Pictures and analysis of Wolves 0 Millwall 1

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An all too familiar defeat means that Wolves have now plummeted 15 places in five joyless weeks around Molineux.

This being the crazy world of the Championship, it is possible to imagine a team climbing 15 places over the same, relatively short time-span.

But, in order for Stale Solbakken's team to make that happen, two things have to change. First, Wolves need to stop facing opponents with former players in their ranks.

Andy Keogh last night stepped into the role previously taken by Mark Davies and Adlene Guedioura by scoring Millwall's winning goal with the kind of crisp conviction that eluded his old club throughout.

Second, Solbakken has to find the person, or persons, who kidnap his players when they leave the dressing room after half-time in order to send out 11 imposters instead.

Yes, yet again Wolves were guilty of failing to deliver on the promise of their opening 45 minutes which had the potential to earn them a match-winning lead.

This fade-out is proving such a repeat experience for the dwindling Molineux audience the club could show the games on ITV4. Dwindling?

A gate of 18,174 was the club's lowest for nearly six years and an inevitable consequence of an undercooked Championship campaign by an undercooked team which has now gone nine games without a win.

At the moment, the broader Molineux public does not appear to have an appetite to abandon Solbakken.

For all their dismay at how his transition is going, there is a longing for him to succeed which is to the credit of an often-maligned fan base.

But sequences such as this fuel the social networks and Wolves will be braced for some toxic advice about how the club handle a slump that leaves them 18th in the Championship a year after they were targeting Premier League stability.

For Solbakken to ride out this crisis of confidence, he needs his first-half Wolves to overcome their second-half alter egos.

Because there were times in the opening half-hour when they were quite a joy to watch, slicing Millwall open only for that decisive, finishing touch to expose the frail nerves of a faltering team.

Indeed, maybe their night was summed up inside the first 90 seconds in which the increasingly positive Bjorn Sigurdarson set up Kevin Doyle only for his side-footed shot to display the uncertainty of his and the team's current malaise.

Following up, a right-foot effort by Bakary Sako, gamely demanding to play despite a niggling injury, was goal-bound but deflected away.

Wolves would know such frustration time and again during this opening period and the anxiety which sets in clearly plays a significant role in what follows later.

In the improvement of Sigurdarson, Solbakken has a clear case for keeping faith in what he sees for Wolves further down the line.

But it would be so much easier to carry the public with him if the young Icelandic striker had been able to make a clean contact on a near-post header from a Sako cross.

The team could do with a break as well – and replays of Milwall captain Danny Shittu's barging challenge on Doyle showed Wolves were unlucky.

They should have been given a penalty for a foul referee Michael Naylor wrongly called had occurred outside the area.

But Wolves reached the interval with nothing to show for their supremacy and grateful that Christophe Berra had got back in time to deny Millwall's on-loan Albion rookie Chris Wood from the visitors' best first-half opening.

This was not the best of nights, however, for Berra and Roger Johnson, who seemed constantly uncomfortable dealing with Wood and Keogh and it only needed a brighter start from Millwall after the break to shatter Wolves' confidence.

Slowly but steadily, the familiar retreat into defence began. A couple of minutes before the game's 79th-minute match-winner, Dave Edwards' registered Wolves' first shot of the second-half, as the South Bank broke out in ironic song.

But then Wood bullied Wolves' central defence out of possession to tee-up Keogh for a punishing right-foot finish which killed his old team as it flashed by Dorus De Vries, a 66th-minute replacement for the injured Carl Ikeme.

There was one final display of the kind of individual declines which have aggravated Solbakken's progress as substitute Sylvan Ebanks-Blake was unable to take one of three decent chances.

The old Ebanks-Blake would have snared one at least, instead the new Wolves continue to flounder.

By Martin Swain