O'Neil sacked by Wolves after Ipswich defeat

Wolves have sacked head coach Gary O’Neil after defeat at home to Ipswich on Saturday, Sky Sports News understands.

The dramatic 2-1 loss at Molineux, which was followed by a scuffle that saw Rayan Ait-Nouri pulled away from the pitch, left Wolves 19th in the Premier League table.

The club, who are still to confirm the news, have taken just nine points from 16 matches and are four points adrift of 17th-placed Crystal Palace.

O’Neil guided Wolves to 14th last season, but saw star players Pedro Neto and Max Kilman depart for Chelsea and West Ham in the summer.

Speaking after the Ipswich defeat, the former Bournemouth boss said his players “needed him” but acknowledged a run of four straight defeats had left his position under threat.

“That group need me to get them in a place where they’re ready to go and I’ll keep fighting for them,” he told Sky Sports in his final interview as head coach. “And that doesn’t mean I’m not going to get sacked. For every result, the chances of me losing my job will heighten, that’s nothing new – it doesn’t concern me.

“When I speak to Matt [Hobbs, sporting director] and Jeff [Shi, chairman], they’ll tell me I’ll need to do more otherwise they’ll replace me. That’s the same message for the players, you need to do more to compete at this level or you’ll get replaced. That’s how the business works.

“I’m not interested in my own position – I know the work I do every day and I know the situation we’re in. To get this group to perform the way they did took a lot of work today.

“People can point the finger at me but some of the responsibilities have to land on the players in those moments. When we get in good positions and we spoon the ball off the pitch – I can’t help them with that.”

Another scuffle marks final straw at Molineux

Only days after Mario Lemina was stripped of the Wolves captaincy for his reaction to a post-match altercation with Jarrod Bowen against West Ham, an incident which saw him push his own team-mates as they tried to calm him down before squaring up to Wolves assistant coach Shaun Derry, more ugly scenes marred the end of Saturday’s defeat to Ipswich.

O’Neil had vowed there would be no repeat of the incident but Rayan Ait-Nouri, who was shown a second yellow card after the whistle, had to be dragged down the tunnel by team-mate Craig Dawson after clashing with Ipswich’s Wes Burns as boos rang down from the stands.

“We deal with things like that very, very seriously, as you saw last week,” O’Neil said after the game. “It’s annoying in that we’ve got enough to do at this moment in time, we’ve got enough to fix without me having to spend time on things that go on off the pitch.

“So the players do need to take some responsibility. But I’ll help them with all of it so we get back to work on Monday morning.”

‘Wolves managers operate with one hand behind back’

Daily Mirror assistant editor Darren Lewis on Sunday Supplement:

“I have a lot of sympathy for O’Neil. At Wolves, you do a good job and they sell your best players.

“Julen Lopetegui said he couldn’t do the job if he didn’t have the players who had been sold from under him. O’Neil came in, and not only did he keep them up but he did it fairly comfortably.

“So what do they do? Sell another two of his best players in Pedro Neto and Max Kilman.

“Wolves are sacking him, but actually if I’m a Wolves fan, I’m looking at the club and asking why they’re bringing in managers and asking them to do a job with one hand tied behind their back.

“It’s 11 defeats in 16 games, and justifiably you can’t expect to be a manager and keep your job. But there’s not a manager in the Premier League who would say they can work in circumstances where the chairman, the owners, the people who make the decisions are going to systematically remove your leaders at the back and your goalscorers, and stay in the top division.”

Analysis: O’Neil’s demise is both simple and complicated

Sky Sports features writer Adam Bate:

“The story of how it unravelled for O’Neil, a coach who might have fancied his next job could have been as England manager had that final phase of last season played out differently, is both simple and complicated. There were certainly mitigating factors.

“The trajectory at Wolves has changed in recent seasons, a club seemingly contracting. The big investment stopped and there will be some sympathy as a result. Indeed, O’Neil only inherited the job because his predecessor had been so frustrated by the situation.

“That trend continued in the summer when captain Max Kilman and star winger Pedro Neto were sold. The club will argue that they committed £28m to sign a new striker in Jorgen Strand Larsen and a series of prospects who they have far from given up on.

“But it is a far cry from the days of Ruben Neves and Joao Moutinho, Diogo Jota and Raul Jimenez, top-seven finishes and European nights at Molineux under Nuno Espirito Santo. Wolves cut ties with him at the end of a season in which they finished 13th.

“That was a team that knocked Liverpool and Manchester United out of the FA Cup in the same season, picking up Premier League wins over Tottenham, Chelsea and Arsenal as a newly-promoted side before doing the double over Manchester City the following year.

“All of which helps to explain why the excuse of Wolves’ awkward fixture list never really landed. Fans had become used to troubling the best teams, but the first eight games delivered one point. Those same fixtures brought 11 for O’Neil himself just last season.

“It is that comparison – between last season, one in which Neto started fewer than half of the games, and this – that damned O’Neil in the end. Performances and results should not have deteriorated so dramatically. After all the praise, he lost his way.”