Gary O'Neil doubles down with demand to Wolves stars - notably key man Matheus Cunha
Wolves head to Fulham on Saturday emboldened by their first win of the season before the international break, but with Molineux boss Gary O'Neil still a man under pressure
by Neil Moxley · The MirrorGary O’Neil has called upon Wolves’ strikers to start defending from the front.
The under-pressure Molineux chief heads to Craven Cottage this afternoon, partly relieved by their first win of the season over Southampton. But he still finds himself under the pump - and he believes that while his side possess a goal threat, they need to tighten up all over the pitch.
He said: “Before I arrived, Wolves struggled for years and years to score goals. They were one of the lowest scorers in the league for a very long time, and we always look like scoring now, and there are not too many games where we don't manage to score. But it's trying to find that right balance between that and making sure we're solid enough.
“We definitely don't want to take away from being an attacking team because some of our best moments come from Matheus Cunha’s freedom and getting players forward. But we do need to find a way to be solid. We need to help the boys understand how to defend the goal better.
“The front players need to protect them better, it’s about all of it as a team.
“The team needs to be better out of possession, and that’s a big focus. Sometimes you'll hear me talk about Matheus [Cunha], because he's unbelievably talented, and he wins us games on his own, but he wants me to be hard on him, and he wants me to improve him out of possession, and I work on it with him every single day.”
O’Neil added that the defeat to Brentford - amid a tricky start to the campaign - fell way below the standard expected.
He said: “It's been an interesting season for us so far in that journey, not the results, just the performances I was really pleased with for such a long time at the start. I know you don't want to keep saying that because we weren't picking up enough points, but we had some tough opposition.
“We took Liverpool to the wire, we should have taken something off Newcastle, we were the better side at Villa for a long time, so there were some real good performances in there. But for some reason, when we arrived at Brentford, we fell a long way below the level.
“It was probably the first game that people outside of here would have gone, ‘You're not playing one of the big boys. Now let's see.’ And we fell well below the level and we gave ourselves absolutely no chance of taking anything from that game with how we went about it.”
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