Mario Lemina and Co’s disrespectful antics are just embarrassing – deal with it the old school way and be done with it
A REAL team of fighters do not get involved in the sort of disrespectful antics Wolves have recently.
Mario Lemina was pushing his own team-mates and coaches after they lost to West Ham this month, and then last weekend Matheus Cunha and Rayan Ait-Nouri clashed with Ipswich players and staff after falling to a late defeat.
If something like that happens once, you go: Right, that’s just someone losing their cool.
It’s not the right way to go about things, but sometimes emotions spill over, especially when you are under that much pressure or in a relegation battle.
But for it to happen in back-to-back weeks, it looked like they were just reacting off Gary O’Neil after he asked for more ‘fight’ from his team.
That is not what he meant.
We’re footballers, not tough guys. You want to be a boxer or a fighter? Go watch a proper fight between Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk tonight.
Get in the ring with them, I dare you.
I wouldn’t even use the word ‘fight’ to describe what those players did.
It’s petulance. It stinks of a team that is needing leadership and direction from both the top of the club and on the pitch.
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You want to do it properly? Go old school and do what we used to do back in the day, even if it was our own team-mate we had a disagreement with.
Get down the tunnel, into the boot room, have someone hold the door shut, one-on-one for a few minutes, then shake hands and it is finished.
The next morning, it was back to work and we didn’t speak about it again.
If it lasted longer than 30 seconds, people would dive in and break it up, but often it was just three or four punches to blow off some steam, and that happened a few times a season.
But those involved at Wolves were pretending to be something they’re not, pretending to be up for a fight by getting themselves involved in something.
It is embarrassing.
If you fight after the final whistle, it says to me that you don’t care about fighting for the ball or for tackles or for the win during a game.
And if they really were that hard or tough or up for a fight, they wouldn’t be doing what they did.
It’s like that friend who says you can trust him. If you have to tell me, I don’t think I should trust you.
As the saying goes: It’s easier for a nice guy to pretend to be tough than it is for a tough guy to pretend to be nice.
And this Wolves group, they’re not tough, they’re just nice kids, nice people.
If you fight after the final whistle, it says to me that you don’t care about fighting for the ball or for tackles or for the win during a game.
Troy Deeney
You wouldn’t be scared to bits if you came across them in a dark alley, would you?
I saw Lemina having a go at the assistant, Shaun Derry, at West Ham.
I tell you what, if Lemina had tried that on Derry a few years ago, he would have been put on the ground.
And then I saw Craig Dawson try to carry Ait-Nouri down the tunnel to calm him down.
As a whole, there is just a lack of respect across that whole team.
There should be a genuine, healthy fear and respect of senior players or leaders in any dressing room.
I saw a few of those incidents close up during my career, especially during my early days with Walsall.
After something like that, we would be terrified knowing the manager would tear us a new one or the captain would have us up against the wall after making such fools of ourselves.
I don’t sense that happening now. Respect your elders.
But saying that, it seemed to me like the players actually liked O’Neil before he got sacked.
It wasn’t like they ever quit on him. There were so many times they could have.
They followed him and liked him and respected him and didn’t want him to go.