Gary O’Neil has revealed his Wolves squad is not at 100 per cent following the international break as he returns to AFC Bournemouth this weekend, just four months after his time as manager came to an end.
The head coach will be without the suspended Nelson Semedo and Mario Lemina for Saturday’s trip to the Vitality Stadium, but O’Neil has also admitted his squad has injury issues – although he was keeping his cards close to his chest and did not disclose who those players might be as he spoke to the media ahead of the latest Premier League clash.
On missing key players
“You’ll see tomorrow, but there’s a possibility that there’ll be a few names missing who we’d rather not be. I won’t tell you who they are because I don’t want to give too much away, but we’re probably in the toughest weekend I’ve had in terms of squad position.
“Some lads have come back with a couple of issues, some lads need late checks and we’ve got the two boys suspended – which is something we need to improve.
“I wasn’t in charge when the meeting was done by the officials this summer around the changes in rules, so we need to clear that up with the lads and make sure they get less cautions because they can make a big difference to the outcome of a season.”
On international break disrupting momentum
“I don’t like those breaks because we lose a lot of players here for the week, so it’s difficult to do a lot of work as a group.
“You can do work with some individuals and their roles, but in terms of trying to progress our understanding of what we’re trying to be, the international break obviously pauses that for us.
“We got most of the lads back in yesterday and today, try to get everything back together, remind them where we were and head down to Bournemouth tomorrow to try and pick up a positive result.”
On still building the team to what he wants
“People might not like this, but we’re still early and it takes a while to build a team. There’s lots of stuff that we’ve still not been able to put in yet because the lads need time to digest what they’ve already been given before you give them something else.
“We’re still at an early stage and not put too many layers on it at the moment. It’s fairly straight forward at the moment compared to where it will hopefully be in a few more weeks, months or however long it takes.
“But it always evolves, so the longer you have, the more it improves, but there’s been really good signs – especially in the last two performances, in terms of the understanding of the game plan, the execution of the game plan, and still managing to carry a threat and score some goals. The last two were good, but it will be another big test tomorrow.”
Checking back in at Compton 👋 pic.twitter.com/8e96T84zaw
— Wolves (@Wolves) October 19, 2023
On returning to his former club
“It’s zero per cent about me tomorrow. I have zero consideration about what it means to me, it’s just a game that we want to take three points from against a team that are in our division and a team that we can compete against. That’s all it is.
“There’s nothing extra for me, the players are ready as they’ve always been for a tough Premier League game, and my feelings around the situation that happened four months ago, is just that it’s football. It happens.
“It's never my job to decide whether I earned the right or not to continue, it’s people above who make those decisions, and I was comfortable with that, but I would prefer to talk about Wolves, where we are, what we’re trying to do, the group of players we have and how fantastic the supporters have been since we’ve got here.
“The Bournemouth phase is over, and we move on. I’m at a great place, working at a great football club, so I’m looking forwards to continuing that.”
On differences between the two squads
“The groups are very different. Bournemouth have added a lot of quality and depth. The group that is there now is very different to the group that I had. They’ve spent over £100 million net in the window, so it’s a very different group to what I had and we’re still early in a transition phase here.
“We maybe have less depth, but we have some quality of course, and the players have shown that already. I love the group, we are a small group, and that can carry some issues as we have a couple of suspensions this week, and a few other issues which make this weekend trickier than normal for us, but I love the group I have, I love getting to work with them every day and there’s no complaints from me.”
On Wolves’ goalscoring form
“The attacking players have been very good, Channy [Hwang] and Pedro [Neto] have played a large part in that, Matheus Cunha as well, even Sasa [Kalajdzic] off the bench, so the quality of the players, trying to get them into the right areas is important, getting them arriving in those areas as much as we can, it’s probably played a part in it.
“It’s a short window to see if it’s something we’ve improved or something that’s just happened, so judgment will still be ongoing on that. But we’ll still be trying to improve, and we’ve conceded a few more than they did last season, so we’re trying to move a few things around and I’ve got to know the group and what their strengths are, so hopefully we can make sure we address that and find the right balance between being a threat and being solid enough to not need to score two or three each week to win a game.
On Hwang maintaining his shot conversion rate
“I hope so. He scored three last season and he’s on six now, so it’s a really good return. I like that he’s not scoring ones from miles out either – amazing hits that are one in a million – its arriving in good areas and scoring goals that you can see continuing.
“But lots goes into that, not just the work of Channy but the work of the team, the work of Pedro on the other side, Cunha’s work to move defenders, so there’s a lot that goes into it, but Channy has been very clinical and he arrives in really dangerous areas.
“We’ll keep working with him at that, it will be an incredible rate to keep up, but let’s try to keep it as close as it is.”
