Side Wolves Side offers a happy post-City future

Without a doubt Vitor Pereira responded to the calls of supporters of Wolverhampton Wanderers last night and took the drinks to celebrate another big step towards the safety of the Premier League.

And why not? The last time the wolves reached what they managed yesterday, their current coach would have been sitting outside the Taberna in his hometown of Espinho with the Portuguese equivalent of a bag of chips and a bottle of Vimto.

Pereira was three years old when Wolves recorded the last time they recorded four subsequent victories in the maximum flight, in January 1972. They combined with that race yesterday by beating Tottenham Hotspur 4-2 in a breathless meeting.

Even Nuno Expire Santo did not collect a series of victories in the Premier League as his compatriot, who managed it thanks to another rarity of the wolves, with the club that appointed an unchanged starting formation for five subsequent matches for the first time in more than five years.

If the success of the 56-year-old in saving the wolves from the relegation-the security threat could be confirmed mathematically already in the next weekend-can be attributed to one thing above all the others, is the consistency that led to the team.

At the end of a kingdom that had brought his high points but who revealed themselves spectacularly in his last few months, Gary O’Neil seemed to make changes for his own good, feeling infinite combinations, tactics and plans in a desperate effort to escape the spiral of sports death that was dragging his part towards the championship.

Pereira, who was a surprise choice to replace O’Neil when the patience of the wolves finally took place in December, was the coaching antidote to the excessive complication that ruined the last sad weeks of O’Neil in Molineux.

Even before this sequence of unchanged staff – which is not equal to a series of five games under Nuno in December 2019 – Pereira had brought a level of tactical and emotional coherence that was missing during the dying days of the kingdom of O’Neil.

Since Pereira came to take the command with her part stuck in the three lower, the wolves have played a system consistent with the players in coherent roles, which they now instinctively include.

The wolves won eight of the 16 games of the Premier League under Pereira (Chris Brunskill/Getty Images)

And the four -games winning race, which has been part of an unbeaten sequence in five games, offers an encouraging look at how life could be next season without Matheus Cunha.

Brazil international is never far from the thoughts of the fans of Wolves, and in the event that they were in danger of not discussing him in the accumulation of yesterday’s victory, he sent a cryptic post on social media, which he eliminated but not before putting him back at the center of attention.

If this was the intention, it worked perfectly. If it was not, then it was quite negligent. And his anger reaction of Instagram to the social media accounts of the fans who collected his words talked about a man who cannot live with attention but cannot live without it.

“He is a special player,” said Pereira in his post-match press conference. “But like everyone else, like me, he needs the energy of love. He needs to hear that it is important, that people recognize his work for the team.” Who seemed to be an polite way of saying the same thing.

Cunha’s response to being left on the bench after a four -games suspension was credible.

He played as a substitute for the second half, he worked hard, scored with a nice goal at a time when the wolves needed a goal to stabilize the nerves, and therefore most of it took a rear seat in the post-match celebrations, even pushing the hero of goals Jorgen Strand Larsen towards South Bank in Molineux to acclaim.

As for Larsen, it was the largest individual beneficiary of the absence of Cunha and the coherent selections of Pereira, becoming the first Wolves player from Henri Camara 21 years ago on the net in four consecutive games in the Premier League.

As a focal point striker of a Cunha formation, the Norwegian found shape in a team that has prepared himself to play his strengths.

And if the Brazilian has disappeared next season – as is widely expected and how Pereira seems to want to remove any distractions – there is a clear encouragement that the team can work well as a striker unit without him.

Summer remains enormous for Pereira and Lupi, with a myriad of aggressive companions who could join Cunha and Captain Nelson Seedo outside the door. But after five games in which their attacker talisman played only 20 minutes and Wolves collected 13 points, the prospect of managing without him seems much less discouraging than he did a month ago.

Fifty-three years ago-when Pereira was three years old, none of his current players were born, Instagram had not been conceived and another plant that combined Strand Larsen’s stature with a little temperament of Cunha was driving the line for wolves-era when for the last time they won four games in a ranks in the front row.

Derek Dougan scored 24 goals in that season when the wolves closed the ninth in the first division and reached their only European ending.

They lost that 2-1 game against Tottenham. Yesterday’s victory will have a much smaller place in the history of wolves, but offered more moments of hope to a coach whose consistency changed his mood to Molineux.

(Photo above: Dan Mullan/Getty Images)