Been away on holidays and offline for two weeks. Since I last looked at Wolverhampton Wanderers, 4 significant things seem to have happened. 1 good, 1 not surprising, 1 bad and 1 insanely surprising.
1. JSL signed a new contract without a release clause
2. Wolves lost away at Newcastle .
3. Wolves lost, seemingly quite badly, at home to Leeds. The 2nd of the 8 must win games I identified in an earlier post “the road to survival” both lost at home!
4. Wolves gave Vitor Pereira a new contract!
As Wolves have picked up 1 point from the last 9 league games in normal circumstances Vitor would be on very thin ice and in my view should actually be gone now! However, sacking him either this week or even over the next few weeks will both be highly embarrassing and very expensive! What is going on?
I can totally understand why Vitor signed a new contract as he was, (in the rational world), just about to be sacked and a new contract hugely increases the pay off he will receive. However, why did Jeff Shi offer him a new contract? Even as a non football man he knows he is likely to have to sack him soon – lesson learnt from not sacking Gary O’Neil soon enough?
Was he frightened that Vitor would walk and no one credible would take the job?
To be honest I have no idea – but is Jeff really this stupid?
However, the far, far more relevant question is, why is the club in this mess?
The short answer for anyone with the wit and willingness to see is that this has been coming since Seville.
Phil, (an ex-poster for those that don’t know him), used to ask me if Wolves would go down this season and I would reply no not this year but it’s coming. Now I am not so certain that the club has done enough to avoid the drop. But what specifically is so bad this year?
I tend to agree with Wandering and say that to a large extent it sits with Vitor.
Yes Wolves had yet another abysmal transfer window – selling high quality and experienced players and buying, for not insignificant sums, 6 largely younger players with no Premier League experience. Incredibly Wolfe already appears written off – 3rd choice LWB now? – and only Krejci is seemingly currently playing at the levels required.
Also, to be fair to Vitor, I still question if this is really Vitor’s side? I know I have read that he said he is “happy”, but given he was being offered a new contract as Mandy Rice Davies put it “he would wouldn’t he”?
We certainly know he wanted Krejci as he was on the “list,” but if he is happy with the rest of this squad, he is even more damned than I had thought. I strongly suspect that he wouldn’t have wanted to lose the quality players he did and we know he wanted to buy better players, including some of those on his “list”. He can however, only operate within the restrictions of the market – prices Wolves will pay, wages Wolves will pay and even more relevantly, players willing to come to Wolves.
But it’s far worse than this; The squad is awful but nothing like this bad. Vitor seemingly has lost if not the entire dressing room at least elements of it – Andre, now one of the 2 best players is clearly out of sorts and the body language of several others including seemingly JSL is apparently poor.
Selections, tactics, fitness and morale all are poor according to numerous pundits and social media posters. Like Emmanuel’s form in the second half of last year was that brief flurry of results against the bottom 6 last season the high point of Vitor’s reign?