Wolves Vs Coventry City
Saturday 18th October KO 3pm
Our first derby of the season saw Coventry City make a short trip up the M6 to Molineux, and for the first time in ages, they actually sold out of their allocation. The Wolves fans also turned out in their numbers, and I thought the crowd was going to be a lot higher than the 25 odd thousand announced over the tannoy. Where were the 3000 empty seats? Anyway, CC kicked the game off, and were soon in front. As is usual these days, we gifted them an early goal, although by the standards of the last 2 games this was quite a late goal, coming in at 6 minutes which is later than the combined total of the goals conceded against Reading and Swansea! Thankfully their goal scorer was not Freddy, but rather the Maltese Mosquito Mifsud. (Otherwise known as donkey because& .eyeore& ., eyeore& ., he always scores against us! Geddit!)
Fair play to the lads though, they didn t let this disappointment affect them, and they carried on playing in the same disjointed manner, and gifted them another couple of great opportunities only for Ikeme to pull of 2 great saves and keep us in the game. We eventually started to create some openings and Kightly forced a save from a well struck shot, while SEB had a header cleared off the line. Towards the end of the half Keogh got an assist when he played the ball into the 6-yard box, where Kightly had the freedom of the box with not a challenge in sight, to take the ball past their keeper and hook it in from a tightish angle. The goal was well taken and gave a lift to the players who began to play much better at the start of the second half.
Kightly had a header saved by their keeper, and then a move down the far side saw SEB cross the ball into the box, before his momentum took him off the pitch, just as he was coming back on to the field of play, Kightly s shot was ricocheting up into the air and so SEB duly challenged for it and somehow or the other it crossed the line. SEB had a look at the linesman to see if he was going to flag he didn t and so the goal stood. The referee was Steve Bennett who has refereed a Champions League final as well as some World Cup matches, so if he said it was a goal, it s a goal! (After the match he said something along the lines that SEB went off the pitch so he wasn t offside!) Anyway, all this is academic as the linesman later ruled Iwelumo s perfectly good goal (proving that he can score from 3 yards out) as offside when in fact he was being played on by a CC defender who was only about 10 yards away from the linesman!
After this there was some scrappy play in the middle, and then towards the end CC pushed to get an equaliser and Ikeme made another great reflex save. Another chance for them went begging when Ward (Brother of Darren) failed to get onto a flick-on. During this frantic period of CC pressure, MM made a double substitution when we were defending a corner! I thought there was an unwritten rule (which somebody has probably written down somewhere) that you can t do this I guess it only applies if you are looking to make a single substitution, so a double one kind of cancels the rule out& ish! Anyway, we successfully managed to clear the corner.
Ikeme was Man-of-the-Match for his saves in the 1st half which kept us in the game, but a close 2nd was Kightly, not only for his goal and his assist for SEB s goal, but for the way he kept the ball in the corner during the four minutes of injury time! He was superb! He won two corners, got one of their frustrated players booked, and ate up some valuable minutes in the process! Class! We certainly weren t at our best and had to grind out this win against a decent looking CC team, but 3 points and going back to the top makes it sweet!
