Total football was on show at Molineux as Wolves blew West Ham away. Nuno’s side put three past the Hammers when in reality, it could’ve been double that. As much as Wolves were slick and stupendous, West Ham were poor and offered very little on a cold Black Country night. All the same, in this Premier League tactical analysis we shall look at how Wolves took West Ham apart and how, despite the scoreline, Lukasz Fabianski was West Ham’s star man.
Team news
There were no surprises from Nuno as he stuck with the team which beat Leicester 4-3 last time out in the league with one minor change. Matt Doherty returned for Ruben Vinagre which meant that Jonny switched back to the left-hand side.
Pellegrini, on the other hand, made three changes to the side that lost away at Bournemouth. Arnautovic came in for Andy Carroll, Snodgrass for Nasri and Aaron Cresswell was replaced by Arthur Masuaku. Out of those three changes, the latter two were enforced by injury which would’ve disrupted the West Ham team. Either way, it shouldn’t have made that much of a difference.
Domination
To illustrate Wolves’ domination over their London counterparts, I’m going to show you two images. Firstly, we shall begin with one that we haven’t used before.
Wolves utter dominance is borne out by the statistics: 87% of the chances, 20 shots on goal, nine on target. The rest is there in plain sight. It is worth noting that the xG total of 2.02 is less than what can be found in other places, with some sources having it as high as 2.56. Irrespective of whether you look at the 2.02 or the larger figure, West Ham’s total of 0.13 doesn’t change.
‘Deep’ refers to how many passes were completed by either side within 20 yards of the goal excluding crosses. PPDA (passes (allowed) per defensive action) hasn’t got a great deal in it which has more to do with the pace that Wolves attack than anything else. To clarify, essentially Wolves made 14.05 passes on average before West Ham would manage a defensive action, such as a tackle, interception or block.
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