A soul-crushing defeat from a game we should have won felt bad enough The walk back to the car felt longer and gloomier than normal. But then to turn on the car radio and learn of the passing of a club legend…
It was difficult to process at the time… and still is.
Thankfully Mick Dennis is penning a fitting tribute to the great man, which will appear on MFW later today, and so I’ll leave the words on Martin Peters to someone who watched him from the Carrow Road press box.
All I will say is, how crazy, looking back, is it to think we had a World Cup winner in our ranks. And how honoured should we feel to have had one. That he was ever-present in two of his five-and-a-bit seasons here and that he played more times for City than he did for Spurs speaks volumes.
I’d like to think the affection that we all felt, and are feeling, for Martin Peters was reciprocated.
I hope so.
In terms of yesterday’s game, while it feels a little futile, here goes…..
First thing to say is, despite the result, I can seldom recall seeing a better individual performance in a yellow and green shirt than the one put in by Emi Buendia yesterday. Outstanding.
The biggest compliment I can pay, is that it was on a par with the shift put in by one Darren Huckerby on what was supposed to be the final game of his loan spell here against Cardiff City in December 2003. Hucks was mesmeric that day; Emi matched it yesterday.
That he didn’t end up on the winning side was a travesty. MFW’s Mike Ward called it perfectly.
A word to the wise all #ncfc fans. Appreciate Emi Buendia while we can because that was a staggeringly brilliant performance in a gut wrenching defeat! #ncfc
— Mike Ward (@mjtward19) December 21, 2019
To be set adrift in the bottom three while Emi produces performances like that, just as the January transfer window opens. is not a great place to be. He’ll be on many a radar and rightly so.
He wasn’t alone in playing well yesterday. For the best part of an hour, there were excellent performances everywhere you looked, and a team more attuned to the brutalities of the Premier League would have gone in at half-time 3-0 up with the job done.
Instead, almost in unison, as the players sat in the dressing room awaiting their half-time team talk, 26,000 voices uttered ‘we’re going to regret those missed chances’.
And so it came to pass.
As good as City were in that first half, Wolves were awful. There was no way they were going to be that passive for the second 45. Not a chance.
The space and time afforded Hanley, Zimmermann, Tettey and Trybull in the first half disappeared – almost totally – and as a result, so too did the natural source of City’s ebb and flow. It became harder to get Emi and Kenny McLean on the ball in those dangerous pockets.
For almost all of the first-half, it was a display of 2018/19 proportions, with Wolves being opened up with the same swagger and, almost, nonchalance shown to the Championship a year ago. The space out wide offered up by the visitors playing three at the back was exploited perfectly by Max Aarons and Sam Byram, both of whom picked their time when to stay and when to go perfectly.
This Wolves team has been very expensively assembled and the club has ambitions of gatecrashing the top six, yet City were able to create chances and get in behind almost at will.
It’s hard to lay any blame at the feet of Teemu Pukki, such has been his sheer brilliance over the last 16 months, but all the good chances did all fall to him, and in his duel with Rui Patrício, it was the Portuguese international who came out on top. In addition to thwarting Pukki on four occasions, he also somehow tipped that Alex Tettey howitzer onto the post.
It was that type of a half. It should have been a 3-0 type of half.
Sadly, what followed was horribly predictable. As soon as we’d succumbed to that same short corner routine for the umpteenth time – you need two players to stop a short corner, lads – and Romain Saiss had soared higher than a stationary Byram to make it 1-1, there was an inevitability to it all.
The waning belief in the stadium appeared to be matched by a feeling of ‘here we go again’ within the group. Heads visibly dropped. No lack of effort but a lack of nous and an inability to reassert control on a game that was slipping away.
Jiminez’s winner was coming.
So, while not a second-half of Sheffield United proportions, it was one that failed to match the tempo of the first and also failed to cope with an increase in intensity from the visitors. That’s now three home games in a row where City have gone in at half-time with a lead, but from those, we’ve earned just a single, solitary point.
All of which is made more frustrating because, as we proved last week at Leicester, we’re really not far off being a good side. We’re really not. But we’re fragile. We ship too many goals are not clinical enough at the other end. It’s an unholy combination.
A look at the league table on this grimmest of days is not recommended but this group do have a habit of reigniting belief when we least expect it, so let’s all hope for a Christmas miracle.
And if Father Christmas would care to drop off a big old box of Premier League nous, I’d take that over any new signing any day.
If we don’t speak again, a Happy Christmas to you and yours, Thanks for reading.
An excellent summary of the game. Unfortunately I cannot see anything other than relegation given the inconsistent performances and the failure to realise that football matches last 90 mins not 45. Perhaps we came up a season too soon and another season in the Championship to consolidate would be best for all. Just being realistic
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Fair comment, Tim (and thanks). Our fragility at the back does indeed make it difficult to see a way to 17th.
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Cheers Gary
Keep up the good work!
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@Tim “perhaps we came up too soon and another season in the Championship to consolidate would be best for all.”
Personally, I think that the gulf between the Championship and the Premier League is too huge to ever be “ready for it”.
City’s undoing, in my view, is that we came up with just two players with Premier League experience, Krul and Tettey, and, whilst we added another with Byram, the dishing out of too many contract renewals to players with no Premier League experience, was a huge leap of faith in those who did so wonderfully well last season. Maybe, adding a little more Premier League nous, as expensive as that would have been, would have helped get City over the line in situations like yesterday.
OTBC
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It’s a ninety minute game not fourty five
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All true and spot on Gary. And yet I came away feeling aggrieved. I know it wasn’t the ref’s fault that we lost but I just hated the way that Wolves’ fouling in the 2nd half disrupted everything we tried to do in attack and was not properly punished. How can a player grab Buendia by the neck as he’s surging forward and not even be booked (in rugby it would have been close to a red).
Wolves had obviously read Barney Ronay’s piece in The Guardian last week in praise of the ‘beauty of foul play’ when Spurs did it to them: https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/dec/20/killing-transition-fouling-tottenham-wolves
a truly crass bit of praise for Mourinho style cheating.
I understand that my reaction is in some ways ridiculous and that you’re right about missed chances and and defensive lapses but the result just felt so unfair. Their second goal came after a 5 minute wait for the ref to get ‘miked up’ (which was also the time Farke should have done his triple substitution) and the 6 minutes of extra time were less than that. I guess I’m just clutching at straws but we really need something to go our way. The truth is that we just don’t seem to have the nous and that unsurprisingly we probably haven’t quite got the quality. As you can see I found this defeat very hard to take, probably because we couldn’t have given much more. I suppose I should take a crumb of comfort from that.
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Thanks Gary. It was a scintillating Norwich performance in the first half and one which belied the teams respective league positions. If only we cld have put away a couple more of those chances. But it wasn’t to be and the seemingly inevitable happened. Let’s hope, against hope, that we can pull some wins out of the bag over Xmas. Always enjoy reading your reports. Best wishes for Xmas and here’s to a more successful 2020.
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Dear Father Christmas
Decent Centre back (a bruce or Watson would be nice) Tick
Defensive midfielder (a younger tettey or a vierra 😉 ) Tick
Attacking midfielder (another wes or huckerby please) Tick
And a couple of wins to help us get out of the mire . Tick
Hope i’m not being greedy santa just wishing so much .
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Football…so frustrating! Wolves were superb against Spurs last Sunday, the best I’ve seen for a long time and we came away with zero points. Yesterday Norwich in the first half were excellent, great tempo, passing and closing down. Wolves were lucky, very lucky not to go in 3-0 down. Villa up next so forgive me for hoping you play like you did 2nd half but come away with a 3-0 win. The Vile Villa fans think they are the biggest club in the league and Grealish is better than Messi. Hope Norwich do a job on them and then get rewarded by not going down. You play some great exciting football and deserve a much higher place than where you are at present.
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It’s so frustrating to see a hopelessly underfunded City once again get so close and yet so far.
I think from his comments afterwards Farke is finally starting to be worn down by our predicament.
To cap a miserable afternoon I turn the car radio on and hear that one of our finest, Martin Peters has died. Still remember watching him dismantle Manchester United in the league cup, wonderful player.
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Great analysis Gary.
Those nasty bookies now have us at 1-8 to get relegated and I think we all agree that for us to survive now would be an unbelievable achievement, perhaps even surpassing last seasons Championship win.
But on a brighter point if you look at our last 6 games we have been competitive a win, two draws and three 2-1 defeats, compare that with the seven games before that, Bournemouth aside, we were well and truly beaten.
I know its small comfort but there is at least some improvement, which coincided with Christoph Zimmerman’s return. I imagine our points haul would have been a lot better but for these accursed injuries.
So sad to hear of Martin Peters passing away, the best out field player I ever saw to wear the yellow and green. RIP Great Man
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Thank you Gary.
It all seems a case of when will we ever learn? So many points with our grasp at half-time, but so many squandered in the last 45/50 minutes.
Yesterday with the delay for the ref reminded me so much of last season against Derby and the floodlights. And did he really play at least six additional minutes?
After the surprise of last season I took this one as pretty much a free hit. If we should go down (as now looks increasingly likely), provided we keep the core of this team together we have one heck of a chance of an immediate return – with the bonus that then we will have a few with Premier League experience.
A Happy Christmas to one and all.
O T B C
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The problem is keeping the best players.
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Farke has learned nothing about use of substitutes in all the time he has been here. 3 at once never works as you lose all rhythm in the game. When will we learn to look at the back post? Byram had no chance against a big defender and two others in waiting. This could have been the turning point but you can’t expect Pukki to score all of the goals.
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Truly sad news regarding Martin peters.
Re. The game, Bunedia and cantwell were outstanding and I suspect Mike is correct in his assertion that both will be gone in the summer.
Frustratingly, the weekly stupid concession (s) handed the points to the opposition, cancelling out so much good work which had gone before.
Clearly, had we behaved like a premier league club during the summer and not indulged in a cash grab we could have bolstered a squad which clearly has the raw material for survival with some help.
The manager, players and supporters have been let down badly.
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