Dave Edwards: Tough to read into Celtic display as season nears
Some good, some bad and some indifferent – that sums up Wolves’ performance against Celtic.
You always have to apply context to pre-season games. When I was at Wolves under Nuno, in my last pre-season at the club, we were doing an awful lot of training, even on the morning of games.
In the group we’d be thinking ‘there’s no way we can play a game this evening’ and we were feeling very leggy, but Nuno expressed why we were doing it. It was to feel tired and get your fitness up, make decisions under fatigue and not so much about the performances.
Looking at the Celtic game, it could be a similar scenario where they had an awfully hard week. It’s hard to judge too much from the outside and I expect we’ll see more where Wolves are at during the Rennes friendly and going into the start of the season at United.
Analysing the poorer moments against Celtic, Wolves were alarmingly open at times in the first half. Celtic’s movement was excellent, but the amount of times they got runners in behind Wolves’ back four was quite alarming. They could have scored three or four goals in the first half as Wolves switched off.
There was some good stuff as well. They grew into it in the first half and kept the ball well, without really hurting Celtic. Matheus Nunes had that one chance, too.
They got better as the game went on and I think the 4-4-1-1 formation helped Wolves. We saw it work really well last season when you look at the Liverpool and Fulham games.
