Gary O’Neil has issued an honest verdict after Wolves fell to a surprise 2-0 defeat to Brentford at Molineux.
Wolves were below par on Saturday as they were defeated by the Bees at Molineux. Despite O’Neil’s side not losing to Brentford in their three previous meetings this season, the hosts struggled throughout and could not replicate their form from last weekend.
A lot of things that could have gone wrong for Wolves did go wrong. In the build-up to the game, Hwang Hee-Chan was ruled out with an injury before Matheus Cunha was forced off early in the game.
Then, an equaliser from Craig Dawson in the second-half was ruled out for offside before Ivan Toney rounded off the win late on.
In the aftermath of the game, manager O’Neil issued an honest assessment of Wolves as fans witnessed back-to-back defeats at Molineux.
Wolves were “nowhere near good enough“
After multiple impressive displays so far in 2024, Wolves were not at the races on Saturday. Molineux in particular had been a fortress for O’Neil’s side, but their 4-3 defeat to Man United saw that came to an end last week.
Now, the side arguably put in their worst performance at Molineux since their 4-1 loss to Brighton at the start of the season.
O’Neil was certainly unhappy with how his side performed as he insisted that they weren’t good enough on the day.
He told Wolves: “We’ve done a really good job as a group. The group have done an unbelievable job maintaining a high level generally. Absolutely gutted we fell below it today and the players will be as well, so using the elation of last week and what we managed to produce compared to how we feel now to make sure we perform better than we did today. There were factors which contributed, but if we look at the performance as a whole, it was obviously nowhere near good enough.”
Wolves need to quickly put Brentford game behind them
The performance from Wolves were certainly uncharacteristic from them as they did little to nothing to truly harm the visitors. Pedro Neto’s last first-half header was the only real effort that tested the ‘keeper.
This was especially surprising given how many goals were scoring recently. Even in recent poor results, Wolves were still getting the goals.
Now, O’Neil’s side just needs to put the result behind them. The club travels to Spurs next weekend in a tricky match and also faces Brighton in the FA Cup later this month.
Wolves must now make sure that the loss was just a blip and return to winning ways as quickly as possible.