Sacking your manager six and half weeks after giving him a new contract doesn't seem like good business, but joined-up thinking seldom seems to be the Wolves owners' strong suit.
By the time the full-time whistle blew at Craven Cottage on Saturday afternoon, the wolf was looking a little mangy. There is something fascinatingly creepy about the Wolverhampton Wanderers badge. The angular lines and the whites of the eyes peering out at you.
But this particular pack of Wolves were no threat to anybody whatsoever. Fulham have hardly been tearing up trees themselves, this season. They kicked off in 17th place in the table. Yet they probably won’t have a more comfortable win all season.
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Quite what the owners of the club were thinking when they gave Vitor Pereira a contract extension 45 days ago will probably remain a mystery. Wolves were, as they are now, bottom of the Premier League at the time that they made this decision, and at that time they didn’t have a single solitary point to their name so far this season.
There will have been a period when they thought they’d performed magic. Wolves looked okay in successive draws against Spurs and Brighton, the former of which they were desperately unlucky not to lose. Only a stoppage-time equaliser prevented them from snatching a win from Spurs. It looked as though they may have turned a corner.
But it didn’t take long for storm clouds to descend over the club again, and by the time of the Fulham match the atmosphere among the travelling supporters had become mutinous. For a manager, hearing “Sacked in the Morning” from opposing fans is one thing, but hearing it from your own is another matter altogether. He’d got in a row with fans following their 3-2 home defeat by Burnley a week earlier. In the post-match interview, Pereira had the unkempt look of the beaten man about him.
The decision to hire him in the first place had been baffling, but it did work out, after a fashion. Wolves were 19th in the Premier League upon his appointment and they did survive relegation, although it should be added that the apocalyptic form of the three newly-promoted teams last season - and just look atwherethey are in the Championship now - did offer more established top-flight clubs stuck in a rut of mediocrity a degree of security that they frankly didn’t deserve.
But the summer transfer window hinted at the direction in which they were headed. There was a talent drain, with exiting players heading for Manchester City, Manchester United and Borussia Dortmund, amongst others, while their replacements coming in from Celta Vigo, Genk and Girona. The new season started with a 4-0 home defeat against Manchester City and hasn’t - apart from that brief two-game respite at the end of September - improved much since.
But that was then and this is now. The problem with sacking your manager is that there aren’t going to be many readily available replacements. You’re going to be limited to a manager who’s already been sacked or quit this season or during the summer, or somebody that you could poach from a smaller club. But even the latter of these three possibilities is riven with problems.
Consider, for example, Frank Lampard, who has thus far arguably been the manager of the season so far across the top four divisions. Lampard is a well-known name, has managed in the Premier League before, and has built a team which ended up the last unbeaten club in either the EFL or the Premier League.
You’d expect him to go straight to the top of the list, but there’s a problem with this. Should Coventry City get promoted at the end of this season, they’ll be returning to the Premier League after a gap of 25 years. That’s a hell of a party to be missing. And in terms of quality of life, it may not appeal either. Why leave a winning team that you built yourself for a club that’s already eight points adrift of survival and a club that doesn’t seem to be a particularly happy place at the moment?
But taking a look at the betting list for Pereira’s replacement tells its own story of slim the pickings are at this time of year for his replacement. There are good managers, but as we can see, they’re all at prices which suggest that they’re not particularly likely:
Top in the betting market is Gary O’Neil, who was the manager that they sacked in order to bring Pereira in. Second is Brendan Rodgers, who has just quit Celtic so is available, but would be likely to be a spectacularly bad fit on transfer policy. Let’s all take a moment to enjoy what player recruitment meetings between Rodgers and Jorge Mendes might be like.
Third in the list is Erik ten Hag, who has already been sacked this season and needs to rebuild his reputation following disastrous spells at Manchester United and Bayer Leverkusen. He’s considered to be equally likely to Kevin Muscat, who does at least have a previous connection to Wolves, but whose managerial experience is limited to Australia, Belgium, Japan and China.
Beyond these four, the betting companies appear to be throwing their hands in the air and admitting that they don’t have the first idea. And why should they? They probably weren’t expecting Wolves to sack their manager 45 days after giving him a new contract either. And the race really is on, now. Wolves travel to Stamford Bridge next Saturday night to play Chelsea live on the television.
While it not be possible to make the right choice before then, the ideal position - so far as there can be one under these circumstances - would be for the new guy to come in, get through that match, and then use the international formulate a plan on how to get his team out of the pickle in which they currently find themselves.
The flotsam and jetsam of the Premier League have been coddled in recent times by having such poor teams coming up at the end of each season, but while there’s still plenty of time for things to fall apart for any of them this season, there have been few indications that Leeds United, Burnley and Sunderland are going to be as bad as Southampton, Leicester City and Ipswich Town were last season.
Could it be like clubs like Wolves have persuaded themselves that this state of affairs would be permanent and that they’d be perpetually shielded from relegation as a result of this? It would certainly explain much of their thinking so far this season.
The most troubling thing about this season for fans will have been that there was a brief spike up in performance levels before returning to where they were before. This suggests that the Fulham defeat was the mean rather than an exception, and that the exception was the two games in which they looked capable of staying in the Premier League come the end of this season. Getting rid of Vitor Pereira may have been the right decision to take, but offering him that new contract in the first place told its own story, and quite where they go from here is anybody’s guess.
Image byNewUnion_org fromPixabay
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