If somebody had told you that Wolves and Leicester City would be 1-1 at half-time and asked you to guess how both goals came about, anybody who has watched these two sides even a handful of times over the past few years wouldn’t have gone too far wrong with their hypotheses.
The home side took the lead through a Ruben Neves goal from outside the penalty area, before the visitors equalised from a goal created by a Youri Tielemans through ball. Those two moments were the perfect encapsulation of these respective players’ raison d’être — the thing which defines both their individual playing styles and the way in which their teams look to pressure the opponent in the final third.
Neves is so dangerous for Wolves on the edge of the box not only because of the level of control he has in his shooting from distance, but because the team’s attacking system is based on the principle that Raúl Jimenez holds the ball up well in and around the penalty area and tees up those who are quick and intelligent enough to join him.
The Leicester shape, meanwhile, is designed to engineer situations where quick, nimble wide players and forwards are able to isolate a defender while making a run, so that Tielemans can find them with a vertical pass towards the penalty area.
Both first-half goals were scored via those precise templates. It is not always the case that teams are able to score goals in the exact way in which they set themselves up to do so, but here both systems worked like clockwork. In attack, at least.
For the Leicester goal, Neves was nowhere to be seen in midfield as the away side moved the ball around with zip on the sodden pitch. When Tielemans collected possession and slid a pristine pass into Marc Albrighton’s path for the veteran to set up Ademola Lookman, he had the freedom of the park to move into.
At the other end of the pitch, Wolves should have already been two up, but wing-back Rayan Ait-Nouri lashed his left-footed shot from the penalty spot narrowly wide of Kasper Schmeichel’s right-hand post after Daniel Podence’s cut-back. That pass from Podence came about after the Portuguese winger had deceived Tielemans on the edge of the penalty area with a series of twists which, while admittedly tricky, bamboozled the Leicester midfielder far too easily.
In the course of 45 minutes, then, Neves and Tielemans had put in performances which were almost parodies of themselves, demonstrating why are they are so often highly thought of by plenty of observers, but also why no club higher up in the pecking order in England or abroad has seen fit to take a risk on purchasing them.
Both players possess supreme, top tier level skill in one vital area of midfielder-ing: For Neves, attacking support and goalscoring, and for Tielemans, chance creation and assisting. At the same time, though, their deficiencies are profound enough to mean that the colleagues around them are forced to simultaneously indulge their eccentricities while also covering for their foibles. A shifting equilibrium which is at once immensely rewarding and extremely frustrating.
The problem which both Tielemans and Neves both face — as footballers who no doubt enjoy playing where they are right now, but who would no doubt like to be able to play for clubs competing for top domestic and European honours — is that they exist in a kind of purgatory where a transfer is very difficult to come by.
The fact that they are specialists rather than all-rounders whose skills could be honed by elite level coaching with quality colleagues to match means that a club wanting to win the Premier League, La Liga or the Champions League would be faced with exactly the same deficiencies Wolves and Leicester contend with, but with much more at stake. Footballers like Gini Wijnaldum, Federico Valverde and Corentin Tolisso have built successful careers at Champions League-winning teams in recent years by performing every aspect of a midfielder’s job well, without truly excelling in any one particularly glamorous area.
Those players are valuable to the very best teams and the most sought-after coaches because they are malleable in terms of the demands placed on them, and adaptable in terms of the situations in which they are able to help see a team through a football match. Tielemans and Neves are stuck at the level they are, for now at least, because they are antithesis of that, and the strengths they do possess have not been deemed sufficient enough to take a risk on.
What’s more, the thing which benefits them so much now — the new money which mid-tier English clubs are able to spend on long contracts for talented players — means that it would cost an awful lot of money to take Tielemans or Neves away from their current clubs. That combination of their exclusivity and inaccessibility renders them difficult purchases to justify.
In the end, it was Podence whose second-half winner settled the result of a fixture which Tielemans and Neves, for better and for worse, had cancelled out beforehand — their performances tonight the perfect distillation of the praise they receive and the uncertainty their futures face.
