Bully Bites with Steve Bull

Wolves legend Steve Bull gives it to you straight in his weekly column and believes taking nothing from playing ‘the big four’ is not a foregone conclusion.

They might have lost 4-1, but I still saw more than enough against Arsenal to suggest that Wolves are capable of playing at Premier League level this season.

Give two ‘soft’ goals away to a team like that though and the game’s gone – it’s as simple as that. What made Saturday evening all the more exasperating was the fact that those goals came from just the kind of silly defensive error that I thought had been wiped out.

Whenever a side ships four goals, particularly at home, fingers inevitably point towards the goalkeeper. In viewing last Saturday’s DVD – which I’m sure he has – maybe goalkeeper Wayne Hennessey might agree that this match wasn’t his finest hour. But that doesn’t make me think that he’s anything other than an excellent goalkeeper.

In fact, I think that the best possible position to keep him at the top of his game is the one that he’s in at the moment, with an established back-up ’keeper like Marcus Hahnemann breathing down his neck, plus the imminent return of Matt Murray looming large in the background.

It’s worth remembering that Matt was Mick McCarthy’s No 1 all the way through the manager’s first season at Molineux. Murray just seems to be one of those players who is unlucky with injuries. But with the advancements in modern surgery we can only hope that everything has now been sorted.

Now it’s international time again. I used to hate long breaks like these as a player and I’m sure that’s also true for Mick.

In the Championship, it used to be that if you’d had a bad result on the Saturday, you could try to put it right on the Tuesday, but life is a little more complicated in the Premier League.

There are two extra elements which make this enforced ‘holiday’ doubly tricky. Going into a long break after a heavy home beating on a low rather than on a high, then facing an away trip to Chelsea at the end of it.

That’s what makes me think that things might get worse before they get better.

I don’t like seeing Wolves in the bottom three, nor do I like predicting the fact that we might not take anything away from Stamford Bridge. The flip-side, I suppose, is that they play those top four sides now, rather than in the final few games of the season.

It’s also worth remembering that no result is a foregone conclusion in the Premier League. Who would have bet before this season began that Burnley would beat Manchester United at home and draw at their neighbours City, for instance?

Sooner or later, the law of averages suggests that Wolves are going to pull off a result like that against one of ‘the big four’, although maybe not next Saturday.

One of the other reasons why I’m so keen for Wolves to be five or six off the bottom by the time that Christmas and the New Year come around is the fact that this will also have an impact on the type of player they are able to attract during the January transfer window.

If we’re out of the bottom three and on a good run of form, it will make a move to Molineux look that much more attractive for the type of Premier League-level of player who will improve the quality of Wolves’ squad.

Maybe a week or two ago, we might have thought that one of the positions which Mick might look into at the turn of the year would be at left-back, but I thought that Richard Stearman was very impressive in that role against Arsenal.

The Gunners have some of the trickiest wing-men in the game at their disposal, but I thought that Stearman stood up particularly well against them. Especially so, if you consider that he was supposedly a centre-back playing out of position.

Eyebrows were raised when Michael Kightly didn’t get a start – as they did when Sylvan Ebanks-Blake was dropped to the bench the previous week, at Stoke – but I think that people can read too much into that.

My take on both those non-selections was that they were ‘horses for courses’. Both Stoke and Arsenal play in a very particular way, so Mick rotated his squad in order to try to nullify them and get the best possible result.

That tactic worked in the second-half at the Britannia Stadium, also for the first twenty minutes against Arsenal. If players are dropped in order to make a tactical switch, it’s much easier to bear, I feel, than being left out due to poor form.

Whether Nenad Milijas gets a start or not at Chelsea will also be a matter of some debate – but I think that he’d be worth the gamble. For my money, the Serbian is one of the best ‘ball’ players at the club – he’s just struggling to adjust to the ultra-fast pace of the English game.

If he looked a little exposed at times against Arsenal last week, it’s arguably because they’re one of the best teams in the world at passing and moving the ball dazzlingly quickly – as Wolves discovered.

One last thing, I’ve got a few tickets left for my Christmas party at Molineux. Call 0844 372 2491 if you’re interested.

BULLY’S BETS FOR THE WEEK: -

Maybe you’d expect it from a former centre forward like me, but I think that it’s always worth betting on a striker in form. So I’d suggest placing a few quid on Sunderland’s Darren Bent to score for England at any time against Brazil.

But, in terms of the result, I think that Brazil might prove to be just a little too strong and thus predict them to win 2-1.

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