banging them in for Bruno Lage. Now the shuffling ghost of Diego Costa can’t even get an argument going properly.

You can see why the thought of returning to Nuno Espirito Santo is an appealing one. On a very fundamental level, he looks like a man who gives a good hug, and Wolves look a like a collection of individuals that need, as much as anything, a good strong hug. A moment’s peace, a couple of pats on the back. There you go. That’s ok. Let it out. We’re not saying this would fix everything, but it seems a decent place to start. Come on. Bring it in.

But beyond that, it’s an interesting question, essentially posing two of football’s more mystical beliefs against one another. On the one hand, he ‘knows the club’, a strange and slippery compliment that defies precise understanding. It might refer to a deep and abiding familiarity with the cultural intricacies of Wolverhampton and its passions as they relate to football, just as it might mean knowing the name of the lad who cleans the windows at the training ground. These are both positives for a manager.

But on the other hand: never go back, never go back, never go back. You can’t cross the same river twice, as Brendan Rodgers once said, and you absolutely must not attempt to manage the same football team. Howard Kendall, Malcolm Allison, Terry Venables… nothing dents a legacy like an attempt to expand it. Jose Mourinho even got another title out of Chelsea, and that still ended in all-around misery.

Neither of these rules are hard and fast. Returns can go well, and knowing the club can mean nothing at all. Perhaps a little cynically, we wonder if the most appealing thing about a Nuno return, from the point of view of the Wolves hierarchy, might be the fact that he’s got them out of the Championship before. That, and the fact that he’s very unlikely to get poached by a bigger Premier League team, even if things go well. That and the fact that he’s out of work. It’s not clear he answers any of the footballing questions, but he does fall into a certain logic.

As for being too good to go down, there’s a lot of it about. From West Ham in 13th to Leicester in 20th, the bottom half of the table is packed full of clubs that have pretty decent looking squads and pretty wobbly looking teams. Perhaps all a side needs to survive, in such circumstances, is a calming and familiar presence on the touchline, a little more stubbornness at the back, and a warm embrace from an avuncular man with a good beard. Get the vibes right, and the points will follow? At least it’s a plan. Though not, perhaps, one with many goals in it. Whatever happens, it’s unlikely to be a whole lot of fun.

As It Should Be

Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona had their own identity. So did Wimbledon’s Crazy Gang. And Brighton had one too, and that’s why we were worried. After all those seasons under Graham Potter, could a new manager and a new way of doing things disturb the Premier League’s most ambiently pleasant, most utterly frustrating team? Who are these strangers going to Anfield and scoring three goals?

But no. As it was, so it is. Lovely football, incisive passing, can’t put the ball in the net, 70% of possession, 19 shots to three, hitting the crossbar, hitting Dean Henderson, hitting Dean Henderson again. A big warm cup of Brighton with extra marshmallows on top, perfect for the deepening evenings. Sure, a win would have been nice. But it seems clear that Roberto De Zerbi and Brighton understand one another, and that’s more precious than points. Maybe.

But where Brighton look a team entirely at ease with themselves, if not with goalscoring, then it’s not immediately clear what Nottingham Forest are up to. Perhaps they came to the AmEx looking for a point, and if so, job done! But thanks for that job go equally to Henderson, the crossbar, and Brighton’s wonky shooting, which doesn’t really point to a smooth defensive smothering.

Up the other end, the square root of almost nothing. Odd to say about a side that brought in nearly two full teams over the summer, but last night the failure to pick up a Big Man Up Top really stood out. Jesse Lingard, Brennan Johnson, Morgan Gibbs-White: each a talented footballer, each perhaps at their best when working alongside and around a focal point.

And so we ended up with one side that won’t score goals as a matter of principle, against another that apparently can’t. The Warm-Up sat down to watch this game thinking it might be entertaining, and it was! But we also sat down thinking that there might be goals, and oh, how silly we felt when the whistle went.

Don’t Call It A Comeback

Instead, A22 – “a European sports development company” – are here to initiate “a broad dialogue about the current state of the football ecosystem,” and are hoping to “achieve the full potential of pan-European club football while at the same time addressing the many important issues facing the sport.” Funny thing, you look at the home page and there’s no mention of any particular club. You could almost think that, organisationally, this was nothing to do with the Super League. And then you click through to Read More and there they are: Andrea Agnelli, Joan Laporta and Florentino Pérez. Keeping the flame alive.

As ever with this whole conversation, there are a lot of good points about sustainability, access to football, the bloated calendar, and underinvestment in women’s football. And there is the overwhelming sense – call it realism, call it cynicism – that those driving these changes don’t really care about any of that, not really. Not so much as they care about toppling UEFA and taking charge of things for themselves.

IN OTHER NEWS

Goal of the evening in the Championship came from Ben Brereton Díaz, who did one of those sidefoot from long range goals that always look impossibly cool. Like an inside-out Thierry Henry. Just think, if the Championship had VAR, then the goal probably would have been ruled out for a penalty up the other end. What a crime against aesthetics that might have been. Who needs justice when robberies look this good.

RETRO CORNER

“Ronnie Lawson’s got the biggest mouth in the north-west of England.” Our thanks to the BBC Archives Twitter account for bringing us this clip from 1975. Weird how supporting football has changed in about a million very important ways, and yet ‘man shouting loudly’ remains such a crucial part of the overall experience.

HAT TIP

Trivia question! This year is the first year since 2006 that neither Lionel Messi nor Cristiano Ronaldo have finished in the top three of the voting for the men’s Ballon d’Or. Can you name the 2006 top three? Answers in a couple of paragraphs.

“[Zinedine] Zidane, who Benzema saw as a kind of big brother, would agree. ‘People talk about Karim as a pure No. 9, a nine and a half, a 10; for me, he’s a bit of everything,’ he said. ‘I would define him as a total footballer.’ Benzema had always felt so too. In fact, he didn’t always see himself as a striker at all; he played, and for others. He played, he liked to say, for those who understand the game.”

A mild and pleasant irony, then, that so much of what Benzema got up to last season went far beyond easy understanding. That comeback, that other comeback, that other other comeback. Benzema was “the heart of probably the most absurd campaign the European Cup has seen,” and ultimately “there can have been few clearer winners.”

Trivia answers! 2006 was, of course, the year of Italy’s World Cup victory, and so Fabio Cannavaro beat Gigi Buffon to the prize. Thierry Henry came in third after scoring lots of goals for Arsenal.

COMING UP

We don’t get Arsenal vs. Manchester City tonight, title defenders against title upstarts, because of all those Queen-related postponements. So instead we all get to watch the second-best team in north London against the second-best team in Manchester. We have Barclays at home.

Andi Thomas has officially rebranded at AT38 Sports, and will be here tomorrow to begin a wide-ranging dialogue on Warming-Up