Wolves 2 – 2 Cardiff – You can’t always get what you want…

By: Toby | February 22nd, 2009

But if you try sometimes you’ll sort of get what you need if you squint a bit. Pretty much, a win would have been nice but 4 points from 6 against Cardiff is more than most teams will harvest against the BlueBirds this season, with Wolves now having to rue missed chances and wasted opportunities. A game which Wolves could have won or lost at a stroke of fate, a draw seemed fitting if not ideal, I’m sure once the bitterness of throwing away another lead subsides it’ll start looking like a point gained rather than lost.

The opening ten minutes were frantic from a Wolves’ perspective, if not on the field but in the hearts and minds of the supporters, the weight of pure anticipation was palatable. On four minutes Keogh nearly made good with an early chance when his shot ricocheted off the post, Wolves set out their stall early, no holding back…instantly memories off early season Wolves came flooding back to the faithful. This was almost instantly bought down to earth as Chopra exploited a good break away only to splay his shot narrowly wide. Wolves were not only impressively aggressive in attack, but also in defence, to be honest for the first twenty minutes Cardiff saw very little of the ball, and if they did, it was in their own half. Wolves, for the first time in a long time actually used this pressure, and turned it into a goal. Kightly creating space from a short ball, leaving Jarvis with time to cross for Ebanks Blake who did well to turn in his 21st league goal of the season.

One nill up, Eleven minutes played, you could hear a collective exhale of breath reverberating around the globe. (That’s not an over exaggeration, check out my flag counter). It could have been two on the half hour mark when Andy Keogh enamoured himself further with the Molineux crowd by…well I’ll be honest here, missing a sitter. I love the lad to bits, but really, he doesn’t help himself sometimes, and with fate as it is, it would have to be that Cardiff went down the other end with Chopra grabbing the equaliser with their first real attack on our goal. Oh dear Andy, I keep defending you and you go and do something like this to me? The only silver lining would be Jay Bothroyd limping off for second time against Wolves this season…obviously didn’t fancy it today either.

So it was all square at half time. Followed almost instantaneously by Cardiff scoring straight from the kick off. It’s enough to make me want to hand in my laptop and give up this game, it’s not doing much good for my health. It was a corner which resulted in the goal, headed in by Johnson. Oh my, bragging rights were headed firmly the way of my Cardiffian girlfriend. I don’t know, it’s at times like that which you really start to question why you get excited and support a team, why you put yourself on the line every week, defend a team, talk them up…ah I don’t know. The two starts to the halves couldn’t have been more different, gone was the attacking mentality, gone was the endeavour, returned was the mildness, the tepidness and the fear. Also AWOL was the home crowd once more, we’ve attracted too many fair weather fans over the recent months of glory, too many prawn sandwiches, as soon as the second goal went in, we fell silent.

And so we continued in a similar vein, second best and second rate. Mick pondered the situation and decided to make his move, Keogh came off for Vokes, a jaded Jarvis off for Reid, whilst a slight injury to Ward meant that Stearman cameoed at left back for the final fifteen minutes. Molineux was a grave yard, why do we do this do ourselves eh? I know why, because with ten minutes to go, mouth melting Cardiff goalie Konstantopoulos managed to drop and fumble a ball in from Kyel Reid allowing the ball to squirm over the line, Konstantopoulos had a bit of a moan, but there was never any doubt, it was game on again once more at Molineux, the sound level was once more raised, with ten minutes to go, both sides looked like they not only wanted this win, but needed it.

In the end it wasn’t to be, Wolves will be happy deep down with a draw, as I’m sure Cardiff are. On the positives, despite that fact that it’s now that old moniker of “one win in ten blah be blah blah derp di der” we managed a draw against the best team that we’ve got the play for the rest of the season and that’s no lie. Yes I’m aware we still have to play Birmingham, but you’re point is what exactly? On the negatives, now let me have this one, I don’t moan often. We don’t know our best team anymore, we’ve tinkered and played and we simply don’t know our starting 11 anymore, I don’t know if this is a plan to make us unpredictable to other sides, but all I can see it doing is making the players…well…slightly confused. Secondly, we threw away a lead, AGAIN, I feel as if I’ve written this at least a dozen times this season, you know why I feel like that, it’s because I HAVE written that a dozen times a season, it seems that unless we score two or three we’re always vunerable to the critical lapse in concentration. We need to stop haemorrhaging goals if we’re going to realistically look at promotion, sooner rather than later with Reading 5 points behind with a potential 6 points to gain from their next two games.

So okay, for now, let’s enjoy what could well be one of the last weekends a top the Championship, we know what we need to do, let’s hope we can do it.

Tarra-a-bit