O’Neil | ‘A great way to finish the trip’

Gary O’Neil described Saturday’s performance and win over RB Leipzig as a “great way” to finish Wolves’ pre-season tour of the United States.

The Old Gold have spent the past ten days preparing for the new campaign in the US and on Saturday evening in Miami a lot of their hard work showed, as Pablo Sarabia’s braces was followed by another Rodrigo Gomes strike to seal a 3-0 victory. The head coach handed minutes to his returning internationals and saw, despite changes throughout the second half, his team maintain standards and momentum, which bodes well at this stage of pre-season, he believes.

On a pleasing end to pre-season

“My only disappointment was that we slightly lost our way and we’ve worked hard on that during pre-season, and I was hoping we might be able to fix it without my intervention at half-time, but we are early in the process and once we discussed it in the dressing room, the lads were able to solve a lot of it themselves. We went out for the second half and were better in our build-up phase.

“Out of possession we were excellent all night, I thought the pressing was good, the defending was good, some of the emergency defending from Toti and Yerson was excellent. A pleasing performance. It’s nice to win, but it is just pre-season.

“We were trying to make sure we get ourselves in a good spot. Leipzig had made a few changes, but it was a good performance, a good win and a great way to finish the trip. I’m looking forward to getting back to England and playing Vallecano the weekend before the Premier League starts.”

On training work showing in the performance

“The game went how we expected. It was very close to how we prepared, which helped, because a lot of the stuff we’d been working on was available to us. That doesn’t mean that you get it all right, they are a good side, they’re well organised and have an extremely good coach – I’m a big fan of the way that they play. I watched a little bit of them over the last few days and they’ve got really good organisation without the ball and have difficult movements to stop with the ball, so the lads for the most part did a really good job of it.

“We get to look at why we maybe didn’t do it as well all the time and bits we can improve, but as a whole, it’s been a good ten days for us. Obviously, great result against West Ham, then we made a lot of changes for the Crystal Palace game and still played extremely well, and that result could definitely have gone the other way.

“Then to finish it with all the group back together, of course with Daniel Podence and Matheus missing with injury, but it’s the first time we’ve been able to get the whole group together. Pedro, Nelson, Joao and Sa, everyone back in the group at the same time, so it was a nice win for us, a nice moment, and we get to build now ready for Vallecano next weekend.”

On everyone being on the same page

“We’ve got a real good depth at the moment, of course we have an awful lot of players available to us, so that brings its own challenges about keeping them all happy, how we get them enough minutes. With a month left of the window, there’ll still be some moving around to get us to the right point where the squad feels balanced, but really pleased with everyone’s contributions.

“The lads who’ve come back from loans have bought in fully, the lads back from internationals have been great, the boys who’ve been with us since day one have been working excellently. We’re in a real good spot at this moment in time, but the real test will come when you turn up at the Emirates and they start to come out flying because they’re desperate to win the league this year. That will be a completely different text, but hopefully this work stands us in good stead to give ourselves a chance in a lot of Premier League games this season.”