Wolves v Newcastle Sublime Sylvan, Crunching Carroll and Boo Hoo Barton

Wolves 1 v Newcastle 1

A trip to Molineux on a summer's afternoon is a delight to behold. As you walk up to see the golden stadium glisten in the sunshine you can not help but be full of optimism for the game of football to follow. A shame then that on this particular day the football would have been better suited to a dour, rainy, winter evening as the two sides refused to budge in a bruising encounter.

Newcastle came with confidence off the back of their  6-0 victory over Villa and they had a game-plan that worked very well for the first 30 minutes. They had the midfield packed out with Kevin Nolan given the task of running on to support Andy Carroll in attack. Early doors Barton and Smith were bossing things in the centre - which led to a number of strong challenges coming in from Wolves players - most of them fair despite the moans from Joey Barton in particular.
The irony of Barton not being able to take a hard tackle was not lost on Mick McCarthy who went to lengths to point this out to him on the final whistle.
Never the less the nature of the game was set as a full committed gritty match and this will never make a Referee's day easy. Stuart Attwell indeed was up against it, but he did not help himself by constantly stopping the game and booking players far too easily. He invited the wrath of both sets of fans with his decisions at different points in the game and I can testify to the bizarreness of the whole stadium singing 'you're not fit to referee' in unison - one point that home and away fans did appear to agree on.

Well the battle of Newcastle's midfield sufficed to allow their better players to shine. Andy Carroll was brilliant in his lone role up front - he won a lot of balls in the air and was such a handful for the Wolves defence. He will be very important for Newcastle this season if they are going to do some damage in the Premier League - It is bizarre to think that he is not in the full England team if it is the case that Capello prefers a target man.
Routledge also looked dangerous for Newcastle when he was allowed to run at a defence - perhaps just failing in composure and the final ball.
Gutierrez in comparison is a player who looks very comfortable on the ball, but he runs hot and cold throughout the game and may suffer from concentration lapses if his performance here is anything to go by.

Wolves, after containing Newcastle's early pressure, fought back and showed that they do have some quality of their own. No less than new signing Jelle Van Damme who battles with the best of them but also posses a sweet left foot - evident when he picked out Ebanks-Blake with a delightful ball from the right.
Ebanks-Blake had a difficult season last year after much was expected of him. You would expect him to be low on confidence, but that didn't show when he sweetly controlled Van Damme's pass in the air and powered into the goal through Harper's legs. A man on form with 2 in 2.

After the break another star of Wolves early season showed what he can do. Matt Jarvis set off on a run from the left that took him into the Newcastle are - he jinked past James Perch, only for the defender to hack him down. A penalty was not given - I could have forgiven Attwell for this if he had thought Perch had got the ball, but no he gave a goal kick. Had Jarvis thrown himself on the floor? no - he wasn't booked for diving. Then what the hell happened in the head of Stuart Attwell - please someone tell me.

As is usually the case with Wolves the chance taken away from you to make a game 2-0 becomes an excuse to sit back and lick your wounds - which usually results in punishment from the opposite team. With Andy Carroll playing as well as he was - this wasn't long before he had the opportunity to head Newcastle level from a Barton free-kick.

The game then petered out with a chance or two at either end but nothing clear cut. The shame here being that a usual solid Wolves back-line made a few big errors and let Newcastle have more chances than they should have - a bit of re-organisation needed over the international break - I'm sure Mick will be more than up to that task.