Always Wolves
Always Wolves
Leeds Wolves by Always Wolves 7 minutes ago
Leeds 3-0 Wolves: A Fan’s Honest Reaction to Another Heavy Defeat
On occasion, as a hobbyist writer and a huge yet distant fan of Wolves, I write articles for this website. I have done so for a few years now, and it is a part of my life that I have always hugely enjoyed. Today, though, I find myself not wanting to write at all. I fully expect this to be read by very few people because I suspect, like me, you are carrying a feeling that is not easy to express or explain.
This article was requested as a things we learned piece, and I could do that if I really wanted to. Jackson is terrible. We are going down. Whose fault it is. But this has been such a slow, predictable death that those conclusions are already baked in. There is nothing left to learn about this club or these players. Everything has already been revealed. So if you will indulge me, I want to come at this differently. This is not about what we learned about Wolves today, but what I learned about my feelings towards them. Forgive me for that.
It would be easy to say that I hate this club. The players. The manager. Everything. That was absolutely my reaction walking out of the London Stadium after seventy odd minutes. But today it feels different. We have just lost two games in a row to relegation sides by a combined score of seven nil, yet hate is not what sits with me now.
It would also be easy to say I simply do not care anymore and hide behind a borrowed apathy. But that would be a lie. I do care about this football club. It is a huge part of who I am. I glance to my right as I write this and there are Wolves shirts hanging in frames on the wall. I am wearing a Wolves training top. I do not accept that anyone reading this truly does not care either. You do not end up here by accident. So it is not hatred and it is not indifference. Which leaves the harder question. What is it?
The only word I can come up with is disassociate. This is not my Wolves. Of course it is the reality in front of us, but it is not a team I recognise or identify with. The losses do not hurt like they used to. Goals going in, for us or against us, are met with nothing more than a shrug. It feels as if Wolves have forced a strange neutrality onto my support.
You could argue that this is the same as not caring, but it is not. I still wear the shirt. I am still loud about where my loyalty lies. I am still, at my core, a Wolves fan. But whatever this thing is that we are currently watching, this is not Wolves to me. I do not feel connected to it in any meaningful way. It is like my Wolves exist somewhere else, frozen in time, waiting for the day they return. When that happens, I will be there instantly. Until then, I have nothing left to give to what is currently wearing the badge.
I suppose that is the bleakest lesson I learned today. Not anger. Not rage. Just a quiet sense of detachment, like stepping back from something you love because it no longer resembles itself. Maybe that is a defence mechanism. Maybe it is resignation. Or maybe it is simply what happens when hope has been chipped away slowly, carefully, until there is nothing left to react to. All I know is that when football becomes something you watch rather than feel, something fundamental has already been lost. I hope the damage done here is not terminal. I do not know if I will ever feel as deeply for this club as I once did and the thought that this might be permanent is quietly terrifying. For now all I can do is hope that this distance closes, because I am not ready to accept that this is how it ends.