Ugly win sees Reds top of the Premier League
Wolves 1 Liverpool 2, 28th September 2024
WOLVES 1 (Aït-Nouri 56)
LIVERPOOL 2 (Konaté 45+2, Salah 61)
There are many ways of describing an ugly win such as this but whichever route you care to take Liverpool are top of the Premier League this weekend, Wolves are rock bottom with a -10 goal difference, and I fear for the future of their manager Gary O’Neil. No malice and only admiration for the man who played for my home city of Portsmouth before a short coaching stint at the Mighty Reds, but his Wolves team, for all their composed football and attacking intent with full backs Nélson Semedo and today’s goal scorer Rayan Aït-Nouri pushing forward to squeeze the game away from their defensive back 3, his team lack a vital ingredient that so often costs a football manager his job: spirit.
Even deadlocked at 0–0 in an utterly dreadful first half of football whereby Wolves were by far the better team, the Molineux crowd grew impatient with their team’s lack of creativity let alone the verve to take a truly woeful game of football by the scruff of the neck and determine its outcome. So often a pass backwards or the slowing of the game to a snail’s pace elicited groans from the home crowd who clearly desire their team to play attacking, goal scoring football, but I’d also hazard a guess they could see their visitors were abject, disjointed and dare I say ripe to be beaten? Liverpool needed half an hour to start the game and only then created one golden goal scoring opportunity before Ibrahima Konaté completed a “smash and grab” raid on a 45 minutes of football that deserved that ugly moniker.
In an ugly game such as this football writers are oft to use the cliche of a team being “devoid of ideas”, but this truism was writ large and so glaringly apparent this evening as with the game heading into injury time Wolves could only gently pass the ball in a defensive triangle between two defenders and their goalkeeper Sam Johnstone and as the vital seconds of uninspired attacking inactivity continued, so the decibel level of groans and disquiet increased from the stands. Based on one game perhaps but the Premier League table never lies, this Wolves team lack spirit, and a long, hard season beckons.
So what of the Premier League leaders? An ugly win is taken with gratitude. Ryan Gravenberch collected yet another well deserved “Man of the Match” award from all right thinking football fans and, well, yes…Liverpool are top of the Premier League at the end of September. 7 points out of 9 from the London trio of Crystal Palace, Chelsea and Arsenal should keep them there at the end of October. Early and strange days indeed, and an especially strange yet victorious one for Ibrahima Konaté. The 25 year old Paris born man mountain scored a majestic, old fashioned header in first half injury time when his team needed it most, was wholly inept and at fault for Wolves gift of a second half equaliser before a 5 minutes he’ll want to forget in a hurry ended with a desperate defensive lunge that resulted in a yellow card. Mere minutes later, the affectionately known “Ibou” flew into a last ditch defensive block to deny Wolves their one and only true attacking shot from substitute Carlos Forbs. The block itself will be barely remembered in the days to come before disappearing altogether in a forgettable 2–1 win and if you think I’m ending this match report of an ugly game of football highlighting a flying and desperate defensive block, you’d be right!
I did say there were many ways of describing an ugly win such as this, didn’t I?
Let’s see what the Boss thought of it all.
Up “The Unbearables”
Arne’s Afterword
“It’s maybe for others to judge, but I think the first 15 minutes were difficult for us. The other team — Wolves — had a week to prepare and if you have a very good manager like Gary O’Neil, who is tactically really strong and comes up with a strong game plan and that’s what he did. We were ready for this. You always have to wait to see then exactly what he does. He overloaded our right side in a good manner, which made it difficult for us to control the game in the first 15 to 20 minutes. Then when it died down a bit the energy it went away maybe and then I think we took more and more control over the game”.
“It’s almost ideal that we played Wolves today because we are top and they’re last and they absolutely don’t deserve to be last. They had a very difficult fixture list and I’ve seen many games of them and in almost every game they deserve more. You could even argue today because it wasn’t like we were so much better than them”.
“I think everybody is realistic enough. All the players have so much experience that they understand six games into the season doesn’t give you a realistic view on the league table. That is more like in 19 games then you can really feel, ‘OK, where are we?’ But of course it helps if you get some good results, especially if you bring in a new manager and a new staff and being a successor of such a successful one. Of course everybody understands that if we’d have lost four or five out of these first six fixtures that life would’ve been a bit different than it is”.
Thanks for reading. I often lament that despite my hundreds of articles here I rarely if ever make contact with genuine Liverpool fans so, if that is you, please say a hearty hello and, whilst you’re here, can I interest you in these spectacularly good self-published books on the Mighty Reds?
"A final word from The Boss" - link to Amazon
"Chasing the Impossible and a Sword of Damocles" - link to Amazon
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.