Gary Neville was angry with Wolves for their passivity against Liverpool but what did he really expect? And why are pundits suddenly dictating how to play? Gary Neville seemed particularly unnecessarily aggrieved by the whole thing but you could see his broader point. Wolves, at home, bottom of the league and without a win this season, did not have a shot from the 77th minute onwards in a game they were trailing and would lose 2-1. They were also playing against a Liverpool side who went top of the table with this victory, whose second conceded goal this Premier League season came from a bizarre mix-up between defender and goalkeeper rather than any carefully crafted attacking move, and who are by quite some margin simply far better than Wolves.
But as Sam Johnstone traded passes with Toti Gomes and Nelson Semedo for the final stretch, an increasingly exasperated Neville pondered whether they even knew they needed a goal, raged against the entire concept of Passing It Out From The Back and helpfully clarified “the aim of football”: basically to pass the ball to your striker as quickly as possible. After the baffling and boring Arsenal discourse over the past week, it does seem as though the wider punditocracy is slowly – and suddenly and for no apparent reason – zeroing in on precisely how the sport should be played. Not defensively when playing more than half the game with ten men away at the four-time champions, that’s for certain.
And now absolutely not passively.