While he couldn’t hide his disappointment, Ruben Neves insists Wolves can’t be defined by their defeat at Brighton & Hove Albion and must put things right as soon as possible.
Wolves were hit for six at the AMEX Stadium and deserved their defeat, after uncharacteristic mistakes and a lack of reaction made them pay, against a free-flowing Brighton side. The captain spoke to the media post-match and knows Wolves must look at themselves, their performance, and ensure there is no repeat between now and the end of the season.
On what went wrong at Brighton
“We are not that team. We are not a team which concedes a goal, gets frustrated and concedes two or three more in ten minutes. It happened today, everyone can have a bad day, in our lives, in football, in all the jobs in the world, it’s not about the bad day, it’s about how you react and in this case, the next day.
“We will work, prepare ourselves for the next match. It was really bad today, we know that, and we want to change it. It was about the attitude, the calmness we had. We were really frustrated and couldn’t play our game.”
On not following the game plan
“Losing like this was not in our plans, of course. We came to play against one of the best teams in the Premier League in terms of playing football. They’re a really good team, but it was not good enough from us.
“We started the game really bad, they scored really early, and then we couldn’t react. We did the worst thing we could do, conceding two more goals in a few minutes, and that was our big mistake today. Then, of course, everything happened in the match. We had some chances to score and didn’t. Every time they went to our goal, they scored until 6-0. Then they had two or three more chances to score, really bad from us.”
On a poor reaction to conceding
“We lost control completely. It’s happened before, we conceded goals in the beginning of the game, but we were more calm, more relaxed, trying to change the game, but today we couldn’t do it unfortunately. It was really hard for us to chase the result and our confidence went down. A lot of mistakes, we didn’t think well the game.
“Everything is really hard after, we conceded three goals in the first 15 minutes against a team that plays so well, your frustration is a lot, it’s really hard to come back. We tried our best, but we are better than this, we showed it before.”
On how to rectify it
“We look at ourselves. We are in the moment of the season where we can’t lose too much time thinking about this game. Four games to go, we are in the middle of a battle like we always say, and our main goal is to show ourselves at home next game.
“We know we can do better, we showed it before, it was a really bad day for and for our fans as well, for them to come all the way here to see us play like that is really bad. We didn’t want to do it, but of course it’s football and the best answer we can do is next Saturday at Molineux.”
On the need to react
“We had two games like this this season, Leicester and today, really bad games for us, but we reacted. It’s not the moment to think too much into this game. Of course, we’ll look into all the aspects of the game, but using this frustration and our power at home to change the mentality again and try to come back – the big teams, that’s what they do.
“We saw some strange results this season for every team, today was us. It’s not about the result today, it’s about how we’re going to react and I can assure you we’re going to react really well next game.”
