Gary O’Neil has said Wolves cannot afford to be scarred from their bruising start, with the manager adamant a “tipping point” is coming. O’Neil conceded their winless run looks “like a disaster” and acknowledged the visit of Manchester City will expose fragility after six defeats from their opening seven matches left them bottom of the Premier League.
O’Neil’s side have taken a solitary point – a draw at Nottingham Forest in August – from a brutal run of fixtures. Wolves have played seven of the league’s top 11 before welcoming Pep Guardiola’s champions on Sunday and face a trip to high-flying Brighton next weekend.
“They [the players] understand what the Manchester City game may look like,” said the Wolves manager. “And then they know what’s coming in the next few weeks. We don’t have to play teams in the top eight for the whole season. There will be games where we get to play teams in the lower parts of the league. It doesn’t mean they’re any easier but it means we need to be ready for them. We need to make sure we’re in a place mentally where this run hasn’t affected how ready we are for the next challenge.”
O’Neil conceded a humiliating 5-3 defeat by Brentford in the last game served as “a real shock and a shot in the arm”. Asked about the psychological challenge facing his players, O’Neil said: “I think Manchester City always test that and there will be a spell in the game where you just feel like it is unbelievably difficult, you can’t get out and they just keep coming. That shows you where you are as a group, those sorts of moments.
“It will show us where we’ve been able to get to over the last couple of weeks, how much fight and resilience we’ve got in tough moments, whether we can show enough quality, albeit against a top side to cause them problems. It is a good test for us. Of course, the fact it [the City game] comes after one point from seven has this sort of added factor to it. We will do our best on Sunday to put our first three points on the board for the season.”
This week Guardiola suggested Wolves were better than their position suggests. “I understand what Pep is saying but we need to show it, we need to prove it and that tipping point will come soon,” O’Neil said. “We can’t sit here for ever and say: ‘We’ve had tough games, we lost a couple of important players in the summer.’ It’s like: ‘Now what? Let’s go.’”
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O’Neil said Wolves hope to repeat the feat of beating City at home as they did last season, when Hwang Hee-chan, who is sidelined with an ankle injury, scored the winner. “The key that day was an unbelievable discipline from the team, a counterattacking threat and a real togetherness and fight, which we’ll need,” O’Neil said. “We need to take care of a performance the fans can unite with.”
