Festive Lift-Off Is Like No Other

It’s time for a big festive statement……namely, that Wolves have never achieved a Christmas turnaround like the one overseen in these last few days by Vitor Pereira.

They have had bigger and better wins at this time of year than the ones against Leicester and Manchester United but the new head coach’s opening two matches feel truly historic as season-changing successes.

We have combed all of the club’s past second-half-of-December results and, using the final game before Christmas and the first one afterwards as the criteria, have not found any previous combination of victories that have transformed the mood as much as those in the last week.

To win by three clear goals away to the team so closely tied to Wolves in the battle to escape the Premier League’s bottom three and then to bring down United at a vibrant Molineux has been the stuff of dreams.

After all, the club had previously won only two out of 19 League games going back to the spring and had nosedived so far in the final weeks of Gary O’Neil’s reign that they lost four in a row – all to mid-table opponents or lower, and with 12 goals conceded in the process.

Now, we are relishing back-to-back clean sheets as well as six points out of six and a spectacular improvement in the goal difference column.

So when did Wolves ever manage a festive reversal of fortunes like this in the past? ‘Never’ is our considered answer unless or until any of our readers can prove us wrong.

Strangely, last season was one that bears some comparison with the current lift-off, a 2-1 home win over Chelsea on Christmas Eve being followed by a 4-1 victory at Brentford a year ago today. But the fine work O’Neil did in the first two-thirds of 2023-24 was reflected in the fact that they already had five Premier League wins on the board beforehand.

Similarly, in 2019-20. the win at Norwich on December 21 and the Adama-inspired one at home to Manchester City just after the big day were tremendous but Nuno’s men were generally flying both in Europe and domestically.

And that is what marks the present out as different….several times in the past, there were excellent Christmases but always based on much more promising platforms than the one that greeted Pereira. 

As Wolves were approaching pre-war greatness under Major Frank Buckley, for example, they put five past Manchester City at Molieux and then five past Derby at the Baseball Ground in Christmas week in 1934. But, again, they had a good number of victories behind them by then….they weren’t on their knees.

Going back much further to 1898-99, there was a 4-1 home victory against Sheffield United and a 5-1 romp at Albion, but once more Wolves achieved those heroics from a comfortable mid-table position.

Let’s not forget just how low both their League position and their morale were after that awful defeat against Ipswich less than a fortnight ago.