Rarely can a club or its supporters have spent quite so much time studying the fixture list as Wolverhampton Wanderers at the start of this Premier League season.
And rarely can the cliched phrase “it’s hard to see where the next win is coming from” be applied quite so literally.
The fixtures computer has handed Gary O’Neil and his players a brutal start to their league campaign — the toughest opening of any club in the league based on Opta’s Power Rankings.
But if players, fans or even the Molineux hierarchy have already flipped their diary to November, when the run of games becomes markedly less daunting, they might find that life does not automatically get any easier.
“Mentality and confidence play a massive role in performance,” says Marc Sagal, a sports psychologist and managing partner of Winning Mind, who has worked with teams including Liverpool.
“If belief has taken a hit, then performance will often follow suit. In this way, early setbacks that aren’t framed and managed effectively can be problematic.
“Consider the likely vibe in and around the club when you start a season brightly and sit higher in the table versus what it feels like to immediately be looking up at your competition.”
In simple terms, fixtures that might otherwise look inviting can become daunting for a team with just one point from their opening five games.
Wolves’ 3-1 defeat at Villa Park was the second Premier League match in a row that they surrendered a winning position and ended up losing
They have lost at home to Chelsea (6-2) and Newcastle (2-1), and away to Arsenal (2-0) and Aston Villa. Their solitary draw, earned away to Nottingham Forest (1-1), leaves them with the joint lowest points in the division.
And the games do not get easier any time soon, with Liverpool and Manchester City to follow in the next three games either side of a trip to Brentford.
After a trip to Brighton at the end of October, the degree of difficulty theoretically gets lower from the beginning of November, with three of the four games in that month at home against the division’s lesser lights.
Yet former Bolton striker Kevin Davies, whose side were handed a similarly daunting start to their 2011-12 campaign, says those theoretically easier games could come with significantly increased pressure due to Wolves’ start.
“Wolves have been in all their games, so you can retain some confidence, but if you play all the big teams at the start and lose them all, then when you do get a supposed lesser team like we did with Norwich, the pressure increases because you are already in the bottom two or three,” Davies told The Athletic.
After opening their season in 2011 with a 4-0 win at Queens Park Rangers, Bolton’s next league games were at home to Manchester City, Manchester United, Norwich City and Chelsea, and trips to Liverpool and Arsenal.
They lost all six before collecting three wins, eight defeats and a draw from their next 10 games despite the fixtures becoming easier on paper. They were eventually relegated after taking their fight for survival to the final game.
“Those games become must-wins and that makes it harder straight away,” said Davies. “When you get through those tough games, you come into a run of games that people think you should be getting points from, but it doesn’t work like that.
“There are so many factors that come into it. If the manager is under pressure and the fans have turned a bit, those games are different. After seven or eight games, the table starts to take a bit of shape and it’s OK saying you’ve got a run of games coming up where you can pick up 10 or 12 points, but it’s not as easy as that.
“The manager will be messing around with shapes and systems, you might have strikers lacking confidence because they’ve missed some chances and defenders might have conceded a lot of goals and it all affects you.
“So when you go into a game against somebody you should be beating at home, it’s difficult mentally.”
The scale of the challenge for Wolves at the start of the season is clear. The graphic below, based on Opta’s Power Rankings, shows each team’s fixtures categorised by difficulty. For Wolves, just one game from the opening 10 is in the green “easier” category.
Clubs they might expect to be competing with in the table such as Bournemouth, Southampton, Fulham and Nottingham Forest each have four or five fixtures in the “easier” category.
A different graphic, again using the Opta Power Rankings — a global ranking system containing more than 13,000 teams rated between zero and 100 — and measuring the mean difficulty of each team’s opening 10 Premier League fixtures, shows Wolves’ start as being the toughest in the Premier League.
For O’Neil, the task of coaching his side has now become secondary to the challenge of keeping morale intact for the coming fixtures after a brutal start that continued on Saturday, including a potentially serious injury to centre-back Yerson Mosquera.
“Acknowledging the suffering that comes with defeats is important,” says sports psychologist Sagal. “When frustration, fear and disappointment go underground, it can do no end of harm.
“Managers have to pay a great deal of attention to team dynamics and unity and reinforce collective responsibility. Continuing to emphasise the importance of learning and extracting lessons from adversity is the key.
“The more a manager can do to break things down into more emotionally manageable chunks rather than viewing the opening part of the season as one daunting block, the better.”
There is light at the end of the tunnel for Wolves, but they need to limit the damage until then.
(Top photo: Wolves after the injury to Mosquera; by Shaun Botterill via Getty Images)
