Wolves Are Mauled By Baggies

 Today, Wolves were embarrassed at home by Black Country rivals West Bromwich Albion in a result that must leave manager Mick McCarthy’s job in doubt. Peter Odemwingie had given West Brom the lead before Steven Fletcher levelled on the stroke of halftime. But it was to be West Brom’s day as goals from Jonas Olsson and Keith Andrews gave them the win, while Odemwingie completed his hat-trick. 

• I was disappointed with the starting line-up – I felt it was far too attacking and would leave us wide open defensively. I wrote in the week that Nenad Milijaš should play in this match, and would have liked to have seen him play ahead of Sylvan Ebanks-Blake and give an extra body in midfield. I was slightly worried about the Jamie O’Hara/David Edwards partnership – both of these are attacking midfielders and neither would be able to play their natural game.

• As it was, I was right to be worried. In the first half, O’Hara and Edwards were completely overrun by Paul Scharner, James Morrison and Youssouf Mulumbu – I will look into this in more detail later in the week from a statistical point of view. But, it was clear that neither O’Hara nor Edwards were particularly able to get the ball down and play; not only were they outnumbered in the middle of the park, but they were also outfought. This is not necessarily a criticism of O’Hara and Edwards – they were being asked to play a position that is not natural to them.

• Given the lack of players in midfield, it made it very difficult to pass the ball out of defence. This was most notable in the first half when Wayne Hennessey passed the ball out to Sébastien Bassong. Both centre backs had pulled wide to receive the ball, similar in the way Carlos Puyol and Gerard Pique do for Barcelona. But, when Pique and Puyol do this, Sergio Busquets drops in between them to give a passing option. Neither O’Hara nor Edwards did this, resulting in Bassong being forced to play a risky ball across the penalty area to Roger Johnson. I couldn’t but feel that had Milijaš had been in the team, he would have offered the option to receive the ball.

• The opening goal came after both Johnson and Bassong were drawn to the right hand touchline, thinking Olsson was going to play the ball into the right channel. Instead, Olsson switched the ball diagonally into Marc-Antoine Fortuné, who was all on his own in the D on the edge of the box. Stephen Ward was forced to move inside to challenge Fortuné, and as a result, Matt Jarvis was left in a 2 v 1 situation against Steven Reid and Odemwingie. Jarvis isn’t a defender, and it should be of no surprise that Odemwingie was able to work the space for a shot. Whether Hennessey should have done better or not is debatable, but the save a little earlier on from a deflected shot meant he was still in credit.

• Just before halftime, McCarthy made a tactical switch to a 4-2-1-3 formation, with Kevin Doyle, Ebanks-Blake and Fletcher playing as a front 3 and Matt Jarvis playing through the middle. While this led to a goal involving all the forwards, and an excellent finish from Fletcher, and a promising start to the second half, there are a multitude of reasons why this formation didn’t work. First of all, from an attacking perspective, it completely negated Matt Jarvis. Jarvis is an old fashioned winger, who attacks his man and crosses the ball. He is not, and I doubt ever will be a Number 10. He doesn’t have the ability to pick a pass or to use the space that is usually available between the midfield and defence. Saying that, he was up against Mulumbu who is an excellent player, and barely gave Jarvis a kick. Jarvis wasn’t as involved as he would have liked in the first half, but did burst into the box on a couple of occasions that could easily have led to goal scoring opportunities. By playing him through the middle, this threat was completely withdrawn. We do have players who could play this role, or at least are more used to playing it – Edwards has had some success there, while Adam Hammill could have been brought off the bench to try and provide the spark.

• Instead of a winger playing on the flank, it was left to two of Fletcher, Ebanks-Blake and Doyle to provide the width. I’ve long called for Doyle to play on the right, but today he seemed reluctant to play there. I’m guessing that the three forwards were given license to switch positions, but we’d have been far better off with Doyle holding his position. Ebanks-Blake seemed to spend a lot of time wide on the left in the second half – he is clearly at his best in the penalty area sniffing out chances. It was frustrating to see Ebanks-Blake struggling out there when we had Jarvis playing out of position who would have loved to get the freedom to play that Ebanks-Blake seemingly had. I could understand the reasoning behind the move to get an extra body in midfield, but it didn’t work with the personnel we had on the pitch.

• As the second half result would suggest, the formation didn’t exactly help defensively. The major drawback of a 4-2-1-3 is that unless you play two midfield ‘snotters’, and O’Hara and Edwards will never be described as this, it is far too easy for your fullbacks to be isolated. In theory, the wide forwards should have the responsibility of helping to protect the fullbacks, but this clearly didn’t happen. Far too often Odemwingie was left one on one with Ward, and there was only ever going to be one winner there. Had Odemwingie not been so selfish on a number of occasions, West Brom could easily have scored 6 or 7 as the defence were left so exposed. This is not absolving the defence of blame, but it takes 11 men for a team to defend successfully and this just didn’t happen.

• While it was Odemwingie who got the hat-trick and will get all of the plaudits in tomorrow’s press, I thought Fortuné was excellent upfront. He held the ball up superbly well, bringing the midfield into the game with ease and never gave Johnson, Bassong, and later Christophe Berra a moment’s rest.

• While this was an appalling result, it was by no means the worse performance of the season. The home defeat to QPR was far worse, which I think is a damning indictment of our abysmal form at home this season. The last time we avoided defeat at home was thanks to a late goal from a corner against Norwich, while the last win could easily have gone the other away had Sebastian Larsson been able to score from 12-yards. I reckon the last time we won comfortably in the league was way back at the start of November in the 3-1 win over Wigan Athletic, and even that could have gone the other way.

• If Mick McCarthy does not lose his job this week, he will surely still be manager come May. There is surely no better time to sack the manager given that there is a two week gap until the next match, enough time for a new manager to come in and assess the squad.