Wolves' foreign takeover a familiar story - Interview Wednesday, 30th Nov 2016 22:20 by Clive Whittingham Ahead of the conveniently scheduled Thursday night match between QPR and Wolves, LFW caught up with blogger Dan Lovelle for his opinions on the visitors and their bizarre season so far. New foreign owners, how's that working out for you? DL: We were in desperate need of a takeover - Steve Morgan decided fairly abruptly last September that he was putting the club up for sale and our parachute money ran out at the end of the season. That financial outlook led to us selling Benik Afobe for relative peanuts in January and the prognosis would have been more of the same had we not managed to attract a buyer, merely selling off anyone half decent and using a portion of the money to bring in low end replacements and lower league punts. Fosun made all the right noises when they arrived and the investment (in a short timeframe - the takeover wasn't ratified until late July so we had limited time to add to an extremely threadbare squad) can't really be faulted to date in terms of pure money spent. Whether it was focused in the right areas is another matter. It's still very early days, we know they're outwardly ambitious but lower half Championship football can dull enthusiasm quite quickly... DL: He was never first choice for the job, we knew it, he knew it. We first heard of the takeover rumblings in June when the Spanish media started linking Julen Lopetegui as our new manager (notwithstanding that there wasn't a vacancy at the time, Kenny Jackett was still here). He was very much Fosun's man and right up until the end it looked like it was happening...until the very day we actually announced the takeover, when our announcement was preceded by about two hours with the news that Lopetegui had taken the Spanish national team job. I find it hard to believe that someone would rather work with David Silva than Conor Coady but there's no accounting for taste. So, we were left two weeks before the start of the season with a lame duck manager in Jackett and our only real target off the agenda. Whatever was said at the initial press conference, everyone knew realistically that Ken's time was up so it was a case of getting someone in very quickly, with the caveat that they'd have to put up with having little say in recruitment and on the understanding that this wasn't necessarily a long term thing. And if you want a short term manager, who better than a bloke who has left a job within 16 games eight times already in his career? With the appointment being completely out of left field and my own knowledge of the UAE Arabian Gulf League not being what it might, we had very little to work on when he arrived save for his chequered history. When he first came in, aside from going 2-0 down at a terrible Rotherham team inside half an hour on the opening day, signs were reasonably promising. We pressed the ball well as a team, we looked much more threatening than we had at any stage last season (there aren't adequate descriptions of what it's like to watch four consecutive 0-0 draws at home, as Ken treated us to), he clearly had a great deal of enthusiasm for the project and spoke in an engaging if haphazard way. However, things went south very quickly. We got into a disturbing trend of conceding goals within the first 15 minutes of games and his tactics - such as they were - totally unravelled. It was never clear what exactly our midfielders were supposed to be doing, our full backs were under strange instructions not to go forward, the intensity in our game disappeared and we became extremely easy to play against. Ultimately the goal this season was a top six finish and Zenga had conclusively proven by the end of his time here that he wasn't going to deliver on that. So while it's far from ideal to be sacking a manager after less than three months, if it's not working it's not working, and there seemed little point in wasting more of the season blindly hoping it would get better. There was nothing by way of evidence in the manner of our performances or his own history to suggest it would.
DL: Once it became apparent that we were looking for a British manager ideally with experience of the Championship - whether this is the right mindset for the club to have is up for debate - consensus really was that he was probably the best of a bad bunch. It was never likely that Sam Allardyce would drop into this league when he knows that come the dust settling on his pint of wine induced loose tongue, he can have his pick of most bottom half Premier League jobs when they inevitably become available. Nigel Pearson is badly damaged goods given his oddball behaviour at Leicester and terrible spell at Derby, I'm sure there are plenty of your own fans who get a chill down their spines when they hear that Tim Sherwood is being linked to your job, and Paul Ince shouldn't really be a viable candidate for any job above League Two. What we have to hope is that we're going to get the Norwich version of Paul Lambert where his teams played some excellent football and produced some outstanding results rather than the Aston Villa version where entertainment values were on a par with sheepdog trials and perpetual relegation fights were the order of the day. Early signs on that aren't good. He hasn't had a honeymoon period and he isn't going to get one now because we've had two games, no goals, hardly any shots and he's already got people unhappy with his selections and comments on our squad. He must know that if he fails here, that's him done for quite some time with decent sized clubs so it defies belief that he would carry on this way. It's whether Villa made him a fundamentally broken man, which seems more than possible at the moment.
DL: No two ways about it, it's been massively disappointing. There was a lot of optimism about the place in August but that has totally evaporated now. It was never that likely that a serious challenge for automatic promotion was on irrespective of the investment from the new owners - the likes of Newcastle, Norwich and Brighton were too well placed and we had too little time to overhaul everything - but a proper top six challenge should be our minimum aim and we're absolutely miles short. When you look at what Gary Rowett is doing down the road at St Andrews on relatively paltry resources with some very ordinary players it hits home just how badly we're underperforming. What sticks in the craw most is that we've reverted back to picking loads of the players who were here last season (more on whom later). But since we sold Afobe, we've picked up 42 points from 39 games. It's very much relegation form for almost an entire calendar year and it's this lot that are the key contributors to that. They aren't any good. Pick bottom five players and you'll get bottom five results. Two home wins as we enter December is absolutely dismal stuff. DL: One section is going to be longer than the other here. Helder Costa has been our best player this season, quite comfortably. Took a few weeks to properly break into the team but since he has, he's looked very good. Quick and direct but not just a pace merchant, he's got plenty of genuine skill too. He must wonder what he's doing here. Elsewhere Romain Saiss has shown some signs of looking like a quality midfield performer at this level but after a poor game at Blackburn last month he hasn't featured. Jon Dadi Bodvarsson started very well, his displays were full of strength, immense work ethic and being a real focal point for us but as our creativity has diminished he's rapidly looked less and less threatening and it's now three months since he found the net - he probably needs a break. We have Nouha Dicko waiting in the wings who was absolutely superb in his first 18 months here, but is still on the comeback trail after a cruciate injury which made him miss virtually all of last season and it's not been clear from the largely brief sub appearances that he's had whether he's going to get back to his best. And now...the rest of them. Of those that feature regularly, the worst players we have are Matt Doherty and Conor Coady. Doherty is an atrocious full back, quite simply he cannot defend. He can't run, turn, mark, tackle or hold position and his attitude is abysmal. We paid £100k for him back in 2011 when he was playing in the Irish league. He is still worth about £100k (at a push) and still probably about Irish league standard. Yet he's our most used outfield player this year. It beggars belief. Coady is a £2m defensive midfielder who's worth about a tenth of that. No ability on the ball and no threat going forward as 0 goals in 53 league appearances demonstrates. Can't screen the back four and isn't even an especially effective tackler. He does at least try, but that's it. The problems don't end there. Dominic Iorfa and Kortney Hause are England U21 regulars and more often than not look comfortable at that level, but both are struggling for form in a gold shirt, Iorfa in particular. Danny Batth is a very limited centre half, when he's performing to the best of his abilities he is satisfactory, when he's not he looks like a cumbersome lump and it's been pretty much exclusively the latter over the last two months. Richard Stearman was packed off to Fulham for £2m last August, a mugging of a sale for a defender who always has a mistake in him and is extremely lax with marking, Fulham proceed to concede 78 goals last season...and we bring him back on loan. His one main attribute of recovering on the turn has gone now. Lambert has started George Saville on the left of midfield in his first two games which makes no sense at all, he's a technically poor central midfielder who happens to be nominally left footed, he fulfils none of the criteria required to play out there. Dave Edwards has been here for almost nine years and is another one who hasn't developed his game at all, great pro but a poor footballer. He gets in the team for his workrate (which can rarely be questioned) and his supposed goalscoring ability (which is very much in dispute. Outside of League One he has scored 25 league goals for us in 225 games, it's hardly Frank Lampard territory). Essentially the vast majority of our squad could be paid off tomorrow and I wouldn't bat an eyelid. DL: For now it just has to be survival. We're only out of the bottom three on goals scored, we haven't won for over two months and with the teams being put out, we're full of substandard players who are where they are on merit. It's a far cry from what we all wanted in the summer but it is where we are. The hope is that we can bring in some solid signings in January and weed out some of the flotsam. Easier said than done. Beyond that we need to rebuild significantly and look to make another go of it next season. 2017 will struggle to be as miserable for us as 2016 has been - six home wins all year to date and 22 goals at Molineux. DL: The ambition outwardly is there, they're here to have a bit of a flagship club in China eventually and there's only one place that can happen. There aren't any Cellino-style outbursts as such; in fact we haven't heard much at all from the owners themselves since August. But as you good folk will know all too well, having someone running the club who puts money in without the requisite football knowledge is not really a good thing. What is concerning is that we have had issues with recruitment for quite some time, even going back to January 2014 when we brought our mutual friend Leon Clarke back to the club despite us knowing full well what he was - and yet we've promoted the key man in all that scouting, Kevin Thelwell, to Sporting Director. He's very much the man behind Lambert's appointment. If we don't improve the quality of our signings (which one would think are going to be largely UK based from here) then the immediate future is fairly bleak and there isn't a great deal in terms of a track record from Thelwell to suggest he's going to identify the right players. For now the owners are a long way down my list of concerns, the worry would be that if we get stuck in this divison (or worse) getting nowhere near our eventual goals then they might lose interest. After all, they don't have any affinity to us. We just have to trust that won't be the case. Links >>> Dan’s blog The Twitter @loftforwords Pictures — Action Images Action Images Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
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