Reality bites for Wolves

Clearly potential, clearly problems, ultimately not quite good enough, writes Martin Swain.

One final afternoon neatly captured Wolves’ season at Molineux yesterday when the lingering dream of promotion finally disappeared from view.

For a few brief minutes on a dramatic Championship afternoon, the sold-out home sections thought their team could yet kick down the door to the Premier League.

But the rumble of noise which greeted rumours of a second Blackpool goal against Watford proved as misplaced as all that eve-of-the-season talk about a challenge for automatic promotion.

There was no such goal and there has been no such challenge and now Wolves, their collective disappointment aggravated by their arch rivals title-winning finale, must draw breath and decide how to move forward from this faltering campaign.

Undoubtedly, the man most wounded by this season’s events has been the manager Mick McCarthy. While many supporters have bought into a long-range mission to assemble and develop a team of youthful energy and budding talent, many have also lost faith in last season’s ‘Merlin’ to dispense any more magic.

His immediate superiors, owner Steve Morgan and chief executive Jez Moxey, remain steadfast in their support and it is clear McCarthy will be given the summer to further strengthen this squad while coaxing improvement from players who will all be a little older and wiser for this experience.

But he will be under the cosh to deliver from the ‘off’ when August arrives. For all Morgan’s efforts to raise spirits with a rallying speech from the centre circle after the finish, there was an emptiness about Molineux in the dying minutes of this campaign which only a vibrant and positive start to the 2008-09 season will fill.

That is a season which will mark the 50th anniversary of Wolves’ last First Division championship triumph and if the team is to mark it by winning the second class version, it will have to eradicate the weaknesses which pursued them all the way to yesterday’s finishing line.

That they ultimately missed out on the top six for the want of a couple of goals pretty much says it all.

The fifth lowest scorers in the division, Wolves repeatedly got themselves into positions of goalscoring potential against Plymouth without delivering the quality or the cutting edge required - despite, McCarthy’s critics will remind you, the significant investment in strikers over the calendar year.

Plymouth’s Luke McCormick was ultimately beaten by man of the match Seyi Olofinjana in the 87th minute but no matter how crisply Wolves approached his goalmouth in the rest of the game - and at times there was no denying their fluency - the keeper did not have a serious save to make.

And there can be no point moaning about the expectations of their home stadium. It’s there and McCarthy’s young players are going to have to deal with it, something they may be better equipped to do after this season’s sobering experiences.

Wolves had no choice but to go for it against Plymouth and, as a result, went at their opponents with a verve and clarity of purpose their home fans have too rarely seen.

That freedom of expression has been too often buried beneath the fear of earning Molineux’s displeasure. As a result, this was only Wolves’ fourth home league win of the year; no wonder Morgan views some structural changes to the stadium’s dynamics a vital part of the way forward.

How they didn’t end up with the three-goal victory that would have enabled them to leapfrog Watford by the end of the afternoon is perhaps best explained by their closing attack of the first period.

A lengthy sequence of controlled possession which climaxed with Olofinjana breaking into Plymouth’s area to cross from the by-line was sadly followed by Andy Keogh missing what would have been a goal-scoring connection at the near post.

Indeed, if the afternoon summed up the entire season then that move summed up the entire afternoon. Plymouth’s heavily-manned defensive lines had been opened by some impressive football but all of it for nothing because of a poor finish.

That is not to single out Keogh even if this has been a season in which his striking progress of a year ago has been slowed somewhat.

Even the mercurial Kightly, who had the kind of game which suggested his lengthy absence finally caught up with him, suffered when he was played through by Sylvan Ebanks-Blake early in the second half only to chip his finish wide of a post as McCormick advanced.

It should be pointed out that, throughout all this, Plymouth’s central defenders Krsztian Timar and Russell Anderson were unstinting in their efforts to deny their former team-mate Ebanks-Blake a goal and it was only after Timar had been stretchered off with a worrying head injury that Wolves finally broke through.

By then, McCarthy had given Molineux what must be presumed as a final glimpse of the persistent thorn in his side, Freddy Eastwood, in the hope that he would bring the same discomfort to the opposition. Happily, he did.

A delicately-weighted through ball sent Olofinjana galloping through Plymouth’s central lines to beat McCormick with a composure and certainty which Wolves so often needed in the previous 45 games of the campaign.

As that false rumour about a beckoning defeat for Watford quickly followed, Molineux thundered its anticipation of a reprieve over three weeks for a largely disappointing nine months.

But the promise disappeared as quickly as it arrived and I cannot be alone in thinking that may well have been a blessing in disguise.

Wolves are no more ready for the Premier League than Derby were and to have found themselves in there via the play-offs might well have brought more problems than solutions.

“The crime for this club,” McCarthy said, “will not be missing out but going up and coming back down again.”