Arsenal 1 Wolves 1

Not many teams will go to Arsenal and rack up 25 shots on goal.

If there’s a reputation for sitting deep and breaking quickly, this wasn’t an archetypal Wolves performance.

This was fronting up from the start and exchanging blows with a team we had every chance of overwhelming.

We could have been ahead before we fell behind to what felt like a flimsy opener from Aubameyang.

Having seized the initiative they could have had a second courtesy of some generous defending from Dendoncker and Doherty that had us all cursing the skies for Boly’s untimely absence.

But Doherty was soon cantering up the other end of the pitch to sting the palms of Bernd Leno as Wolves continued to give as good as they got.

Jota, Traore and Jimenez were all afforded space and looked capable of picking a weak Arsenal backline apart. They just couldn’t quite seize the moment.

The pattern of play continued in the second half with the equaliser coming at the precise moment you were starting to believe it wasn’t going to.

Moutinho, so often a step ahead of everyone else on the pitch, made the decisive action, escaping his marker and hanging it up perfectly for a well-timed Jimenez leap.

For all the fancy footwork of his fellow forwards, Raul remains the most reliable route to goal.

If it’s not our number 9 causing headaches for the opposition, it’s usually Matt Doherty so it was a shame to see him hobble off in what was another buccaneering performance.

Hopefully he’ll be back for the Villa game as a squad already stretched to breaking point is infinitely weaker without him.

If he doesn’t make it we’ll be all the more reliant on Jota for some punch in the final third. He was a toe end from winning it with a trademark run. We need him to produce if we’re to truly progress up the table.

But that’s all for another day.

This was a performance for the plus column to extend the unbeaten run and set us up nicely for two winnable home games.

The post Arsenal 1 Wolves 1 appeared first on Wolves Blog.