Burnley 1 Wolves 1

Could have won. Could have lost.

You can say that about a lot of games in the Premier League but it feels a particularly fitting summation of this one.

Burnley started sharply and asked most of the questions but Wolves had played their way into it nicely by the time the home side took the lead.

It was a great finish for them but poor from our perspective with Nelson getting caught under the ball to open up the space at the back post.

Gary deployed some sort of experimental setup with Semedo playing as an outside centre half and at that point you were thinking it had backfired, even though he’d made some superb breaks forward prior to the goal.

But it did pay off giving Rayan Ait-Nouri license to get forward. He was a thorn in Burnley’s side all night and did brilliantly to win the free kick and then get on the end of it to equalise.

It’s a crying shame he didn’t finish that one-on-one in the second half because that would have capped another top showing from the Algerian.

He is now firmly in the ‘prize asset’ group of this squad along with Neto, Gomes and Cunha – all young talents that the elite will be swarming over come the summer.

I’d love to see Wolves rebuff all advances, keep this squad together and see what we can do next season. Yes, we need one or two squad fillers to avoid being exposed by injuries as we have been of late, but we don’t need to break the bank to get them.

That’s surely a faster route to success than shifting one, two or three of these top talents out and going back to the drawing board?

Defensively, we might consider doing some business as without the colossal presence of Dawson in the middle, I do find myself fretting about our ability to withstand bombardment.

We wobbled and creaked a bit tonight so just as well Sa had a solid game, commanding his area well and coming to our rescue when Burnley did manage to get a few shots away.

While we wait to get a couple more of the attackers back in the team and up to speed it’s essential we keep the back door shut to keep the hunt for a top half finish alive and kicking for as long as possible.