Wolves Vs Blackpool Pre match

By: Toby | November 21st, 2008

Blackpool, a place I’ve not been to in a long long while. From what I can remember it’s cheap, cheerful, and a bit dirty but you’ll have a good time. Blackpool in some way represent just that, cheap in coming up last year they’re trying to stay in the league having not spent much over the summer and cheerful in so much as they are working hard to stay afloat. I’m not sure if they’re dirty however…we’ll have to see. They come to Molineux on the back of two straight defeats with a not too favourable goal difference, they’ve conceded one less than us granted, yet we know we’ve let in too many goals, and while we’ve combated our leaky defence with 39 goals going in the other end, they’ve only managed 18 this term. And, as we all know the last few games has been a different story for our defence, only letting in 3 in 4…which by our standards of late is watertight. They don’t travel all that well either, only winning one of their last 5 games on their travels and might struggle at Molineux where we’ve lost only one in the last 6. Ben Burgess is their leading scorer so far this season with 6, a well travelled Irishman who’s training to be a journalist apparently.

As always these days there are a couple of former Wolves to look out for, Rob Edwards, released over the summer is their captain, while blast from the past, and cult hero Mohammed Camara is also on the books. Momo was one of my favourite players of that time at Wolves, an absolute nutter in defence, never really defending or attacking all that well, but he used to pick the ball up and run, which was always exciting during that period of Wolves where 0-0 draws were the only results we could get.

Wolves come into this game in a bit of a mess, which is worrying. Obviously we’ve got international fatigue to take into account and that’ll be a strain on some of the players. Luckily not many had much travelling to do, and while Mancienne did travel to Germany, he only “did a Walcott” and watched from the sidelines. He shouldn’t be feeling any ill effects therefore. Sadly, we’ve lost Carlos Edwards, as he’s been recalled to Sunderland, all I’ll say is Keane better bloody play him or I’ll be rather annoyed. That coupled with the fact that Jarvis isn’t ready to replace him, and Henry is serving a match ban for 5 yellow cards means our midfield is looking a bit thin on the ground, just in time for some of the most important games of the season. It’s too late for this game but I’m hoping personally we can get some cover in for the wings before the trip to Sheffield United, or at the very least Birmingham. A good shout is Scott Sinclair, broadening the child trafficking routes between us and Chelsea, and he’s a decent, quick player who can deliver a good ball into the box, just what we need.

So in all that presents Mick with a bit of a selection headache, however it does open up the subs bench for some players who’ve not had a chance so far this season, Keogh might drop in for Carlos Edwards on Saturday with David Edwards and David Jones slotting into midfield, I personally think it’ll need their combined effort to cover the same ground as Henry, he’s going to be a big miss.

I hope, I hope that this isn’t going to be the banana skin I can see it being, we need to win this game as the next four are going to be real tasks there’s no denying that, to lose this game won’t get that off to a great start, though I just don’t know…there’s something about this game that’s getting my pessimistic Wolves fan sense tingling, last time we went into a game at home with key members of our squad missing we got massacred…let’s hope we can all have a good weekend, at Blackpool’s expense.

I’m going to go for a 2-0, 1-0 till the 87th minute mind. It’s going to be a tense one, with Blake first on the scoreboard.

Fingers crossed!

Tarra-a-bit!