Wolves - Championship Champions 2017-18

[OTLB]

Afternoon all,

I am an EFL and non-league fan and run a blog dedicated to such.
We are running an advent calendar this month looking at a different EFL and non-league winner each day.
Today, the winner is Wolves when they won the Championship title in 2018.
Be great to have a read and reminisce about the EFL days which fingers crossed you won’t have to through again any time soon.
Happy reading!

https://offtheline599656488.wordpress.com/2020/12/11/off-the-line-xmas-advent-calendar-day-11/

 

[Tredman]

First time I've seen Nuno described as adventurous.

 

[OTLB]

First time I've seen Nuno described as adventurous.

I loved watching Nuno set his sides up to play, and you had some quality players that unlocked many a defence with ease that year.

 

[Pablowolf]

Nuno could afford to be adventurous and play expansive football when, and not being big headed here, his side was so much better than most of the sides the league could put out that year.

 

[The Bear]

If Leicester can play a more attacking style whilst maintaining a similar defensive record to us, then there's no reason we can't too.

 

[YoungWolf]

Wouldn't say Leicester have been very expansive this season. Without Ndidi (who is back now), they have defended pretty deep in general and played a back five.

 

[The Bear]

They're more attacking and score a lot more goals. Which is what I was trying to get at.

 

[PuntsWolf]

They are playing a back 5 but their outside CBs step In and Tielemans is more than happy to push forward and get involved.

Our CBs never/rarely stepped in with any real purpose and we play effectively two deep lying midfielders with Neves and Moutinho or a deep lying and box to box with Donck in there who isnt comfortable on the ball in the final third.

The formations may have been the same on paper, but they were nothing a like in practice. That’s why the change to 4-2-3-1 should help as it puts less pressure on the CM in attacking situations and alllows them to continue to sit deeper.

 

[YoungWolf]

Their defensive line is as deep as ours usually is in a back five. In possession they play very different, but if you take into account they have scored 8 (?) penalties they haven't been fantastic in open play this season (we saw that in our game against them - although we were too deep for a lot of that time).

Agree on the back four, having an extra player in front of the ball allows us to play forwards to feet better and should allow us to press higher (which I don't think the team have quite grasped yet or Nuno hasn't asked them to). At times against Southampton and Arsenal we looked very dynamic in the way we played the ball on the floor. Need more of that tomorrow for sure to draw someone like Mings out.

 

[AndyWolves]

Weirdly, the first game of that season we didn't create much against Middlesboro and I wasn't sure the system was going to work.

Rightly or wrongly, I still think if we'd been more conventional and played 4231 / 433 we'd have broken the scoring record comfortably

 

[Deutsch Wolf]

If we'd played Baz and Doc as standard full backs we wouldn't have finished in the top two, neither of them can defend for shit.