Match Preview: Brighton v Wolverhampton Wanderers

When Brighton sat eighth in the Premier League after defeating Norwich City 2-0 at the Amex back at the start of November, we all knew what was to come over the next five games – five ridiculously tough fixtures.

Manchester United away, Leicester City home, Liverpool away, Arsenal away, Wolverhampton Wanderers home. All clubs who should have designs on top six finishes this season, even if United and Arsenal have proven to be complete car crashes so far.

That devilish little run comes to an end against Wolves at the Amex and, needless to say, the Albion are now someway off the dizzy heights of eighth.

The good news is that for reasons nobody seems to understand, Brighton have a ridiculously good record against Wolves. They’re the only team in the country that we are a real bogey side for.

This hopefully stands us in good stead to get a result in front of the Sky Sports camera ahead of a much more winnable set of games leading into Christmas in which we can start climbing the table again.

A brief history of Wolverhampton Wanderers
Wolves were founding members of the Football League and have spent 65 of their 142 year existence playing top flight football. Their most successful period came in the 1950s, when they were crowned English champions three times, finished runners up on a further three occasions and won one FA Cup under the management of Stan Cullis.

They also happen to be one of the most pioneering clubs in the country. In 1953, Molineux became one of the first British grounds to have floodlights installed. This allowed Wolves to play glamour midweek friendlies against European giants such as Real Madrid and Honved. Honved at the time contained many of the players from the Hungarian national team largely considered to be the finest in the world. Wolves’ subsequent victory over them led some to proclaim the Old Gold as the best team on the planet.

These floodlit friendlies became the eventual inspiration behind the creation of the European Cup, although Wolves’ decline from their 1950s heyday to become a side who have since bounced between the top three divisions means that they’ve hardly competed in the competition they helped to create.

Wolverhampton Wanderers this season
Last season’s seventh placed finish did however allow them to qualify for the Europa League. There were plenty of pundits out there who felt that a combination of second-season syndrome and the chore of playing domestic football at the weekends followed by European football on a Thursday night would take its tool on one of the top flight’s smaller squads.

Well, Wolves have made a mockery of those suggestions. They’re challenging for the top seven again with some of the best Bookmakers offering odds as short as 11/8 that they’ll end the campaign in the top six – and they have already progressed to the knockout stages of the Europa League.

Yes, they’re given a helping hand by being in bed with Portuguese super agent Jorge Mendes, who is able to offer them the likes of Rui Patricio and Joao Moutinho, players for whom living and working in Wolverhampton would normally hold all the appeal of covering your bollocks in nectar and dipping them in a bee hive.

But good players alone don’t guarantee success. It’s little wonder that manager Nuno is attracting serious interest from some of the big boys of Europe, most notably our opponents from Thursday night, Arsenal.

Head-to-head
As already noted, Brighton have a ridiculous record against Wolves. We were unbeaten in our first 14 meetings with the head-to-head now reading 15 Albion wins and 11 draws from 32 meetings. Wolves have won on just six occasions.

What makes this even more remarkable is that in the 118 seasons in which Brighton have existed, Wolves have finished as the higher placed team in 105 of them. Historically, they’ve been better than us for over 89% of our history and yet we hardly ever lose to them. Long may it continue.

Brighton’s head-to-head record with Wolverhampton Wanderers

Last six meetings
• Wolverhampton Wanderers 0-0 Brighton (Premier League, 20/04/19)
• Brighton 1-0 Wolverhampton Wanderers (Premier League, 27/10/18)
• Wolverhampton Wanderers 0-2 Brighton (Championship, 14/04/17)
• Brighton 1-0 Wolverhampton Wanderers (Championship, 18/09/16)
• Brighton 0-1 Wolverhampton Wanderers (Championship, 01/01/16)
• Wolverhampton Wanderers 0-0 Brighton (Championship, 19/09/15)

One defeat in the past six is about right given the Albion’s dominance of the fixture. That came on New Year’s Day 2016 when James Wilson was infamously caught by the television cameras throwing up on the pitch before the game.

It’s also interesting to note there has been at least one clean sheet kept in the past seven games, stretching back to a 1-1 Amex draw in the 2014-15 season. Fixtures with Wolves haven’t exactly been entertaining in recent years, which begs the questions as to why Sky are showing this as their flagship Super Sunday game this weekend?

Team news
Having played just 72 hours previously away at Arsenal, there is every chance that Graham Potter will shuffle his pack for the visit of Wolves. We know for certain that Solly March and Jose Izquierdo are out but other than that, who knows what Potter will do?

Wolves’ key players
Moutinho may not be getting any younger, but it still strikes us as being completely ridiculous that a newly promoted Premier League club were able to sign one of European champions Portugal’s star men for £5m last summer. Especially when he’d cost Monaco £25m just four years previously.

Obviously, he’s one of Wolves’ star performers, while Ruben Neves has done what Anthony Knockaert couldn’t do and gone from being the Championship’s best player to a genuine top flight star. Adama Traore is a tricky customer, Patricio in goal rivals Maty Ryan as one of the best keepers outside of the league’s big names and Raul Jimenez leads Wolves’ scoring charts with 15 goals in 25 games against all competitions.

A good WeAreBrighton.com memory of Wolverhampton Wanderers at home
Wolves’ visit to Withdean in 2002-03 provides probably our best example of Brighton being the Old Gold’s bogey side. The visitors would end promoted to the Premier League come the end of the season, the Albion were relegated to League One. And yet for 90 minutes, we completely blew them away to win 4-1 in front of a crowd who could scarcely believe what was going on.

Bobby Zamora, Dean Blackwell, Paul Brooker and Gary Hart got the goals. Given the obvious gulf in class between the two sides, this was arguably the greatest performance and result that we saw in our 12 years at the Theatre of Trees. A genuinely shocking afternoon.

A bad WeAreBrighton.com memory of Wolverhampton Wanderers at home?
A midday kick off on a freezing cold New Year’s Day like our one at home to Wolves on January 1st 2016 is the sort of punishment you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. The terrible thing is that we’ve got to go through it all again in less than a months time when Chelsea visit the Amex.

Our favourite player to play for Brighton and Wolverhampton Wanderers
Stephen Ward was an excellent left back during the season that we were lucky enough to have him on-loan from Wolves. He also turned out to be a first class bloke too.

We bumped into him at the Cheltenham Festival a year later, by which point he was a Burnley player. Ward still had time for a decent, Guinness-fuelled chat in which wished Brighton luck and said he had hoped to join the Albion permanently. He wasn’t the only one, given that we’d replaced him with Joe Bennett.

What we like about Wolverhampton
You can get to Birmingham quickly and easily. Oh, and the all-weather racecourse.

Prediction
We may have won three of our last four home games, but it’s hard to see another three points coming against a side as good as Wolves. 1-1.